User:Rich Farmbrough/Talk Archive Mega 1

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January 2008 - September 2009

Bot run request

Hi, Rich! A couple years ago you did a bot run for me to fix Russian Census references. I was wondering if you'd be able to complete a similar but a little bit more challenging task this time.

Currently, we have 2002 and 1989 Census figures in the majority of articles about Russian inhabited localities and administrative divisions. Typically, they are formatted as follows:

Population: 1,234 (2002 Census); 1,563 (1989 Census).

This seems to work fine, but note how none of the population figures quoted is referenced. To fix that, I developed a template ({{ru-census}}), which pretty much leaves the formatting alone but adds the references. The example above, for example, would look like this:

{{ru-census|p02=1234|p89=1563|punct=off}} → 1,234 (2002 Census); 1,563 (1989 Soviet census).

Would it be possible to run the bot replacing the plain formatting with the template instances? Two pesky things to keep in mind are that the population sentence may list more than just the two Censuses (but the template allows for custom punctuation), and that the article should have a "References" section for the actual references to show up (and, of course, there may or may not already be the "References" section in articles being processed by the bot). Is this something your bot can do? If you have any alternative ideas, I'll gladly hear them out. The template is not yet widely deployed, so it can easily be tweaked if necessary. Thanks!—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); 20:35, 13 December 2007 (UTC)

No problem in principle. Rich Farmbrough, 15:39 15 December 2007 (GMT).

Great! I am ready when you are; just let me know if there is anything I need to do. Thanks much!—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); 20:00, 17 December 2007 (UTC)

I'll have a closer look Rich Farmbrough, 16:58 18 December 2007 (GMT).

Rich, I am not really sure that it is time to think that far down the road—the template's capabilities can certainly be extended later, but at this point it is hard to say what kind of extensions may be useful or necessary (I also didn't quite understand your example with the area parameter—could you, please, clarify?). At the same time, there are hundreds of stubs and articles about Russian places that exist now, all of which desperately need their population figures to be referenced (which is the primary goal of the {{ru-census}} template).

I do, however, agree, that it makes sense to separate the censuses, and not just the Russian/Soviet ones, but all of them. What this means is that we'll have one template for each census (2002, 1989, 1979, etc.), which could be called separately if necessary, but we could also implement a wrapper template which would call those subtemplates based on the submitted parameters. So, for example, the {{ru-census}} template in its current form would be re-written to call {{ru-census2002}} and {{su-census1989}}. That way, once we have a good source for, say, 1979 Census, the {{su-census1979}} could be created and {{ru-census}} amended to accept new "p1979" parameter, thus minimizing changes down the road. Also, as you suggested above, another set of parameters can be added to distinguish between the censuses (which would have references) and the population estimates (which may or may not have them). What do you think about this approach?—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); 14:40, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

Hi, Rich! Please note that edits like this one are insufficient; you also need to add a references section and {{reflist}} if it is not present in the article at the time of the edit, and watch the punctuation. Thanks!—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); 14:02, 24 December 2007 (UTC)

OK I've got the code for adding that somewhere, luckily... Rich Farmbrough, 17:43 25 December 2007 (GMT).

Just wanted to let you know that both {{ru-census2002}} and {{su-census1989}} are now available. They can be used on their own (please see their documentation), and they are also called by existing instances of {{ru-census}}. Please let me know if you have any questions.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); 21:43, 26 December 2007 (UTC)

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TfD nomination of Template:Slitheen

Template:Slitheen 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. RichardΩ612 00:18, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

AfD nomination of Mound, Louisiana

An article that you have been involved in editing, Mound, Louisiana, has been listed for deletion. If you are interested in the deletion discussion, please participate by adding your comments at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Mound, Louisiana. Thank you. BJBot (talk) 10:59, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

Bibliography talk over at WP:VPT

Hello Rich. New namespaces for URLs and ISBNs are being discussed at this thread on the Village Pump. What will they think of next! EdJohnston (talk) 14:00, 30 December 2007 (UTC)

Merge templates

As a reply to User talk:JTragardh#Merge templates): I tried to use the subst:date-template but it seems like it didn't work as I anticipated. The article Oresund Bridge is now corrected. Thanks. JTragardh (talk) 20:08, 30 December 2007 (UTC)

SmackBot note

Hi. You left me this note on my talk page:

“ Thanks, I'm on it, please leave any-more notes on my talk page. ”

Do you mean please continue to leave or please do NOT leave more notes? (These were my first reports on SmackBot.)

I'm not familiar with how the Bot stopping works. Does leaving a note automatically stop the Bot, or does it notify you and you stop Bot? What initiates a restart of the Bot?

(I do appreciate the automated cleanup work being done, and the easy way to report problems. Thanks.) — ERcheck (talk) 20:10, 30 December 2007 (UTC)

References/Reference

I've asked this before but didn't seem to get a response, so I'll ask again. Why does Smackbot change Reference to References (and External link to External Links) when there is only one reference? (or external link) Andrew nixon (talk) 21:27, 30 December 2007 (UTC)

Sorry if I missed your previous query. There are a number of reasons. (And of course there are a number of reasons that the singular is good too.) Wikipedia:External links is the guideline, and the main reason is style. We use plural for both "External Links" and "References" (and I guess "Notes") in the same way that books have a "Contents" page even if there's only one chapter. Subsidiary reasons include that people often add links without updating the headings, and consistency. If you trawl through the talk page you'll see the various arguments come up on either side. Rich Farmbrough, 21:35 30 December 2007 (GMT).

SmackBot

Thanks for cleaning up my Reader edits. Can you maybe explain why the link to Jim Holman has been deleted? It was part of the Reader article. nnplt. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Unionpilot (talk • contribs) 10:52, 31 December 2007 (UTC)

SmackBot didn't remove them, but I suspect stuff like "When 770,000 adults pick up the Reader at over 400 locations every Wednesday, little do they know that they are supporting the owner, Jim Holman's, political and social agenda." doesn't belong in Wikipedia. Rich Farmbrough, 13:29 31 December 2007 (GMT).

AfD nomination of List of places in Bionicle

An article that you have been involved in editing, List of places in Bionicle, has been listed for deletion. If you are interested in the deletion discussion, please participate by adding your comments at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of places in Bionicle. Thank you. BJBot (talk) 16:08, 31 December 2007 (UTC)

SmackBot suggestion

Hi Rich - A suggestion for SmackBot: I don't think it should change anything inside an HTML comment (as it did here). -SCEhardT 16:42, 1 January 2008 (UTC)

Yes, it normally doesn't, but I occasionally turn of that restriction to pick up tags in image captions. Rich Farmbrough, 18:12 1 January 2008 (GMT).

SmackBot

Hi. Your SmackBot made a bad edit, see here. It somehow removed the braces from the DEFAULTSORT tag. I haven't found any other instances of that problem, though. --fschoenm (talk) 11:14, 2 January 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. Fixed. This was an underused piece of code to fix repeated templates. Rich Farmbrough, 17:09 2 January 2008 (GMT).

{{0}}

I've just reverted and reapplied an edit that Smackbot made when dating a {{fact}} template transclusion on the article Marcus Hahnemann because it also removed duplicate instances of the {{0}} template when they're made consecutively. The template is used to align appearance figures, and so it's valid to have more than one next to each other. Could you amend the bot so that it doesn't remove such duplicates in future? Thanks! robwingfield ^«T•C» 17:54, 2 January 2008 (UTC)

Yes, thanks for that. I have changed it so that it only applies to temlpates longer than 9 characters. Rich Farmbrough, 19:47 2 January 2008 (GMT).

Subst on Cleanup Tag

Hi thanks for the info. It took me ten minutes to find a tag i needed and all the ones before said you should subst. New to the game and sorry if it meant more work. If wikipedia was a bit more "user friendly" to new editors who think they know what they want but can't find it and want to help that would be better. thanks though for taking you time Bpeps (talk) 18:39, 2 January 2008 (UTC)

{{you}}

Just a quick reminder to reply at Wikipedia:Village_pump_(policy)#Creating_a_template when/if you're back and have time. :-) -- Ddxc (talk) 00:06, 3 January 2008 (UTC)

Meetup

Hi there, I noticed you expressed interest in the Birmingham meetup last October. Just letting you know, another UK meetup is in planning stages, here. We need input on where and when we will meet so comments would be much appreciated. Thanks. Majorly (talk) 16:50, 3 January 2008 (UTC)

Help Needed over at Branches of Wing Chun

Would you mind joining in on the discussion at Talk:Branches_of_Wing_Chun? We are in need of more comments... specifically on the Pruning of Lineages. Thanks. 68.5.147.32 (talk) 06:05, 5 January 2008 (UTC)

Yes, could use your input and opinion over at the "No Longer Affiliated Students" thread on the talk page. The anonymous IP wants to remove all "no longer affiliated" branch people from a particular branch listing. He's also contesting the current structure of the family tree and wants to allow more and more depth. My viewpoint on the depth is I agree with the current standard set up in the opening paragraphs on the article page. It represents an abridged family three, to a depth of 3. Any more and it would start turning in to a gigantic list, and violate list policies regarding WP:NOT#DIR. Likewise, my opinion is that while a person may not be affiliated with the current political organization of that branch/linneage/school, that does not strike them from the family tree. I've seen to many times in other locations (and attempts to repeat it here) where people are stricken from a family tree in a political move to discredit them as if they were never part of that tree. If we were talking about every day students, I could certainly agree with not including them, since they come and go. But this tree listing is composed of actual sifu's. --Marty Goldberg (talk) 07:15, 5 January 2008 (UTC)

SmackBot Edit Summary

While using AWB, you may want to consider turning off the "Show :'Using AWB' " check box. Dreamafter ^⇔ 23:51, 5 January 2008 (UTC)

Strange, the 'suppress "using AWB" in edit summary' is checked. Rich Farmbrough, 01:12 6 January 2008 (GMT).

Weird... Try asking a developer, like Reedy Boy. Dreamafter ^⇔ 00:47, 6 January 2008 (UTC)

A diff for you. Dreamafter ^⇔ 02:27, 6 January 2008 (UTC)

The bug is already logged and fixed [1](but not in the binaries, and I don't build my own AWB at the moment). Rich Farmbrough, 13:12 6 January 2008 (GMT).

Thank you (re:AWB)

		The Working Man's Barnstar
		Rich, I wanted to thank you for being so thorough in your examination of my AWB changes in regards to the interlanguage links, as well as being assiduous enough to go back and put things right on your own. Thanks for helping make Wikipedia a better place! Alekjds talk 16:05, 6 January 2008 (UTC)

List of museums in the United States

Hi Rich. Whats your view on the split of List of museums in the United States by state? Personally I think they are quite easily listed on one page and some of the ne wlists such as List of museums in Delaware are redundant. What do you think? ♦ Sir Blofeld ♦ ^Talk? 15:49, 7 January 2008 (UTC) Also why do many of the new pages still have the contents header for the other states -it makesit pretty awkward ♦ Sir Blofeld ♦ ^Talk? 15:51, 7 January 2008 (UTC)

I'd back the state split if they were developed into more encyclopedic lists. E.g tables with details -e.g columns on Image -image of the museum, Location -e.g town etc, Founded -date it opened Focus -e.g what is specializes in and Summary a summary of the museum. What do you think? ♦ Sir Blofeld ♦ ^Talk? 15:58, 7 January 2008 (UTC)

How about something like this and have a table with them in like this?

Image	Name	Location	Founded	Area of study	Summary
	Arizona Science Center	Phoenix	1984	Science	Home to over 350 permanent hands-on exhibits, the Center is able to provide their 400,000 annual visitors with interactive experiences
	Heard Museum	Phoenix

♦ Sir Blofeld ♦ ^Talk? 16:10, 7 January 2008 (UTC)

etc etc

Of course it would take time but the lists would be far more useful presented this way eventually. Obviously pages like List of museums in Delaware could be done in minutes unlike List of museums in Oklahoma which would take weeks!! I;m afraid I;m too tied at present to think about formatting it. Ah I saw your name in the editing history so thought you were also active with it. Anyway hope you are well. I;m currently trying to sort out the lack of coverage on south-east Asian articles such as Cambodia where entire provinces of hundreds of thousands are still one liners. I spent a good part of yesterday discussing the problem of systematic bias with Jimbo Wales and the others! Let me know if you interested in helping -I;d imagine you;re pretty tied at present but it would be great to have somebody other tha myself working on it. Regards ♦ Sir Blofeld ♦ ^Talk? 16:29, 7 January 2008 (UTC)

Well it would be relatively straightforward to put the titles of the museums into the tables for now. Data can then be filled in gradually and by several different people. This could be done within minutes for each state ♦ Sir Blofeld ♦ ^Talk? 16:46, 7 January 2008 (UTC)

There we go like List of museums in Alabama. I've got shot of that huge big index with the unnecessary map and have made a more normal looking Template:Museums in the US‎ for the articles. ♦ Sir Blofeld ♦ ^Talk? 18:17, 7 January 2008 (UTC)

Which do you think is the best way to format the articles. Like List of museums in Alabama or List of museums in Kentucky. Personally I think that map navigation plate and symbol box is unnecessary. COuld you give some thoughts on the talk page of the US museum page. I;ve got to go now ♦ Sir Blofeld ♦ ^Talk? 19:11, 7 January 2008 (UTC)

List of haunted locations

I see that you removed the 'Citation notice' from List of haunted locations. That page has required constant reverts because of editors not citing sources. It has not been quite as bad with the notice, but more often than not, when an entry is listed it must be removed for lack of a citation. With folklore of this type, one can manufacture the haunting legend quite easily. This is why the notice was there. I feel this is a very big mistake. Without this notice the list should probably be deleted as it becomes a farce and unmanageable. I would like to know your thoughts on this matter. Thanks, --Historian 1000 (talk) 18:33, 7 January 2008 (UTC)

I am going to undo your edit. I am doing this because I know that the tag is necessary to maintain the integrity of the page. If you feel that it must be removed please consider placing an AfD tag on the article. Respectfully, --Historian 1000 (talk) 22:09, 7 January 2008 (UTC)

Re: "The days of the year pages suffer the same sort of problem, they make do with extensive Html comments and page patrolling." The problem with this is the HTML comment does not show up when editing just a section as is usually the case. Why not keep it obvious? Also, I've been pretty much the only person to regularly patrol this page and to be honest, it's enough of a pain as it is without it getting worse. --Historian 1000 (talk) 23:37, 7 January 2008 (UTC)

SmackBot problem

Your bot seems to have made an error here: [2]. It added a $2 at the end of {{cleanup-afd}}, changing it to the nonexistent {{Cleanup-afd$2}}. -- King of ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠ 00:11, 8 January 2008 (UTC)

Thanks, fixed. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Rich Farmbrough (talk • contribs)

What happened here?

[3] --NE2 11:09, 8 January 2008 (UTC)

The article was in one of the undated clean-up categories when SB made it's list, then by he time it made the edit it had left that category. (Probably a tag added and removed.) Nonetheless the canonicalisation procedure changed the format of "date=" in two templates. This is not ideal, but is harmless, rare, and hard to avoid. Rich Farmbrough, 11:54 8 January 2008 (GMT).

SmackBot

ABSD-7

The post says it was at Mare Island until 1946! What time it spent at the Marshall Islands, Eniwetok? Maybe, I have the wrong Auxilary boat but my Dad was in the Navy from 1944-1946 and was on board ABSD-7 Sec. 52 and was at the Marshall Islands!

Is this the same ABSD-7? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.77.197.175 (talk) 21:29, 8 January 2008 (UTC)

Really I couldn't say. Suggest you find someone from the apporpriat wiki-project. Rich Farmbrough, 22:32 10 January 2008 (GMT).

You need to get a life. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 90.207.90.183 (talk) 03:10, 18 January 2008 (UTC)

Saint Johns Park West

Another editor has added the "{{prod}}" template to the article Saint Johns Park West, suggesting that it be deleted according to the proposed deletion process. All contributions are appreciated, but the editor doesn't believe it satisfies Wikipedia's criteria for inclusion, and has explained why in the article (see also Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not and Wikipedia:Notability). Please either work to improve the article if the topic is worthy of inclusion in Wikipedia or discuss the relevant issues at its talk page. If you remove the {{prod}} template, the article will not be deleted, but note that it may still be sent to Wikipedia:Articles for deletion, where it may be deleted if consensus to delete is reached. BJBot (talk) 02:14, 9 January 2008 (UTC)

Bombing of Dresden

Hi, as one of the editors of Bombing of Dresden in World War II, would you mind commenting here about a possible name change? There is a proposal to call the article simply Bombing of Dresden. Cheers, SlimVirgin ^{(talk)(contribs)} 14:45, 9 January 2008 (UTC)

Including cat in Wikipedia:List of monthly maintenance categories

I hope this was ok. You were the only contributor to date, so I thought I'd better notify you. Dorfklatsch 13:59, January 10, 2008

Ah, while I'm at it, I do have another question: {{MonthlyCleanupCat}} must be included manually to fmt the subcat pages, right? Or is there some automated way (e.g. another bot)? Dorfklatsch 14:15, January 10, 2008

Ok, thanks again. (btw: the RealTitle thing on this page is incredible. Didn't know this could be done.) Dorfklatsch 14:34, January 10, 2008

JMonkey Engine

Another editor has added the "{{prod}}" template to the article JMonkey Engine, suggesting that it be deleted according to the proposed deletion process. All contributions are appreciated, but the editor doesn't believe it satisfies Wikipedia's criteria for inclusion, and has explained why in the article (see also Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not and Wikipedia:Notability). Please either work to improve the article if the topic is worthy of inclusion in Wikipedia or discuss the relevant issues at its talk page. If you remove the {{prod}} template, the article will not be deleted, but note that it may still be sent to Wikipedia:Articles for deletion, where it may be deleted if consensus to delete is reached. BJBot (talk) 18:15, 10 January 2008 (UTC)

Resolved

Rich Farmbrough, 14:23 11 January 2008 (GMT).

Ibraham Ahmed

I request the deletion of the article of Ibraham Ahmed after this Doonhamer use his user and edit my article without any reason trying to affect the reputation of Ibraham Ahmed. Aparently me and this guy were in a forum discussing about the organization of Ibraham Ahmed and he get mad and came and edit my article. When I see that I get mad because using his user of wiki he edit the article and wiki permit this. Then, I fight back and try to edit the article from the forum that we were talking know like bullshido.net ( I'm guilty of this ) but for my surprise the article of bullshido I can't edit using my wiki user. But he could do it in my article of Ibraham Ahmed. Well, I decide to erase all parts of my articles that can affect my reputation and the reputation of Ibraham Ahmed from user like this using their powers of writing. I will not longer work in wiki for this reason, please continue erasing all the deletions that I have made. —Preceding unsigned comment added by WMACPR (talk • contribs) 18:51, 10 January 2008 (UTC)

Ibraham Ahmed intention of vandalism

This guy intend to vandalims my article of Ibraham Ahmed and put personal words to it to damage their reputation. He is not cualified in the article of Ibraham Ahmed to talk about it, even he do not knows him, he used his wiki user login to do it see the history of the document.

XXX Entire text of some version of the article removed RF. XXX

Thats why I requets the inmediatly deletion from wikipedia.--WMACPR (talk) 19:37, 10 January 2008 (UTC)

Typo redirect U,S,

Hello, this is a message from an automated bot. A tag has been placed on U,S,, by another Wikipedia user, requesting that it be speedily deleted from Wikipedia. The tag claims that it should be speedily deleted because U,S, is a redirect page resulting from an implausible typo (CSD R3).

To contest the tagging and request that administrators wait before possibly deleting U,S,, please affix the template {{hangon}} to the page, and put a note on its talk page. If the article has already been deleted, see the advice and instructions at WP:WMD. Feel free to contact the bot operator if you have any questions about this or any problems with this bot, bearing in mind that this bot is only informing you of the nomination for speedy deletion; it does not perform any nominations or deletions itself. To see the user who deleted the page, click here CSDWarnBot (talk) 21:32, 10 January 2008 (UTC)

Ibraham Ahmed

About the acusation of non-notable person of Taekwondo, any KMA expert person in the matter knows that a person that holds a rank of 7th Dan of higher tru an International Federation like the International Taekwondo Federation or like the World Taekwondo Federation it is notable because in a numbers of almost 10 millions of taekwondo practitioners world-wide they have achive a rank that aproximadly maybe just 300 people holds thru this organizations. If you do the numbers the porcentage of people that make this effort to get there are just a few. Thats is why the International Federation give to them the honor of hold the title of Grand Masters. This persons have to dedicate more than 30 years of their life to get to this achievement and have to prove to the International Federation that they have contribute to the grow and expantion of the Taekwondo to get there.

It is this not notable in Taekwondo, then what it is? When I see a 7th Dan or higher person of Taekwondo from the International Taekwondo Federation or from the World Taekwondo Federation inmediatly have my respect even if I do not know him, just because the International Federation (ITF or WTF) have confers in them the honor of be called Grand Masters. The intend of desacredited what these International Federations have honrate and honor it is an Intention also to dishonors the International Federation that granted, because they are saying "" that they have make a mistake when they honor this person and also try to desacreditate and question how the International Federation do it.

Also adding words like he sell ranks tru his school is an intention to dishonor this person, because this also dishonor the International Federations that he represents. The mayority of the time the persons who do this are from others Martial Arts backgroungs that have envy of what the Taekwondo have achieve until to date and also try to dishonor the Taekwondo tru his comments. They do it and then go to their students look "see this you can go there and they are saying that they do this...., that is why you are safe practicing our Martial Art and not that think that they call Taekwondo". this is not something new and still happen since the 1960's when Taekwondo change from Karate to his new name Taekwondo and create the style of Taekwondo that the Japanese and other saids that we are not a Martial Art with their recognition.

If wiki can save the document from any alteration that can damage the reputation of these person and the style or organizations that they represents I think that will be OK with me. They are many world wide people with envy of the Taekwondo there!!! —Preceding unsigned comment added by WMACPR (talk • contribs) 04:18, 11 January 2008 (UTC)

I enter to the document history and see that you have defend the original document very well againts these people!!! Amazing job and my congratulation to you, sorry I wasn't notice this before. I see that I can count with the support of wiki for the protection of the document. If you want you can restore the document like it was and sorry about this.--WMACPR (talk) 04:38, 11 January 2008 (UTC)

I just add to the Ibraham Ahmed wiki biography the external links for biography reference. You can compare what you have with those and compare the grammar to see that what you even have in wiki is not writed well. This persons that have edit the biography they do it little by little and at the end of two of three months they got what they want that is make a bad biography making look it bad and making look bad to wiki, Please can you re-edit the biography to make it final forever. And excuse me I know that this will take time from you, but I also need to work and attend my kids and do not have time for re-edit like it was or like it had to be, this little edits had make their purpose, I can compete agains 20 or 20 editors agains my article that do this little by little. They do it because envy or jealous, most of them do not have the expertise in the theme of Ibraham Ahmed, the Ibraham Ahmed email is IbrahamAhmed@aol.com and he is the source, he can provided any evidence of the facts or explain it to you.--WMACPR (talk) 11:00, 12 January 2008 (UTC)

SmackBot is a great bot

Just popped in to say that this is a great bot. I try and get the syntax right, but this cleans up goofs nicely and also serves as a tutor on the details. Cheers, Jack Merridew 13:41, 11 January 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for the ride

Thanks for the ride home after the meetup tonight, I was wondering if you built SmackBot from scratch or used a framework. Poeloq (talk) 04:18, 13 January 2008 (UTC)

SmackBot uses WP:AWB for alomst all its edits. Rich Farmbrough, 07:05 14 January 2008 (GMT).

Question about Smackbot

Hi, I was wondering why the entry foxsports.com got labeled by smackbot with a "advert" warning and what can be done to eliminate it. Thank you. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.67.7.14 (talk) 09:09, 13 January 2008 (UTC)

It didn't, Insanity Inarnate did, here. Rich Farmbrough, 07:06 14 January 2008 (GMT).

Welcome to Wikipedia!

Greetings venerable one, i'm glad you've finally made your way to the repository of human knowledge, I hope you enjoy your stay, but I can see you've already become profilic in your editing, which might indicate that you already are insert smile here. If you need any help, please don't hesitate to contact me. -- Ļıßζېấשּׂ~ۘ Ώƒ ﻚĢęخ (talk) 01:30, 14 January 2008 (UTC)

The Cambells and the King of France

On the chance that you are still "look[ing] forward" since Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2007 July 24#Do titles need initial cap?, i inform you of my two cents being finally put in, "... in a particularly bizarre set of circumstances".
--Jerzy•t 07:03, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

Thanks... Rich Farmbrough, 08:59 18 January 2008 (GMT).

Signpost updated for January 14th, 2008.

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You are receiving this message because you have signed up for the Signpost spamlist. If you wish to stop receiving these messages, simply remove your name from the list. Ralbot (talk) 08:54, 18 January 2008 (UTC)

Dirty laundry showing

Your latest edit to Template:Cleanup-laundry seems to have broken it on some pages. See, for example, the raw wikitext showing at the top of Online music store. I noticed it's the way you're handling the "date" parameter (in particular, when it's missing), but I don't have time to work out a fix myself. - dcljr (talk) 13:13, 18 January 2008 (UTC)

Thanks, fixed. Rich Farmbrough, 13:21 18 January 2008 (GMT).

Template:3CC

What happened to {{3CC}}? Wasn't that the one that showed every three-letter-combination? I used to use that template when navigating Wikipedia, and I have used it in articles I created (such as CHW (disambiguation)).

I looked in the TfD to try and figure out why it was deleted, but I cannot seem to find any mention of it anywhere except in your deletion log, which says:

10:11, 9 March 2007 Rich Farmbrough (Talk | contribs) deleted "Template:3CC" ‎ (Obsolete, deprecated and unused template.)

So if it has been deprecated, does that mean there is a replacement?

Thanks, VegKilla (talk) 08:20, 19 January 2008 (UTC)

It was repalced with {{Disambig}} as were several varieties of dab template - the cats having already gone. The discussion is here. Rich Farmbrough, 13:45 19 January 2008 (GMT).

changeing template:

Is changing {{template:blah}} to {{blah}} really worth an edit ( [4])? -Ravedave (talk) 01:34, 20 January 2008 (UTC)

Its part of a canonicalisation process, not an end in itself - and if we can discourage non-canonical usage that helps all round. Rich Farmbrough, 14:24 22 January 2008 (GMT).

SmackBot

Please remove this tag from Claudine Rhédey von Kis-Rhéde. “This article does not cite any references or sources. (January 2008) Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unverifiable material may be challenged and removed.”

There is an adequate sources listed. In addition, this page is WORK IN PROGRESS. What is your point?

DrewKE - 195.91.54.87

This address -195.91.54.87 – is an address of the internet provider in Slovakia. I am one of many Wireless Users. I have nothing to do with Sala ….

DrewKE —Preceding unsigned comment added by 195.91.54.87 (talk) 08:08, 20 January 2008 (UTC)

Hi, thanks for your message, SmackBot does not generally add tags, but merely dates those that are already there. Regards, Rich Farmbrough, 14:22 22 January 2008 (GMT).

Thanks

when you update a lot of those, your fingers sometimes get away from you.--Crossmr (talk) 14:14, 22 January 2008 (UTC)

SmackBot

It would be great if your bot could be trained to respect "inuse" tags, and not to make edits to pages so marked. Verisimilus T 17:20, 22 January 2008 (UTC)

Set to do this now. No guarantees I don't accidentally turn this option off. Rich Farmbrough, 15:36 30 January 2008 (GMT).

Brilliant, thank you! Verisimilus T 17:07, 30 January 2008 (UTC)

Empire of Japan (foreign commerce and shipping)

Just FYI - No personal response required - In this edit SmackBot did a weird thing to the date {{Unreferenced|date=January 2008date=June 2006}} The original date was June 2006. It looks like SmackBot was trying to clean up the open double pipe when it happened. P.S. Keep up the good work. Jeepday (talk) 03:33, 23 January 2008 (UTC)

hmm very odd. Needs attention... :) Rich Farmbrough, 15:10 23 January 2008 (GMT).

Same thing occurred here a few days ago. —mjb (talk) 02:18, 26 January 2008 (UTC)

Thanks I havnet loked at it yet. RF

Bot

Do you know how to write bots? --Jay ^{Lights! Camera! Action!} 16:02, 23 January 2008 (UTC)

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Vis-à-vis

Another editor has added the "{{prod}}" template to the article Vis-à-vis, suggesting that it be deleted according to the proposed deletion process. All contributions are appreciated, but the editor doesn't believe it satisfies Wikipedia's criteria for inclusion, and has explained why in the article (see also Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not and Wikipedia:Notability). Please either work to improve the article if the topic is worthy of inclusion in Wikipedia or discuss the relevant issues at its talk page. If you remove the {{prod}} template, the article will not be deleted, but note that it may still be sent to Wikipedia:Articles for deletion, where it may be deleted if consensus to delete is reached. BJBot (talk) 06:14, 25 January 2008 (UTC)

Resolved

Rich Farmbrough, 13:55 30 January 2008 (GMT).

SmackBot

Hi, The bot is correcting singular nouns in sections like "Source" & "Reference" (see Tonary). I dont suppose it's serious and I usually make allowances for machines anyway, but if I hear the bot has learned to count I might start changing some of them back. ;-) Sparafucil (talk) 05:26, 29 January 2008 (UTC)

AfD nomination of Bango (cannabis)

An editor has nominated Bango (cannabis), an article on which you have worked or that you created, for deletion. We appreciate your contributions, but the nominator doesn't believe that the article satisfies Wikipedia's criteria for inclusion and has explained why in his/her nomination (see also "What Wikipedia is not").

Your opinions on whether the article meets inclusion criteria and what should be done with the article are welcome; please participate in the discussion by adding your comments at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Bango (cannabis) and please be sure to sign your comments with four tildes (~~~~).

You may also edit the article during the discussion to improve it but should not remove the articles for deletion template from the top of the article; such removal will not end the deletion debate. Thank you. BJBot (talk) 09:44, 29 January 2008 (UTC)

Question--- Japanese

Hey, I saw a page you were at least somewhat involved in editing regarding a Japanese singer, and wondered if you know of anyone who can help translate a page-- it's half in English and I don't want to mess it up; for Keisuke Kuwata. Can you help? Thanks. --leahtwosaints (talk) 06:32, 30 January 2008 (UTC)

There are

1. {{Notenglish}}
2. {{Cleanup-translation}}
3. {{RoughTranslation}}

Which you can use on the page, but I'm afraid I can't think of anyone of the top of my head. Rich Farmbrough, 13:41 30 January 2008 (GMT).

Remove from cleanup categories

Can you please remove User:Rich_Farmbrough/AWB/daitMaintTags from cleanup categories? Thanks! --Gary King (talk) 15:43, 30 January 2008 (UTC)

Done. Rich Farmbrough, 16:17 30 January 2008 (GMT).

Dates

Cheers for picking up that wrong date with the Rainbow Drops...editing at 4am is totally not a good idea :) londonsista | ^Prod 17:20, 30 January 2008 (UTC)

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smackbot removal of line breaks inside succession boxes

Hi, there. Smackbot is removing line breaks from inside of multi-year venue succession boxes. Unfortunately, those need to be there to keep the years aligned horizontally until a new succession box for this type of situation is finalized (it's currently in discussion). See the before and after edit to Camp Randall Stadium and the DCI championships host succession box to see what's going on. Is there anything that can be done to prevent this? Thanks. -Gwguffey (talk) 14:33, 31 January 2008 (UTC)

Oh my goodness.... Let me look. Rich Farmbrough, 14:40 31 January 2008 (GMT).

OK it's part of WP:AWB genreal fixes. I will do two runs for the time being, one skipping succession box articles, one with "General Fixes" turned off. I will log a tentative bug with AWB, although this is a slightly tricky one, as you imply. Rich Farmbrough, 14:56 31 January 2008 (GMT).

Thanks for your quick response and for figuring out the cause. Hopefully, we'll be able to get a succession box coded so that this will not be an issue in the future regardless of AWB. I've developed a draft, but it's going to be a few more weeks until it gets full consideration. Best wishes. -Gwguffey (talk) 15:45, 31 January 2008 (UTC)

SmackBot and links

SmackBot broke some links at Apple TV. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Foobaz (talk • contribs) 16:50, 31 January 2008 (UTC)

Thanks, problem should not happen again (from SmackBot) (but let me know if it does): WP:AWB bug logged. Rich Farmbrough, 16:25 5 February 2008 (GMT).

WikiPoints

Would you like to tracked for WikiPoints? I just check your Special:Contributions/Rich Farmbrough. --Jay^Tur₁ (Contribs) 17:20, 31 January 2008 (UTC)

citation needed and/ot SmackBot misbehaving ??

The Pomona Metrolink station article has been modified by SmackBot:Replaced: date={{subst:CURRENTMONTHNAME}} {{subst:CURRENTYEAR}} → date=January 2008. But when you read the article, the date=January 2008 bit doesn't show.
I have no idea whether this is a SmackBot's problem, but I've decided to report it just in case.--Jotel (talk) 19:19, 31 January 2008 (UTC)

Same problem (or at least symptoms) in Zakopane--Jotel (talk) 19:22, 31 January 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. If you look at the diff you will see, more or less, what it's talking about. The change puts the article into Category:Articles with unsourced statements since January 2008 . Rich Farmbrough, 09:51 1 February 2008 (GMT).

sorry, i am a new people who have no idea where is right place to write. hi, rich, thanks for reading. I am a sociological researcher who is really really interested in the form of wikipedia and wikipedians. This amazing result of sharing information around the whole world really have inspirited me a lot. I found you from the list of contributors. would you mind discuss with me about some questions of wikipedia and wikipedians, from which i would like to search on the incentive mechanism about wikipedia and give people the whole view of you and your partners who volunteerly contributed their knowledge and time.

subst/cleanup

I'm still not that used to most of the tags. I tend to just 'preview' and try things and see if they look like something lol, did I leave one looking like code/gibberish? Merkinsmum 20:34, 31 January 2008 (UTC)

The problem was with a merge template - one of the reasons not to "susbt" is that, as you say, the wikicode is harder to read and edit. Another is that a widely used bot function moves explicit categories to the end of the page - those associated with the templates should go when the template is deleted, and may be conditional. For me the problem is trying to date these tags with my bot User:SmackBot. I un-subst several of these tags a day (well the bot can now do most of them), so don't worry, lots of people do it. Rich Farmbrough, 09:38 1 February 2008 (GMT).

Please Refrain from Illegal Activity

I have left the following message on the Talk:Dudjom_Rinpoche [5] page in response to your raising of a NPOV objection without commenting as to why. Please state your reasons.

In future try to observe the regulations in the process of claiming to defend them.

Illegal NPOV behavior by Rich Farmbrough (SmackBot):

Rich Farmbrough[6] acting as SmackBot[7] has disputed the neutrality of the article but has not provided an explanation as required by the rules [8]. As a result the initiation of this NPOV is not proper and has commenced on an illegal footing. (User:Thegone) 1:15, 10 February 2008 (UTC)

Hi, thanks for your message, SmackBot does not generally add tags, but merely dates those that are already there. Regards, Rich Farmbrough, 03:00 10 February 2008 (GMT).

---

Thanks for your reply:

1- Who has raised the NPOV objection that you have dated?

2- What are the basis as they would have to state a reason, otherwise it is illegal?

3- The warnings on my page have all been by GlassFet. I maintained from the beginning that he was a sockpuppet of Ekajati who was banned and had many other illegal names too. Finally this was proven and he was banned. Someone, I do not know who, probably a bot or an admin, had set his warnings invisible. They are now again visible after your interaction. I consider them an honor. I will monitor for his presence in any way possible vigilantly in future. Are you in any form in contact with that person or his cult of Aro (in England) which is dismissed by Tibetan lamas and considered anti-Buddhist? [9]

4- If no comment on the objection is forthcoming, please reverse your dating action as it is reinforcing an illegal procedure.

I will post a copy of this reply in the article's talk page for the record as well.

Thanks. User:Thegone 5:29, 10 February 2008 (UTC)

---

thanks for moving the ref tags

I hadn't noticed SmackBot moving <ref> tags to follow punctuation before. Is that new? I had been doing that myself and would be happy to stop. --Jtir (talk) 15:55, 31 January 2008 (UTC)

The move of refs is a WP:AWB "general fix". For the last few months I have had GF's turned of because they were implementing {{Reflist}} which I disagree with. I had turned them on with the latest release of AWB, but they're off again awaiting some bug-fixes. So... all AWB bots with GF turned on will correct those, whether you carry on manually, is up to you. I suppose I could do a run to fix the problem specifically once AWB is re-fixed... Rich Farmbrough, 15:39 5 February 2008 (GMT).

Thanks for your clarification. I didn't realize SB is an AWB bot. I got AWB approval last week and have used it only once for a search/replace task. I'll use AWB for ref tag moves then. --Jtir (talk) 16:06, 5 February 2008 (UTC)

How does the bot know the ref is for the last part of the sentence (ref before fullstop) and not for the entire sentence (ref after the fullstop)? If it changes this it looks like a ref can be for the entire sentence and not just the last part.

Also, does it still remove spaces between refs, because that breaks tables when there are a many refs following one another and now no breaking spaces. -- Jeandré, 2008-02-08t21:28z

Congrats?

Hi Rich, I see you congratulated me for something[10]...what did I do?--MONGO 19:08, 31 January 2008 (UTC)

Thanks anyway though...I don't think the community is ready for my getting the tools back anytime soon...best wishes to you.--MONGO 23:50, 5 February 2008 (UTC)

SmackBot - Big diffs

Hi, Rich. Your generally cool bot's edit: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Stanley_Hotel&diff=next&oldid=187666550 is not incorrect, but the diff is unnecessarily huge. Is that a bug? What are you doing? Changing spacing? (Or is there a bug in the diff viewer itself?) --76.21.22.240 (talk) 19:12, 31 January 2008 (UTC)

The tiny changes are part of the WP:AWB "General fixes", which is removing spaces between "." and refs, quite correctly, if a little pedantically. It is a fine question as to what should be included in General Fixes, and what not to, but on balance I think the developers have it more or less correct, and I chose to have General Fixes turned on (generally) for three reasons, firstly to get the most value from each edit, secondly to make other edits looking for GF problems unnecessary, and thirdly because of the number of AWB edits occurring it's likely articles will get a GF hit at some point, and this reduces the chance of big diffs. Having said that, there have been GF's in the past that have caused me to turn GF off for longish periods. Rich Farmbrough, 09:50 1 February 2008 (GMT).

Ok, thanks; makes sense. Couldn't find an option to make the diff tool not hide these spacing edits, or an edit summary. --76.21.22.240 (talk) 18:29, 1 February 2008 (UTC)

FYI, WP:POPUPS displays that diff fairly clearly. Sometimes I have to try both diff displays. BTW, you will need to register to use popups. --Jtir (talk) 20:25, 1 February 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. (Would if I could, but it's not an option for reasons I don't want to get into.) --76.21.22.240 (talk) 21:09, 1 February 2008 (UTC)

Nandikeshvar

Please proceed to further cleaning, if you can, and rid the article of the tag. Thanks?--BobClive (talk) 10:00, 1 February 2008 (UTC)

MacBook Air

Resolved

Looks like User:SmackBot made a slight mistake on this page. See around line 58 of this change to MacBook Air. It looks like the bot broke the text 802.11n and converted it to 802�n. PaleAqua (talk) 02:21, 2 February 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for reporting, should not happen agin, let me know if it does. Rich Farmbrough, 16:38 5 February 2008 (GMT).

SmackBot

The article has been improved with further references to the publication sources quoted previously. Feel sufficient references/citation has been provided to have the tag at the top regarding unverified material be removed.

Article Name : A.W.H. Abeyesundere —Preceding unsigned comment added by Nibiruet (talk • contribs) 02:20, 3 February 2008 (UTC)

If you think a tag can be removed, do so. If in doubt see the articles talk page. Note the SmackBot oesn't add the tags, just dates them. Rich Farmbrough, 16:15 5 February 2008 (GMT).

SmackBot adding stray {

It looks like when converting company-importance tag to Notability|Companies, SmackBot is adding a stray opening curly brace. See [11][12][13]. Jfire (talk) 17:22, 3 February 2008 (UTC)

Thanks, fixed, and checking last 2500 entries for this error. Rich Farmbrough, 21:59 3 February 2008 (GMT).

Updating cleanup tags

Hi. I'm a little confused about why you think it's good to update the date on cleanup tags. Those dates really should never be changed, since they indicate how how the tag has been in place, a vlauable piece of information when evaluating whether the tag should be removed or not - don't you think? Ed Fitzgerald (unfutz) ^{(talk / cont)} 21:10, 3 February 2008 (UTC)

This edit was fine as far as the date is concerned. I believe the issue is how to stop SmackBot from removing certain spaces. Is there any special markup that could be used to hide spaces from SB? --Jtir (talk) 22:28, 3 February 2008 (UTC)

Spaces... again this is an AWB GF feature. Personally I think this is a good spacing regeime, but certainly there are a lot of AWB users out there implementing it. Incidentally statistics were gathered some time ago showing that this is the preferred spacing of editors (by use), although MOS is neutral on the subject. Rich Farmbrough, 16:32 5 February 2008 (GMT).

Thanks. I was hoping to help Ed retain the spacing he likes without reverting SB. I've been known to add an extra space just above the footer navbox myself. --Jtir (talk) 17:21, 5 February 2008 (UTC)

Fiat X1/9

The Smackbot has made a bit of a mess of the opening paragraph of Fiat X1/9 that I have corrected twice today. I'm not quite sure what it thinks it's doing but the result is a bit of a jumble, please take a look. Thanks. Dino246 (talk) 22:47, 3 February 2008 (UTC)

Obsure AWB bug. BUg report rasied. Rich Farmbrough, 17:28 5 February 2008 (GMT).

Citation needed

I'm a Luddite when it comes to things like this. In the Genesis section of the P-51 article, some Wiki-editor has asked for a citation regarding the increase in the Packard Merlin order. The data behind this is from Anthony Furse's biography of Wilfrid Freeman, which I have added to the bibilography.

Can you make head or tail of the way to add a citation, because I can't! pepperrell (talk) 16:59, 4 February 2008 (UTC)

I put the citation in, that article uses as simple style, can you page reference? It should be obvious how, but if you get stuck let me know. Rich Farmbrough, 15:34 5 February 2008 (GMT).

Smackbot insists on dates, but they are officially optional

Smackbot deleted an NPOV tag on this page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plain_English_Campaign because it had no date, but the official page says dates are optional. What gives? It feels kind of like your bot just gets to make its own rules and hijack pages. I know that's not the intention, but at the moment, can you forgive a bit of frustration? Angela Harms (talk) 15:00, 5 February 2008 (UTC)

Here is the removal, not by the Bot. The reason dates are optional is that a Bot will add them. Given the number of mis-spellings of "February", mis-formatting of the date etc., it would actaully be better (i.e. mean less corrective work for humans - mainly me - although the SmackBot does pick up many such errors now) if people left the dating to the Bot, many I know do so. Rich Farmbrough, 15:30 5 February 2008 (GMT).

Thanks! Sorry... I've been letting this get to me. Silly, isn't it? Angela Harms (talk) 16:02, 5 February 2008 (UTC)

Speedy deletion of Testpagepleasedeleteifoveradayold

Thank you for experimenting with Wikipedia. Your test worked, and the page that you created has been or soon will be deleted. Please use the sandbox for any other tests you want to do. Take a look at the welcome page if you would like to learn more about contributing to our encyclopedia

If you think that this notice was placed here in error, you may contest the deletion by adding {{hangon}} to the top of the page (just below the existing speedy deletion or "db" tag), coupled with adding a note on the article's talk page explaining your position, but be aware that once tagged for speedy deletion, if the article meets the criterion it may be deleted without delay. Please do not remove the speedy deletion tag yourself, but don't hesitate to add information to the article that would would render it more in conformance with Wikipedia's policies and guidelines. Toddst1 (talk) 17:09, 5 February 2008 (UTC)

Yh, deleted it now. (B- obvious... :) ~~

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BetacommandBot unblocking

Hi Rich. Please see here for my thoughts on the unblocking. Thanks. Carcharoth (talk) 12:00, 6 February 2008 (UTC)

London Gazette again

Could you possibly gnerate another list of articles which are linking direc to the London Gazette, rather than via the template? In the meantime, I've noticed that www.gazette-online.co.uk also works (as opposed to www.gazettes-online.co.uk), so could you include that as well? David Underdown (talk) 12:10, 6 February 2008 (UTC)

Yes, will do. Rich Farmbrough, 10:25 7 February 2008 (GMT).

See User:Rich Farmbrough/Article lists/Gazette. Rich Farmbrough, 03:46 8 February 2008 (GMT).

Thanks. David Underdown (talk) 13:35, 8 February 2008 (UTC)

Jorge Julio López

His name is actually Julio Jorge Lopez. Could you change this or let me know how. See: [14] (This official missing person report agrees with other accounts I've seen.)

The date is wrong on the chart, too. It should be September 18. The link to his record (footnote 1) is either wrong or broken. I couldn't find the correct one. See if you think the above link would be a sufficient replacement. Cheers, --Beth Wellington (talk) 22:28, 7 February 2008 (UTC) Jorge Julio López

AfD nomination of Sectarian fighting in Iraq

An editor has nominated Sectarian fighting in Iraq, an article on which you have worked or that you created, for deletion. We appreciate your contributions, but the nominator doesn't believe that the article satisfies Wikipedia's criteria for inclusion and has explained why in his/her nomination (see also "What Wikipedia is not").

Your opinions on whether the article meets inclusion criteria and what should be done with the article are welcome; please participate in the discussion by adding your comments at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Sectarian fighting in Iraq and please be sure to sign your comments with four tildes (~~~~).

You may also edit the article during the discussion to improve it but should not remove the articles for deletion template from the top of the article; such removal will not end the deletion debate. Thank you. BJBot (talk) 19:59, 8 February 2008 (UTC)

Complaint about pointless activity by SmackBot

What is the point in replacing {{citations}} with {{nofootnotes}}? It seems just another pointless bot edit. Personally I wish there was a way of disabling these bots.--Toddy1 (talk) 21:13, 8 February 2008 (UTC)

SB dates maintenance templates, this effectively creates a queue to insure that they all get dealt with, it also canonicalises and fixes certain template usage such as {{ tenmplate:wfy |dage= jan 2008}} to {Wikify|date=January 2008}} Clearly sometimes this is a functional change and sometimes not, however it is a. difficult to separate the two types of change (non-functional changes will be a very small percentage normally) and b. canonicalisation is a Good Thing because other processes, such as searchs, scripts, internal functionality are safer from pathological cases. Rich Farmbrough, 14:49 9 February 2008 (GMT).

Call it an 'overcite'?

I've noticed this also... and aren't we getting a bit excessive with so tagging every last article? First, having that huge notice hanging over what should be authoritative text already makes it look like it isn't. Second, I think having umpteen citations (especially all going to the same source work, e.g. book quotes, or a biography), or a cite for every last statement in an article, is going to look more silly than authoritative, by the time it's done. (Besides, some of those citation lists get longer than the articles themselves, with full data.) I would settle for a list of works (specific books, articles, authors) to be referred to at the end, for a popular work such as Wikipedia. Zephyrad (talk) 14:33, 9 February 2008 (UTC)

Possibly. However SmackBot does not generally add tags, but merely dates those that are already there. Comlatins of over-tagging need to be made to the community, perhaps at one of the cleanup projects. Rich Farmbrough, 14:49 9 February 2008 (GMT).

Passed away

Yes, I used the wikisearch and some filtering to find about 4000! Reformatting these is a little depressing since quite a few instances are in badly written or formatted articles. It's fun stretching my AWB legs again. --Oldak Quill 03:19, 10 February 2008 (UTC)

PS. Why did you choose to open a bot account for AWB? To keep bot edits separate to the rest? So you can edit faster or use bot automation? --Oldak Quill 04:00, 10 February 2008 (UTC)

indefblockedbecause

I created that as a version of template:indefblocked that takes a parameter for the reason, and that template includes that category. Is there a reason why it shouldn't? —Random832 04:11, 10 February 2008 (UTC)

It's not intended as a warning template, it's a userpage tag. The style is different - it goes on the user page, not the talk page. —Random832 19:20, 10 February 2008 (UTC)

research wikipedia

Hi, Rich,Thanks for reading. I am a sociological researcher who really interested in wikipedia and wikipedians. The amazing result of contribution in wikipedia has inspirited me a lot. Would you mind to discuss with me about wikipedia and wikipedians, from which i would like to give people a whole view of wikipedians who have contributed in wikipedia volunteerly. and i also want to focus on the incentive mechenism of wikipedia. I really appreciate if you can give me some help. thanks again. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Wikizeyi (talk • contribs) 13:55, 10 February 2008 (UTC)

Template "current sport" and smackbot dating

I'd like to interest you in having Smackbot add month/dates to the {{current sport}} tags in use, as it does for {{current}}. I decided to take a look at the usage of the "sport" template, and deleted about 100 senile uses of the template. (I think actually that the templete is used far too often, and without cause, but that's another discussion.) I don't know what changes are requred to implement this at the template itself, if any, nor how you revise redirects, consolidating the redirected templates into the primary {{current sport}}.
Thoughts?
-- Yellowdesk (talk) 16:19, 10 February 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for your reply. In a recent inspection of {{current sport}}'s presence on outdated articles, and its related template redirects, I dimly recall that some had been dated in the manner that {{current}} is dated, and cannonicalized. And also more recent uses on articles seemed (less than six or so months, I speculate) that none of these were given dates. -- Yellowdesk (talk) 01:59, 21 February 2008 (UTC)

SmackBot and capitalization.

Rich, I noticed that recently SmackBot has been changing articles only to capitalize a cleanup template, which strikes me as unnecessary. Generally it is doing much more useful work! ✤ JonHarder ^talk 20:52, 10 February 2008 (UTC)

Yes it will be rare that it does this, but it happens - usually when an article moves out of one of the undated categories during a run, but I have just included two new templates, which may have thrown up a few more cases. Rich Farmbrough, 23:00 10 February 2008 (GMT).

Smackbot removed a } from templates

Resolved

At Liberty Van Zandt, with this edit, Smackbot changed {{Original research|date=}} and {{Plot|date=}} to {{Original research|date=February 2008date} and {{Plot|date=February 2008date}, somehow removing the } when it inserted the date. Cheers! -- Matthew | talk | Contribs 23:33, 11 February 2008 (UTC)

Fixed. Rich Farmbrough, 20:06 13 February 2008 (GMT).

template deleted

the ncite template got dleted. worth discussing at the fact template on wording? cheers, Casliber (talk · contribs) 10:41, 12 February 2008 (UTC)

RfA

Hello Rich. In a conversation long ago, you suggested I consider this. If you have time, and can look at my Sandbox, I would welcome a review of my current draft of answers. You might check if I tell the story of the ISBN-fixing work properly, and you might see if I answered everything you'd expect. EdJohnston (talk) 18:59, 12 February 2008 (UTC)

All set now. Thanks for your interest and your look at my statement. EdJohnston (talk) 19:47, 13 February 2008 (UTC)

Add new template to smackbot's list?

Hi, Rich. I'm not sure how to get smackbot to add the date to the newly-created {{Images needed}} template. Can you please either do the required magic or tell me how to do so, as applicable? Thanks! —Scheinwerfermann (talk) 23:25, 12 February 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for the quick response. I'm afraid I don't know enough about Template scripting to identify and tweak what needs tweaking. I made this template the ugly/ignorant way (copied the source of a similar template, dumped it into a new-template window, and replaced the source template's name, text, and links with new ones), so it's quite likely I inadvertently introduced errors. Can you show/tell me how to fix them, please? Thanks. —Scheinwerfermann (talk) 01:13, 13 February 2008 (UTC)

Much obliged, thanks. I will study what you did, but I promise not to fiddle with/break it! :-) —Scheinwerfermann (talk) 01:34, 13 February 2008 (UTC)

I copied {{Template:Cleanup}}. —Scheinwerfermann (talk) 01:42, 13 February 2008 (UTC)

err what?

Were you referring to? Sorry, missed that completely? -- Ļıßζېấשּׂ~ۘ Ώƒ ﻚĢęخ (talk) 23:51, 12 February 2008 (UTC)

AOUTP Rich Farmbrough, 11:38 13 February 2008 (GMT).

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Dated tags

Good work on fixing these, and the new cat. There are a lot of templates that use the date parameter though. Rich Farmbrough, 11:34 14 February 2008 (GMT).

Thanks for the comment. I'm quite aware of the number of templates using the date parameter. A casual look through Special:Wantedcategories can attest to that. However I don't want to add the category to too many templates at one time. I prefer to add it to one template, then remove the backlog before moving onto the next. It also makes you realise just how much easier it would be to let SmackBot add the date instead :) -- Harryboyles 11:47, 14 February 2008 (UTC)

Seeing as how you have admin tools and are tweaking things...

Say, thanks for the cleanup on Saddle bronc and bareback riding. While the article is locked down and only admins can get at it, could you also make one more tweak? Change the section header ==Saddle bronc vs. bareback riding== to read "Saddle bronc vs. bareback bronc riding" or something to that effect? I ask this because there is a different article titled bareback riding that is not about riding rough stock in rodeo and I think the clarification would be useful. I believe this would be non-controversial edit (Frankly I think the title of the whole article should also be changed in that fashion, but I want to check the PRCA site for absolutely correct names before doing an actual title move) Thanks Montanabw^(talk) 18:02, 15 February 2008 (UTC)

SmackBot bug

I noticed that SmackBot is running again, but I never heard if the bug was fixed. I reported it on his talk page. He deleted unrelated templates on 3 separate articles. He deleted the entire template (transclusion request), not just a single brace. JackSchmidt (talk) 09:23, 18 February 2008 (UTC)

Ah, it is just AWB deciding whether something is a stub. If there are any problems then, it is just a general AWB bug and not SmackBot in particular. JackSchmidt (talk) 09:37, 18 February 2008 (UTC)

Edit comment

"Please cease and desist from removing the Notability template without reasonable justification" Why did you leave this message as the edit comment on my user page? The issue is nothing to do with templates. The issue is that the bot is misbehaving. Xxanthippe (talk) 10:57, 18 February 2008 (UTC).

It's auto-generated. And yes I know I should click the + at the top, not edit the last section.. :-) Rich Farmbrough, 20:04 18 February 2008 (GMT).

Well, please will you remove it. The placing of unjustified critical comments on my contributions, despite being inadvertent, feels like harassment. Xxanthippe (talk) 21:59, 18 February 2008 (UTC).

Text size

Wikipedia talk:Accessibility#Text size

I had exactly the same reaction after reading several sections that now have autogenerated small text size. Let me know what you think of my proposal. patsw (talk) 20:37, 18 February 2008 (UTC)

I definitely dislike the small references, but I use firefox's minimum font size to globally fix such stuff (though my minimum font size is 16!). If you'd like I can make a simple thingy to fix it for your (Patsw) account.

I wanted to ask though, are there other routine accessibility tasks for gnomish sorts without admin tools to do? I just found out about WP:ACC where you can help those with screen readers create accounts, but it appears to be under control. I've been focusing on the traditional accessibility problem of access points by categorizing articles, but it isn't exactly as focused. JackSchmidt (talk) 22:07, 18 February 2008 (UTC)

(fix for reflist for individuals), In fact, it turns out to be simple. You can just add:

.references-small { font-size: 100%; }

to your Special:Mypage/monobook.css file. JackSchmidt (talk) 22:17, 18 February 2008 (UTC)

SkyHawks Parachute Team

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=SkyHawks_Parachute_Team&diff=174418223&oldid=170360601

A bit old, but just noticed this. Some stub-cats were removed. --Ng.j (talk) 00:05, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

Yes, the article is not a stub. Rich Farmbrough, 22:28 20 February 2008 (GMT).

Speedy deletion of Template:Uncited-article/doc

A tag has been placed on Template:Uncited-article/doc requesting that it be speedily deleted from Wikipedia. This has been done under section T3 of the criteria for speedy deletion, because it is a deprecated or orphaned template. After seven days, if it is still unused and the speedy deletion tag has not been removed, the template will be deleted.

If the template is intended to be substituted, please feel free to remove the speedy deletion tag and please consider putting a note on the template's page indicating that it is substituted so as to avoid any future mistakes (<noinclude>{{transclusionless}}</noinclude>).

Thanks. --MZMcBride (talk) 21:13, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

Speedied. Rich Farmbrough, 22:23 20 February 2008 (GMT).

Speedy deletion of Template:Unreferenced/whatlinkshere

A tag has been placed on Template:Unreferenced/whatlinkshere requesting that it be speedily deleted from Wikipedia. This has been done under section T3 of the criteria for speedy deletion, because it is a deprecated or orphaned template. After seven days, if it is still unused and the speedy deletion tag has not been removed, the template will be deleted.

If the template is intended to be substituted, please feel free to remove the speedy deletion tag and please consider putting a note on the template's page indicating that it is substituted so as to avoid any future mistakes (<noinclude>{{transclusionless}}</noinclude>).

Thanks. --MZMcBride (talk) 22:00, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

Speedied. Rich Farmbrough, 22:23 20 February 2008 (GMT).

Request for comment on main page deletion incident

As you made an edit to the incident listed in the Administrators notice board, it is requested that you confirm the details of the incident here (section 1.1.2)

This is as the incident is used as the basis of an argument and needs to be confirm by persons familar with the event

Regards --User:Mitrebox talk 2008-02-22 —Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.11.244.78 (talk) 07:55, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

Category:Transitional syntax

Hi– I think I understand this category now and guess it would be categorized under Category:Wikipedia utility templates...? First, though, I'd like to recreate it (with no changes) as Category:Templates with transitional syntax (or something similar?). May I go ahead? Sardanaphalus (talk) 16:21, 25 February 2008 (UTC)

• A more accurate but longer title might be "Pages containing a template which is using a transitional syntax on that page"

  Heehee - move now completed. Have categorized it under Category:Wikipedia maintenance templates rather than "utility templates". Thanks, Sardanaphalus (talk) 01:57, 26 February 2008 (UTC)

What does orphan mean?

Howdy, I seem to disagree with people about what orphan means. I look at Special:Whatlinkshere/Analytic_subgroup and notice that only a single article links to it (and only as a see also that I myself added). Sure there are talk pages, and lists of articles needing cleanup, but within the content of the encyclopedia, there is only a single see also link. To me that qualifies as "there are few or no articles linking here."

However, both you and R.e.b. have removed orphan tags, so I'm thinking I must have the wrong idea about it. I want to suggest a de-orphaning taskforce to wikiproject math, but I also don't want to waste people's time if there are not any real orphans.

To be clear, I have no objection to analytic subgroup (heck, it has no content outside of Lie group anyways, and will be merged as soon as Lie group settles down), I just want to figure out if I'm crazy. JackSchmidt (talk) 18:57, 25 February 2008 (UTC)

Ah, so you might define an {{orphan}} as "an article with few or no other articles linking to it, but which could easily have more." Every article could use copy-editing, but one only puts the {{copyedit}} tag on articles where it is quite clear that lots of copy-editing can easily be done. There's no need to say explicitly on the copyedit tag that you only use it on pages that need it most (or more than a good-class article, etc.), because that is common sense. Similarly, there is no need for an orphan tag an article with few incoming links, if it can only expect a link or two at most. Does that sound reasonable? JackSchmidt (talk) 17:55, 26 February 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for clearing it up. I'll likely propose the math orphan tag and rescue operation on the math wikiproject in a few weeks. I think in a lot ways all that needs to happen is for someone to actually read these articles and know they exist. Some are awful, but some are very good and strangely unlinked. My hope is that fixing orphans should fix two things at once: not only will they no longer be orphans, but people will actually read the articles and so want to fix all the other problems. Anyways, thanks again for clearing up tag confusion twice now! JackSchmidt (talk) 18:27, 26 February 2008 (UTC)

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Psalm 69

How come it's "Silly" to redirect 'Psalm 69' to the Ministry album, when the bible verse has no special, common meaning? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 129.177.138.109 (talk) 00:29, 29 February 2008 (UTC)

It's not a verse. The Minsitry album is almost certainly ephemeral, the PSalm has been around for thousands of years. Rich Farmbrough, 21:53 6 March 2008 (GMT).

Smile!

ComputerGuy890100 (talk) has smiled at you! Smiles promote WikiLove and hopefully this one has made your day better. Spread the WikiLove by smiling at someone else, whether it be someone you have had disagreements with in the past or a good friend. Happy editing!
Smile at others by adding {{subst:Smile}} to their talk page with a friendly message.

Resolved

Rich Farmbrough, 16:34 5 February 2008 (GMT).

Bot-tled fury

I originated the Franz Mercurius van Helmont page, but completely abandoned editing this beyond leaving the initial stub outline because of a radical dispute about the breach of Ignore All Rules by the Good Article team in respect of another article. They producing the hypocritical situation whereby an article which had been abandoned by the original editors (I wrote to them all) was adopted as a text in the 2007 Wikipedia for Schools, yet was dumped on as a Bad Text because it didn't meet the GA criteria for annotation. When I took it in hand attempting to annotate it as demanded, they congratulated whoever had started - me - and then insulted me when I checked I was up to scratch. In fact, as the primary sources are listed, and are simply chronicles, there's no need for annotation, the dates cited do that automatically. GA then compounded their offence by stating they didn't respect original sources, which is outright heresy to any historian. They have since withdrawn their Bad Article placard but still plaster the description page with their nonsense - my own protest has not been reacted to.

Similarly, your Bot appears to have picked on this article on NPOV grounds which it doesn't state - it's dated December and yours is the only December edit listed, so I presume it's you. Could you either substantiate why, preferably add the other viewpoint, or withdraw the appeal, please?

IMHO it's time the super-editors stopped plastering notices left, right and centre and actually addressed problems themselves, or started talking to those who had done recent edits. If you and your peers want to turn Wiki into a billboard, keep right on - some of the pages I've seen recently have more Project claims and complaints than real work. It's dead easy to start a Project and use that as a tool for self-aggrandisement, rather than actually commit yourself to doing some real work on it.

If you want to reply, please actually write to me - I'm jelmain at skynet . be

Well, the POV was easily removed. And the Bot just dates the tags doesn't add them. This was tagged on 17th of October, however the dated POV categories are fairly new... Rich Farmbrough, 12:11 2 February 2008 (GMT).

Template:VCS

A month ago, SmackBot made several edits, which, I assume, was to replace "Template:VC" with "Verify Credibility". Unfortunately, there exists "Template:VCS" which is for Volusia County Schools. This became "Verify CredibilityS". While I know that bots always make mistake, it would seem to me that this mistake could have been avoided. For instance,instead of using "Template:VC" possibly using "{{Template:VC}}". While I understand that it was a bit silly for the person who installed the template to use "{{Template:VCS}}" instead of "{{VCS}}" such mistakes should be forseen. For an example, please see this diff. I will fix the errors myself, I simply felt that you should be aware of this mistake.--Vox Rationis (Talk | contribs) 21:55, 2 March 2008 (UTC)

On the one hand the coding is considerably more subtle and complex than that, on the other, had you not let me know the bot would have carried on making the same mistake. Many thanks. Fixed. Rich Farmbrough, 23:05 2 March 2008 (GMT).

More complex? than I am greatly mistaken, as the edit summary appeared to be merely AWB, a program which i am somewhat familiar with (and have had to learn to expect such mistakes). But then, I probably don't know the half of bot creation. All in all, SmackBot is doing a good job, so keep up the good work!--Vox Rationis (Talk | contribs) 00:17, 3 March 2008 (UTC)

Editing Ruud Lubbers entry

Thanks for your post on the Lubbers disc page on 12 February. Almost from the beginning I have been trying to get some serious discussion about the edits on the Ruud Lubbers page. So far I really haven't been succesful. If you have time to read carefully the discussion page you will get an idea of what has been going on. It is frustrating and I am not really impressed with how the WP admin has handled this either. It took me some time even to get a response from Godwin which included an off-wiki exchange where it was suggested that I had created my own problem and the insinuation on the disc page that I was a "professional critic". The only explanation I have seen as come from Fpbat who is clearly not representing WP and is clearly is unfamiliar with the way WP works. I have tried to make adjustments to the proposed text and have included quotes from Mr. Lubber's supporters as well as links to longer texts. I have waited vainly for some response. It seems to me time to move beyond the present text and try out the Revised Proposed Text, however, I don't want to get in an edit war. Finally, if you do have time to read the Disc page carefully, can you offer me some idea of mistakes that I made as well as alternative suggestions. If you can't find the time, can you suggest somebody who might be interested in helping. For the next month I will be in and out of China and will be in and out of contact with WP so that there may be delays in my edits. --Joel Mc (talk) 09:42, 3 March 2008 (UTC)

Completely multiplicative function oops

Howdy, I just redirected completely multiplicative function to multiplicative function, since it was just a brief definition. I had checked the page history, but I misinterpreted your edits as cleaning up an existing article, not turning a redirect into an article. Oops. So I didn't mean to revert your edits.

Should I revert, and try expanding the article? I don't know how to make it much more than a stub, but I can wikify, stub sort, add cats, etc.

I guess what I'm asking is, what is the focus of the article, and why shouldn't it just be added to multiplicative function? I don't mind expanding, but I just wasn't sure how to get past my gut reaction of "this should be merged". JackSchmidt (talk) 22:24, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

Ok, I reverted my redirect and tried to expand the article a little. It's still pretty slim, but I think it is a good stub now. It could definitely use examples. I'm afraid I don't have the mindset to check the examples at multiplicative function#Examples to see which are totally multiplicative. I also made the redirect at totally multiplicative functions point at the new article. JackSchmidt (talk) 22:45, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

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What makes you so good

Since you are the user that has made the most edits to wikipages i was just wondering how do you do it, as in do you spend every single day of every single second on wiki because i could think that is the only way you could do it. The main question i want to ask is do your eyes get sore after being on the computer for so long? Im only on there for maybe and hour or two a day and my eyes are so bad now, i need to change my glasses often because i dont give them enough rest. You know what they say, have a break for 10min every 1/2 hr but im sure you know im hooked on. Whats your secret? Are your eyes still good? Can you help me out because you would know. Thanks, its been an honour to get in touch with you. Roadrunnerz45 (talk) 13:36, 5 March 2008 (UTC)

The reason my edit-count is so high is that I'm not daunted when something needs to be changed in many places, and I'm doing a lot of minor fix-ups. For example I tagged 3000 maps of US counties as GFDL, and made a manually checked tidy up to about half the album articles. Most of my edits (90%) are made by User:SmackBot and there are about another 10 bots that have made more edits than my account. I also run up a fair few edits manually testing stuff for SmackBot, and fixing the exceptions that SB can't cope with. Rich Farmbrough, 15:34 5 March 2008 (GMT).

Kurt Kaiser Article tagged by Smackbot

Rich,

I just reverted the tag from smackbot from my article, the references are now in the article. However, if they don't meet spec, please feel free to re-tag me and drop me a note on my talk page Thanks ! Kosh sezWe don't need no stinkin FUR!! 18:34, 6 March 2008 (UTC)

Rich, I saw your message. Thanks! Regarding my signature - you could say it's activism. The "FUR" is wikipedia's Fair Usage Requirements. I think they're just a touch bureacratic, but that's just me !

We don't need no stinkin FUR!! 04:54, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

No content in Category:Articles lacking sources from February 2005

Hello, this is a message from an automated bot. A tag has been placed on Category:Articles lacking sources from February 2005, by another Wikipedia user, requesting that it be speedily deleted from Wikipedia. The tag claims that it should be speedily deleted because Category:Articles lacking sources from February 2005 has been empty for at least four days, and its only content has been links to parent categories. (CSD C1).

To contest the tagging and request that administrators wait before possibly deleting Category:Articles lacking sources from February 2005, please affix the template {{hangon}} to the page, and put a note on its talk page. If the article has already been deleted, see the advice and instructions at WP:WMD. Feel free to contact the bot operator if you have any questions about this or any problems with this bot, bearing in mind that this bot is only informing you of the nomination for speedy deletion; it does not perform any nominations or deletions itself. To see the user who deleted the page, click here CSDWarnBot (talk) 20:30, 6 March 2008 (UTC)

Deleted Rich Farmbrough, 21:55 6 March 2008 (GMT).

Speedy deletion of Template:Asbox/whatlinkshere

A tag has been placed on Template:Asbox/whatlinkshere requesting that it be speedily deleted from Wikipedia. This has been done under section T3 of the criteria for speedy deletion, because it is a deprecated or orphaned template. After seven days, if it is still unused and the speedy deletion tag has not been removed, the template will be deleted.

If the template is intended to be substituted, please feel free to remove the speedy deletion tag and please consider putting a note on the template's page indicating that it is substituted so as to avoid any future mistakes (<noinclude>{{transclusionless}}</noinclude>).

Thanks. --MZMcBride (talk) 04:25, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

Missing references

Hey Rich. Please see Wikipedia:Bot requests#Missing references section. References are added to many articles with the {{GR}}-template, but the articles are missing a references section. I know you did something similar to this with a list made by User:SQL. Could you take a look at this. Rettetast (talk) 21:27, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

FYI

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:John_Buscema#Request_for_Comment_-_Integrate_two_versions

--Skyelarke (talk) 14:57, 8 March 2008 (UTC)

Merging merge templates

I just thought i would give you heads up that i have suggested the merger of {{Mergeto}} to {{Merge}}, athough they are not tagged yet until someone can add the merge tags. Simply south (talk) 16:43, 8 March 2008 (UTC)

Help with creating a template

I have been trying to figure out how to create templates, and I have been having a lot of difficulty. I have been using Sandbox, but have not succeeded in making it work out.

In particular, I have been having trouble with making a page-top template. I want to make one called "Template:Barenotability" that can be placed on the top of an article that seems to barely meet notability requirements. I want it to say something like the following:

This page seems to just barely meet Wikipedia's notability requirements. This notability may be disputed, and it is possible this article may be proposed for deletion. Please help by adding references, or if no more can be found, merging this article.

The purpose of this template would be to motivate the improvement of existing articles that are minimally referenced.

I have also been trying to figure out how to create the templates that appear at the bottom of many pages that list many article within a category, but I think I have nearly mastered that. These have become popular, and I would like to create some myself.Hellno2 (talk) 00:28, 9 March 2008 (UTC)

Nobots

Hello. I was tracking down how {{nobots}} appeared in MacBook Air.[15] What is SB and what does it break in the article? Gimmetrow 00:36, 9 March 2008 (UTC)

It is a bot account, nearly all edits are made using AWB. There was an AWB bug which did funny things to the text "802.11g" or something similar, probably now fixed,I will check later. Rich Farmbrough, 18:35 9 March 2008 (GMT).

SmackBot

Hi SmackBot,

I have been writing an article entitled "Syngas Fermentation", and I have been trying to find users related to this article. If you do not mind, I want you to look at my article, and give your comments in terms of the article. I can change and include more information according to your comments.

Could you please check my article, and give your comments.

Thanks a lot Regards,

Ferit Isik —Preceding unsigned comment added by Feritisik (talk • contribs) 04:45, 9 March 2008 (UTC)

Made a few cahnges, but basically looks good. Needs expanding. Rich Farmbrough, 18:47 9 March 2008 (GMT).

InUse tags

Hi, it doesn't look like you quite got to the bottom of the inuse issue (22nd Jan) - I've just had an edit conflict with SmackBot over at Morphometrics which was tagged with {{inuse}}. Thanks, Verisimilus T 14:52, 10 March 2008 (UTC)

Thankks, fixed. (I had escaped a metacharacter.) Rich Farmbrough, 15:09 10 March 2008 (GMT).

SmackBot and interwiki sorting order

Hey. It seems that your bot has suddenly begun to change articles' interwiki sorting order from alphabetical word-based order to alphabetical two-letter codes. I don't know if you intended the bot to do that or not, but I think this is a very bad thing. There is no written policy, but the alphabetical order based on the local names of the languages has become the de facto guideline with the very large majority of articles using it. See Wikipedia:IL#Sorting. Thanks, Prolog (talk) 22:56, 10 March 2008 (UTC)

Hello

• Do you have a right to protect pages or to edit protected pages or article? {Jennyandalizapurok4 (talk) 05:27, 11 March 2008 (UTC)}

I Just want you to protect the article of Angel Locsin

• There are so many wikipedians that are keep on editing her article. I want you to full locked her article also to Regine Velasquez. {Jennyandalizapurok4 (talk) 05:27, 11 March 2008 (UTC)}

Snowball Earth

Nearly done; just fixing reference issue Verisimilus T 19:20, 11 March 2008 (UTC)

All yours. Thanks for your patience! 19:33, 11 March 2008 (UTC)

NPOV on John Zizioulas Page

Hi, I notice you've removed a POV-statement tag from the John Zizioulas page. It looks like you tried to replace it with a section template, but the formatting's not correct so the template doesn't come up. As the page is currently protected, could you correct the formatting so that the template appears properly on the page? Seminarist (talk) 21:00, 11 March 2008 (UTC)

Thanks Seminarist (talk) 22:31, 11 March 2008 (UTC)

cite web: accessyear etc.

Mind explaining why you just made the accessyear= parameter on {{cite web}} optional? It seems to me that knowing a reference was archived on April 15th isn't any help in understanding it unless you also know what year it was archived in. Thanks! RossPatterson (talk) 23:39, 11 March 2008 (UTC)

Editing Ruud Lubbers entry: Repeat of request for help

I don't believe that I got a response to the request below. Is there something I am not doing right, are you able to suggest a next step? If you are to busy or have any other reason for not being able to help, can you point me in a direction where I might find help. Thanks in advance.

Thanks for your post on the Lubbers disc page on 12 February. Almost from the beginning I have been trying to get some serious discussion about the edits on the Ruud Lubbers page. So far I really haven't been succesful. If you have time to read carefully the discussion page you will get an idea of what has been going on. It is frustrating and I am not really impressed with how the WP admin has handled this either. It took me some time even to get a response from Godwin which included an off-wiki exchange where it was suggested that I had created my own problem and the insinuation on the disc page that I was a "professional critic". The only explanation I have seen as come from Fpbat who is clearly not representing WP and is clearly is unfamiliar with the way WP works. I have tried to make adjustments to the proposed text and have included quotes from Mr. Lubber's supporters as well as links to longer texts. I have waited vainly for some response. It seems to me time to move beyond the present text and try out the Revised Proposed Text, however, I don't want to get in an edit war. Finally, if you do have time to read the Disc page carefully, can you offer me some idea of mistakes that I made as well as alternative suggestions. If you can't find the time, can you suggest somebody who might be interested in helping. For the next month I will be in and out of China and will be in and out of contact with WP so that there may be delays in my edits.

--Joel Mc (talk) 09:42, 3 March 2008 (UTC)

--Joel Mc (talk) 02:42, 12 March 2008 (UTC)

Bot question

Hiya, I've been thinking that I'd like to get the articles in Category:Accuracy disputes sorted by date, so that we could tell which articles have been tagged for a long time. Currently the bot seems to be adding dates to the tag properly, but we don't currently have a set of "dated" categories. Could you please advise on how we might be able to get this rearranged, so we could sort the category a bit? Thanks, Elonka 21:19, 11 March 2008 (UTC)

Thanks.  :) Now that I'm admin, one of the things I've been doing lately is trying to locate old disputes, and nudging the participants to either resolve the dispute or delete the disputed section. Having a "sorted by date" option will make it easier to find the old stuff.  :) --Elonka 21:37, 11 March 2008 (UTC)

Great work! Fast turnaround too, thank you. I'll get to work on some of the older stuff. Think this would also be worth a mention at WP:AN? --Elonka 23:18, 12 March 2008 (UTC)

Re: Cleanup templates

Whoops, which article did I subst a template on? I'll go back and undo it... but the only article I see in my history for March 12th wasn't substed...? --bd_ (talk) 04:03, 13 March 2008 (UTC)

Protection of Template:Content

I have turned off the cascading of the protection of {{Content}}, in accordance with the standard protection of templates. The template is still full-protected, but pages transcluded within it (such as its documentation page) are no longer covered by the protection. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 06:10, 13 March 2008 (UTC)

Thanks, didn't mean to cascade it. Rich Farmbrough, 09:17 13 March 2008 (GMT).

re: Cleanup templates

Hi Rich, thanks for letting me know about the subst info. Could I have an example where I've incorrectly subst'd something recently, though? I'm just curious as to when/where I made that kind of mistake; I just don't recall subst'ing a cleanup-related template recently, since I've tried not to do that. Thanks for letting me know about that, anyway! :) --JamieS93 11:38, 13 March 2008 (UTC)

Here, rgds, Rich Farmbrough, 11:42 13 March 2008 (GMT).

Ah, that's where I did it. Thanks for the reference link. --JamieS93 11:48, 13 March 2008 (UTC)

Bot edits

Hello. Smackbot just did this - I reversed it because it obviously seemed a bit strange. Is there anything you need to look at? Best wishes, RobertG ♬ talk 18:16, 13 March 2008 (UTC)

SmackBot

Hello, I am AOEgeek!I am hosting a contest on my talk page to see if anyone can guess who I was before AOEgeek.Look at it![[16]]AOEgeek (talk) 09:01, 15 March 2008 (UTC)AOEgeek

Uh, yeah.I am.Lucky guess.And it's MKguy42192, for your information.AOEgeek (talk) 09:15, 15 March 2008 (UTC)

Huh?

What are you saying?AOEgeek (talk) 09:10, 15 March 2008 (UTC)

Bot bad edit

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Rotten.com&diff=197928727&oldid=197333825 --Xyzzyplugh (talk) 19:57, 15 March 2008 (UTC)

Thnks. Fixed. Rich Farmbrough, 20:41 15 March 2008 (GMT).

subst'ing templates

Hi, I actually didn't realize I was substituting those maintenance tags - must have done it right after I left a talk page message or something. Thanks for catching it though. I'll be more careful in the future. --Mosmof (talk) 00:17, 16 March 2008 (UTC)

Trouble with anonymous 71.111.138.30 on Homelessness in the United States article

Hi Rich. User Special:Contributions/71.111.138.30 has made some POV and unsupported assertions in at least the Homelessness in the United States. I had to revert back the changes again. Can we lock the article ? You might look into this contributor. Any suggestions ? Thanks. --- (Bob) Wikiklrsc (talk) 20:40, 15 March 2008 (UTC)

Thanks, Rich. It seems all spurious when I looked at all the anonymous contributor's contrubutions. But let's hope it's over. Im general if we have two rational parties, we can make sense of it. If not, if it's imbalanced, then there is trouble: like revert wars which I am not into. Bests. --- (Bob) Wikiklrsc (talk) 13:14, 17 March 2008 (UTC)

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You are receiving this message because you have signed up for the Signpost spamlist. If you wish to stop receiving these messages, simply remove your name from the list. Ralbot (talk) 23:40, 19 March 2008 (UTC)

Your bot has surpassed 1,000,000 (ONE MILLION) edits! Wwoooww!

Since when did that happened? Being the first Wikibot to reached that alarming milestone as the most-edited bot in the entire English Wikipedia, do you have anything to comment? 60.48.95.17 (talk) 09:30, 20 March 2008 (UTC)

Whoot! Congrats! :) SQL^{Query me!} 09:33, 20 March 2008 (UTC)

Report for User:SmackBot
User groups: bot
Edits (including deleted edits): 1268091
Edits: 1204472

Heh! SQL^{Query me!} 09:37, 20 March 2008 (UTC)

It happened quite some time ago, I think Cydebot actually got there first. Rich Farmbrough, 11:48 20 March 2008 (GMT).

But as per WP:BBE, WP:WBE and via using GTools, the highest of all is still SmackBot with 1,269,006 edits than Cydebot with 1,230,261. 60.48.95.191 (talk) 04:55, 21 March 2008 (UTC)

Bot acting weirdly

In this edit, your bot not only capitalizes one of the tags for no apparent reason, it also changes the date format for an AFD tag, which seems kind of strange. Isn't that tag supposed to remain unedited until the deletion debate is over? And why change the formatting anyway?--Dycedarg ж 19:47, 23 March 2008 (UTC)

SmackBot canonicalises the templates it deals with. As far as the date parameter goes it would be ideal to leave this particular one alone, however it merely links to the log for the day, for the person creating the template to use, it's not too harmful. I will try to fix this fairly soon, however. Rich Farmbrough, 21:50 24 March 2008 (GMT).

Barnstar

		The Tireless Contributor Barnstar
		For contributing so much to the article Pedro López (serial killer) I User Swirlex award you this Tireless Contributor Barnstar.

Resolved

Rich Farmbrough, 18:27 9 March 2008 (GMT).

Magic Tape initial use

I am a Brazilian IP lawyer working on the Magic Tape trademark. I noticed that in the USPTO database, the first use in commerce in dated 30.08.1965, and not in 1961 as you state. See http://tess2.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=gt3b7d.2.1

Hmm. Rich Farmbrough, 22:49 28 March 2008 (GMT).

SmackBot

Rich, converting a list of properties of a software to prose is hard and does not make much sense IMHO, as a list is a lot easier to capture.

Hence I kindly ask you to exclude the Kolab article from being tagged by SmackBot.

Thanks, Cow0x1

Usual reply.. Rich Farmbrough, 18:27 9 March 2008 (GMT).

HEMU

Last editing on 8th March 2008, inwhich word Akbar has been removed and Humanyu has been added. This is a wrong entry. It should be reverted to Akbar, because Humanyun had died in January 1556 and Akbar was made the King at a ceremony at Kalanaur in Punjab.So when HEMU attacked and won Agra and Delhi in September-October 1556, he had a victory against Akbar's forces and not Humanyu's. Please revert this edition.

Sudhirkbhargava

Not SmackBot's edit, however the change you mention has been reverted. Rich Farmbrough, 18:32 9 March 2008 (GMT).

SmackBot & capitalization in tags

I have seen in several articles this bot (and perhaps other[s]) changing the capitalization of the key word in tags requesting citations, clarity, etc. The most recent one is in King Kong (comic). What possible difference can this make? The change certainly doesn't cause the tags to display any differently in the articles. Honestly, I am expecting a reply opening something like, "The difference is...." It's just that seeing these when I check the edit history of an article I am interested in/working on bugs me, and if I understood the point, they would slide right by me. Otherwise, I wonder if there isn't some better use for the energy/server space/whatever (that should give you some idea of how little I understand of how websites work from the technical perspective, and that I am wide open to a justification of this activity). Thanks. Ted Watson (talk) 20:49, 24 March 2008 (UTC)

The difference is that the parameter "date" is valid and will put the item in a hidden category, in this case Category:Articles with unsourced statements since February 2008, whereas "Date" is invalid. 97 times out of 100 Smackbot simply has to add a date parameter, three percent of the time it needs to fix up an incorrect date, mispelled parameter etc. Rich Farmbrough, 20:54 24 March 2008 (GMT).

WOW! That was quick. Thanks. Also, I must apologize as you are quite correct that it was "date," not the key word, that had its case changed in the linked-in article. I'll see if I can find an example of one with the word "citation" or whatever so altered, but perhaps it's just my memory playing tricks on me. Thanks again. Ted Watson (talk) 21:27, 24 March 2008 (UTC)

Reply noted. It was quite unexpected, too. At least now I don't have to try to find one of the other kind, thanks for that. By the way, this very bot, SmackBot, recently added a date to an undated tag on Bruce Lee, but left "date" lower case. Maybe this was simply because this one was a box at the top of a section about a lack of references in general, rather than a little note within the text. But just in case it is some kind of fault, and as we are currently in communication about the process, I thought I'd mention it. Perhaps I'm being overly cautious. Ted Watson (talk) 19:18, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

autolinking of years on |accessyear=

Hello, Rich;

I'm curious as to why you added year autolinks to |accessyear on the cite web template. I've been specifically using "|access-" elements on pages to prevent having changes to year articles show up in the related changes, per the description of the elements on the template page. For example, on List of plesiosaurs, I don't see that there is a need to know about all the changes to 2005 and 2006 when someone checks related changes. In my view, they swamp the changes to articles that are germane to "List of plesiosaurs". Anyway, I just wanted to know your reasoning, and if there is a way to use the cite web template without running into this. J. Spencer (talk) 01:37, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

In general lone years should not be linked, but when they are part of a date 10 April 1962 they should - unless its a literal date in a quote, name of something , URL etc.. This is because it allows date formatting to work. Unfortunately these cite templates are currently rather complicated, and very widely used, so the fact that the date is sometimes linked and sometimes not, depending on the exact parameter used, will take a little resolving. There is an editor who has started working on this, however he is currently behind the great fire-wall of China. Regards, Rich Farmbrough, 18:02 25 March 2008 (GMT).

Okay. It just seemed odd that the template page would describe the "|access_" elements as not autolinking to dates, but when used, the year portion would autolink. J. Spencer (talk) 23:28, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

Uruguay

May I ask you why have you changed the positions in Uruguayan 2007/2008 football article? Please, review the sources before making changes. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 190.134.32.29 (talk) 03:39, 26 March 2008 (UTC)

Of course you may ask. The answer is I haven't. Rich Farmbrough, 16:23 26 March 2008 (GMT).

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You are receiving this message because you have signed up for the Signpost spamlist. If you wish to stop receiving these messages, simply remove your name from the list. Ralbot (talk) 08:05, 26 March 2008 (UTC)

SmackBot and template "current sport"

In February I inquired if SmackBot might include the temporal template {{current sport}} in its program of dating templates, similar to how {{current}} is handled, so that it can be easily determined how old the template might be. I think you were going to check on it, and had thought the {{current sport}} template was included. I checked a random 10 instances of the use of {{current sport}}, and it seems these don't come under SmackBot's current attention. Canonicalizing all of the uses of redirects to {{current sport}} would be appreciated too.
Many thanks, Yellowdesk (talk) 12:28, 24 March 2008 (UTC)

OK I've canonicalised the templates and dated them as of this month. SB will date any it comes across and I could do a monthly run to pick up any others. At the moment the regular run works of undated categories and the act of dating moves the articles to a dated category so they don't get revisited. This doesn't apply to {{Current sport}}. Rich Farmbrough, 12:26 27 March 2008 (GMT).

Thank you.
I'm not sure what you mean, about what exactly does not apply to {{current sport}}.
-- Yellowdesk (talk) 14:20, 27 March 2008 (UTC)

User:Place holder

Could User:Place holder be listed as a bot so that it isn't listed as a regular user in lists such as Wikipedia:List of Wikipedians by number of edits? Gary King (talk) 23:22, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

That would defeat the point. Place holder is used to replace people who don't want to be named in the list, without changing the numbering for people who do. Rich Farmbrough, 16:22 26 March 2008 (GMT).

Ah, I took a quick glance at the list and saw Place Holder at the top and thought that it was the total of all the users that were replaced with Place holder. I now see that it is listed multiple times. Gary King (talk) 16:42, 26 March 2008 (UTC)

SmackBot note

Hi there, I noted today that SmackBot made a strange edit. A few days ago, SmackBot properly added the year to an "unreferencedsection" template. Then, a vandal changed the date from 2008 to 2069. SmackBot subsequently adjusted the date to "20069". Any ideas what happened? --Laser brain (talk) 14:14, 27 March 2008 (UTC)

Yes it's doing its best to fix the error. It knows these dates should begin with 200 not 20. Hmm. Rich Farmbrough, 14:17 27 March 2008 (GMT).

Most Active

Good Job for being the most active editer of all wikipedians (besides bots)!--RyRy5 talk 02:49, 26 March 2008 (UTC)

Thank you. Rich Farmbrough, 16:23 26 March 2008 (GMT).

Hhmmm... Like father like son, like Wikipedian like Wikibot. SmackBot is like a chip of Rich Farmbrough's old block, and it is just like the apple does not fall far from Richard's tree! So much for the most-edited-bot-and-user-in-the-English-Wikipedia trait similarities! 60.48.88.32 (talk) 05:26, 29 March 2008 (UTC)

<Chuckles>... Rich Farmbrough, 19:32 29 March 2008 (GMT).

Minor over mergeto

An extremely trivial edit to ask but could you include a space between the discussion and the date as it makes things easier to read...? Simply south (talk) 19:27, 27 March 2008 (UTC)

Unfortunately David Levy has removed the date display altogether. Rich Farmbrough, 09:02 28 March 2008 (GMT).

SmackBot

I don't think your bot should touch fact tags on talk pages and I reverted you here. Thanks, SqueakBox 03:45, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

I also couldn't give an edit summary using your send a message to your bot and that really pissed me off, please fix. Thanks, SqueakBox

Hello! I agree that Talk pages can be skipped too. I've got another example here, and I noticed that in the third change in that diff, text was also changed inside nowiki tags. However such special casing is not really important if staying in the article namespace. Thanks. -- Sverdrup (talk) 00:44, 29 March 2008 (UTC)

Yes you're right about the nowikis. Rich Farmbrough, 19:27 29 March 2008 (GMT).

SmackBot

hi richard i have a note from your bot on Salt Spring Air saying may contain original data, i have listed a good number of external sites for pretty much each claim, comment made. could you visit the site and see if maybe i am placing the links in the wrong section or something. i am pretty new to wiki but do want to make things work. look forward to any direction you can give. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Flymebc (talk • contribs) 22:05, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

Fly, that was me, not a bot. I'll explain on your talk page. Nick Graves (talk) 02:29, 29 March 2008 (UTC)

Date in reference

Hi, recently your bot changed a bunch of dates in a bunch of references (in article 2008 Canadian Commercial Seal Hunt). It changed the date from numbers to text (the month 03, became March), which is nice. The problem however, was that 2008-03-26 for example, became only March 2008. The day of the month disappeared. Bib (talk) 12:12, 30 March 2008 (UTC)

Thanks Bib, it shouldn't do that. It's only supposed to be looking at date parameters for cleanup templates. The whole field of dates in general, is, at present, beyond it's scope. Rich Farmbrough, 12:15 30 March 2008 (GMT).

I see you've fixed it now, thanks.Bib (talk) 16:47, 30 March 2008 (UTC)

SmackBot: conversion of HTML char-codes to raw Unicode: issue & consequent suggestion

greetings rich. first off, although you've probably heard it many times before, congrats and thanks for smackbot. it does good work, with few errors.

but (you knew there was going to be a but, didn't you), there's an exception:

it passed through French spacing and mungled the examples of different-width spacing in the unicode section. see the 2nd mod block HERE -- note the html charcodes &#8201; and &#8239; have been converted to their raw unicode equivalents, and in the latter example user-content becomes effectively invisible. even given my own knowledge of what should have been there (i created this section (by the miracle of copy-paste)), i thought the code had been completely deleted until i went to replace it and discovered by accident that there was an invisible essentially-zero-width character still between the last word and the exclamation mark.

now i'm in 2 minds as to doing this sort of thing anyway.

PRO: it's technically slightly purer for those on perfectly updated systems using standards-aware (typically paid-for) tools.

CON: it makes the article uneditable offline for anyone without access to unicode-compliant tools, which are much less common than most people think.

CON: some of the unicode codes' characters are not directly creatable on our current keyboards/OSs —that is, they CAN NOT be manually entered, and in some cases can not even be clearly or even visibly observed–can YOU determine at a glance in an edit-window that a gap in the text is not a normal space but actually a non-breaking space?— and in some key cases are not even visible: once they've been forced from being display-time characters to also being edit-time characters, most people lose the ability to directly enter them, and in some cases (eg varying-width spaces) may lose the ability to even see they are there.

but clearly i need to keep SmackBot away from the typographic examples.

i looked at {nobots}, and was about to exclude poor ole smackbot despite his sterling service and well-meaning edits. then i stopped and thought.

i do NOT want to forever exclude smackbot from hoving to with dustpan and brush, monkeywrench and oilcan, tidying up and improving common errors that may be inserted in future by later editors (none of us will be here forever {existential angst} )

but i DO need him not to munge my spacing examples.

then a penny dropped.

SUGGESTION:
modify SmackBot to have a context-sensitive ruleset.
CASE: where an article is tagged Category:Typography, he does NOT execute the html-code-->unicode-char conversion rules.

"simple as that", he says, secure in the knowledge that it's not him that would have to be making them changes...

LESS ARCHITECTURALLY-ARDUOUS SUGGESTION (which in many ways is superior to the above) :
you the developer do one single personal manual pass through the code's config data for the unicode chars smackbot will seek to convert, and remove at devel-time any character with typographic significance (perhaps best defined as: invisible behaviour different from a typewriter font; in particular: spaces).

for now, i'm going to {nobotno,badbot,down!} the article. but it'd be nice not to have to.

i remain,

yours in mutual futile pursuit of perfection,

Sal

Saltation (talk) 11:46, 31 March 2008 (UTC)

OK, I have a solution, but it's not perfect.

First realise that SB is almost exclusively run on WP:AWB, so excluding SB's "general fixes" will likely only buy you time (as another AWB bot will arrive).

There is however an option to ignore nowiki'd text, and a bunch of other stuff. SB is supposed to have this turned on, but sometimes I turn it off to get to picture captions - and forget to turn it back on.

So I've nowiki'd the unicode, which will probably keep most AWB bots away from them, including SB, provided I don't forget an leave the switch off.

Be aware, however that the next AWB gen fixes to hit that page will probably remove those <p>s you have put in the blockquotes.

Rich Farmbrough, 13:49 31 March 2008 (GMT). (tweaked 14:54)

Rich, you're a legend. Thanks.

Since I think this is a nontrivial issue for this and other articles, I've posted the problem (and the workaround's problem implied by your last line) to the Bug page on AWP. Please don't hesitate to update or delete it if you feel it is not appropriate.

Saltation (talk) 16:39, 31 March 2008 (UTC)

Unspecified source for Image:NASA-apollo11-AS11040-5904.jpg

Thanks for uploading Image:NASA-apollo11-AS11040-5904.jpg. I noticed that the file's description page currently doesn't specify who created the content, so the copyright status is unclear. If you did not create this file yourself, then you will need to specify the owner of the copyright. If you obtained it from a website, then a link to the website from which it was taken, together with a restatement of that website's terms of use of its content, is usually sufficient information. However, if the copyright holder is different from the website's publisher, then their copyright should also be acknowledged.

As well as adding the source, please add a proper copyright licensing tag if the file doesn't have one already. If you created/took the picture, audio, or video then the {{GFDL-self}} tag can be used to release it under the GFDL. If you believe the media meets the criteria at Wikipedia:Fair use, use a tag such as {{non-free fair use in|article name}} or one of the other tags listed at Wikipedia:Image copyright tags#Fair use. See Wikipedia:Image copyright tags for the full list of copyright tags that you can use.

If you have uploaded other files, consider checking that you have specified their source and tagged them, too. You can find a list of files you have uploaded by following this link. Unsourced and untagged images may be deleted one week after they have been tagged, as described on criteria for speedy deletion. If the image is copyrighted under a non-free license (per Wikipedia:Fair use) then the image will be deleted 48 hours after 16:35, 31 March 2008 (UTC). If you have any questions please ask them at the Media copyright questions page. Thank you. MECU≈talk 16:35, 31 March 2008 (UTC)

Goons!

Dude! I just saw your home page, and saw you kicked in for the Goon Show page. My esteeeeeeeeem and all-leather zeppelin for you just climbed immeasurably; yea, almost unto the point of climbing so high as to upset Nelson's Statue.

You realise... this means the END of the horse-drawn encyclopaedia!

Farewell!!

Grytpype-Thynne: And so saying, he climbed into his atomic dustbin and drove off.

Salgoon: Did I? Well, I might have been told a bit sooner than this.

FX: Clatter of lid. Insanely fast revving, enormous explosion, screeching of wheels (fades, with mad revving and intermittent explosions)

Salgoon: Hi! Someone's stolen my dustbin! After it in the key of E!

GRAMS: E#, suddenly sped up

Greenslade: I say, listeners. They've all gone.

FX: a piece of string

Moriarty: Owwwwwwww. Grytpyppe, Grytpyppeeeee... what was that?

Grytpyppe: Do you know, I haven't the faintest idea.

THEME TUNE

Saltation (talk) 17:26, 31 March 2008 (UTC)

"Wikify by month" categories

Hi, Rich. When creating new "Wikify by month" categories (e.g., Category:Wikify from April 2008), the dated tag in the message must be manually updated. If you simply copypaste from a previous category, that category's month will appear in the new category. If you know of a way that allows the month to be automatically updated when a category is created, please let me know. In any case, I've corrected the month in the "Wikify by April 2008" category. Cheers. – Liveste (talk • edits) 18:01, 31 March 2008 (UTC)

Yes, I know, I wrote the template :) .... I hope that was the only one of the 27 cats I made yesterday that I missed the change. I am thinking of writing a bit of java-script to make the new months cats. Rich Farmbrough, 18:45 31 March 2008 (GMT).

Suzanne Engo

I'm just letting you know that another user has all but blanked this article and is now attempting to have it deleted. John celona (talk) 02:18, 1 April 2008 (UTC)

Centuries

I was just wondering what the policy/advice on this was? I'm not challenging it, I'm just curious. I'm sure I read somewhere that centuries ought to be in number format (i.e. inline with the articles themselves - e.g. 12th century)? --Jza84 |  Talk  14:47, 1 April 2008 (UTC)

Yuen kay-san proposed for deletion

Hi, you took part in the discussion over at Branches of wing chun, and we could now use your input at Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Yuan_Kay-shan. Some guy not familiar with Chinese martial arts history is insisting on getting the Yuen Kay San article deleted. He'll probably move on to a lot of the other historical figures from there. --Marty Goldberg (talk) 17:23, 1 April 2008 (UTC)

Football templates

Hi, I have started a discussion here about football templates. I'm sorry that I can't explain what I would like to happen in more technical language. The basic idea is that players appear in the Current squad on the team article and on the {{Argentinos Juniors squad}} which is used on player articles. The information used in the two templates is basically the same.

What I propose is including all the information on each player in one template

{{Fs player|no=1|nat=Templetonia|name=Tommy Temple|shirtname=Temple|pos=GK}}

and then using it to display something exactly like the navbox used at present on player articles, but having a function triggered bysomething like the inclusion of "clubarticle" which makes the template convert into something looking like the current squad section used at present in club articles. So that {{Argentinos Juniors current squad}} gives the navbox and {{Argentinos Juniors current squad|teamarticle}} gives the current squad.

The main reason for this is to reduce the huge maintenance workload for people who update football articles, by storing all the current squad information in one place instead of two. An additional benefit would be to stop the Current squad and the squad navboxes getting out of sync (as can be seen in the Argentinos Juniors squads used as examples).

I really need some help from someone who knows parser functions etc, but have not been able to find any yet. If you are unable to help could you please point me in the direction of someone who can. If I haven't made myself clear, please contact me on my talkpage. Regards English peasant 22:42, 30 March 2008 (UTC)

As an afterthought, I was wondering whether it would be possible to bung the neccessary code into a template on the {{Infobox Football biography}} which automatically transcludes the relevant info to the current squad template on the team page and onto the team navbox which would just be a semi protected shell. This way the number of edits for a player transfer between clubs could be reduced from at least 5 (out of Current squad, out of navbox, details on player article, into new current squad, into new navbox) to 1 (change the player bio and adjust the transclusion parameters in the infobox). I don't know if this kind of thing is even possible, but it could potentially be of great ergonomic benefit to maintainers of football and potentially all sports articles. Let me know if you think its possible. All the best English peasant 22:13, 31 March 2008 (UTC)

I was thinking about this some more at work this morning, if it's possible do implement my ideas the current squad template would become something like a glorified category, indexed by squad number. A potential problem with this would be that people could add any old player into the squad and it would not appear on anyones watchlist and may stay uncorrected for ages. One possible solution would be to create a List of recent football transfers. Whe someone makes a change to the club parameter of any current squad template, it automatically gets listed on the list, in the same way that when you nominate an image for deletion on Wikmedia Commons an edit to Commons:Deletion requests. This could be monitored by people at WP:FOOTY and any unsourced or ridiculous transfers could be quickly undone.

So my idea is to create a currentsquad template in each player infobox comprising something like this

{{Csquad|club=Argentinos Juniors|no=10|name=Nicolás Gianni|shirtname=Gianni|pos=MF|nat=ARG|source=http://whatever}}

which would generate

10 MF Nicolás Gianni

in the {{Argentinos Juniors current squad|teamarticle}} on the Argentinos Juniors page

and

• 10 Gianni

in the {{Argentinos Juniors current squad}} navbox

Say he changes club to Boca Juniors, when I change the details on the club= parameter and provide a new source, it then takes him out of the Argentinos Juniors template and puts him into the Boca Juniors current squad and generates an automatic report to List of recent football transfers where it can be verified by other football obsessed wikipedans. Perhaps transfers where the club is changed but the source isn't could be marked as dubious/source required on the list.

The report would look like

Under the heading April 1 2008

• Nicolás Gianni Argentinos Juniors to Boca Juniors [17] (with some kind of option to mark as patrolled).

and where the source isnt changed

• Nicolás Gianni Argentinos Juniors to Boca Juniors No New Source

I think the first idea is probably much easier to implement, but the second idea would cut the workload for each player transfer by 80% and drastically reduce the number of unsourced transfers based on rumours by giving WP:FOOTY a list of transfers to revert if neccessary.

Perhaps a How to do a football player transfer page to explain how all this works, and that unsourced transfers will be reverted would also be helpful.

I would really appreciate some feedback on this issue, let me know if you think I'm talking pie in the sky. All the best English peasant 12:05, 1 April 2008 (UTC)

Individual footballer templates that render as lines in current squad and links in the navbox sounds like a potentailly good solution. Would it be possible to make it render automatically from the current squad parameter so that you put that guy plays for Argentinos Juniors by writing currentsquad = {{Argentinos Juniors}} [http://Evidence that he plays foe Argentinos] and he automatically goes into the Argentinos Juniors navbox and the current squad on the Argentinos Juniors page with no further edits. Would this be possible?

I've also been thinking through the transfer verification thing, some way of generating a List of recent association football transfers needing verification and making provision of a reliable source a neccessary part of the transfer process would help wikiproject football cut out a lot of amutuarish and bogus transfers and make the whole process more verifiable by creating a verification process (there is no real process at the moment transfers are only verified if they are noticed on enthusiasts watchlists). Perhaps this could be done by creating a feature of the currentsquad parameter that reports any non-trivial changes to the transfers for verification list. Then people such as myself can watch the list, mark properly sourced transfers as verified and undo unsourced transfers and leave a message on the editors talk page giving instructions on how to do it properly. If you can help me think of a workable methodology I'll raise the transfer issue at WP:FOOTY. See If I can get more interest than I did last time. English peasant 15:51, 1 April 2008 (UTC)

I appreciate the effort it's taken you to come up with the individual footballer template thing, but I don't think it really solves the problem of having to do at least 500 edits for 100 player transfers, I currently just cut the line out and paste it into the new squad in the right place and just change the no= parameter and the same process for the navbox.

Perhaps we could go back to the idea of combining the navbox and current squad, maybe this could be done by adding the nationality and position parameters to the navbox and making it render as a current squad on the team article? Then each transfer would only need 3 edits (change player article, remove from old navbox/current squad, put into new navbox/current squad. This would reduce the number of edits by 40% and stop the squads getting out of sync, a definite improvement.

I have added two hidden parameters on the Argentinos Juniors navbox (flag and position), can you think of a way to make it render as something like a current squad, but with the [v] [d] [e] gubbins at the top.English peasant 15:00, 2 April 2008 (UTC)

SmackBot request

I've copied this from the bots request page. Would you be willing to help please? Nyttend (talk) 19:56, 31 March 2008 (UTC)

As a result of this discussion, the various GR templates were changed from being references to Wikipedia:Geographic references to being various templates that produce standard-looking references. There was originally a different format for these links (like [[Geographic references#2|²]] for {{GR|2}}), most of which were removed years ago with edits like this one. However, there are a lot remaining, and since the GR templates are standard references now rather than being links to Wikipedia:Geographic references, the old-style ones are inferior. Could we have a bot simply to go around and put the respective GR templates in place of all instances of links to [[Geographic references]] with numbers?

To explain:

• [[Geographic references#1|¹]], [[Geographic references|¹]] with {{GR|1}}
• [[Geographic references#2|²]], [[Geographic references|²]], [[Geographic references#2|²]] with {{GR|2}}
• [[Geographic references#3|³]], [[Geographic references|³]], [[Geographic references#3|³]] with {{GR|3}}
• [[Geographic references#4|⁴]], [[Geographic references|⁴]] with {{GR|4}}
• [[Geographic references#5|⁵]], [[Geographic references|⁵]] with {{GR|5}}
• [[Geographic references#6|⁶]], [[Geographic references|⁶]] with {{GR|6}}

• [[Geographic references|^GR6]] and [[Geographic references|⁶]] with {{GR|6}}
• [[Geographic references#2|^GR2]], ^{[[Geographic references#2|2]]} and [[Geographic references|²]] with {{GR|2}}

Nyttend (talk) 16:56, 31 March 2008 (UTC)

Give that to smackbot. its what it does. β^_command 17:05, 31 March 2008 (UTC)

I converted the Harding Park, Bronx to a GR2. I'd advise that links like that, too, be converted (with the <ref> and </ref> templates being removed, since they're in the GR template code), since the big thing is getting rid of the self-references in favor of a complete listing. Nyttend (talk) 04:38, 1 April 2008 (UTC)

Could the bot check if there are a reference section and add one if there isn't one? Rettetast (talk) 19:48, 1 April 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for that. I found some more links to Geographic references, that should be replaced. I have added them to the above list. Rettetast (talk) 19:19, 2 April 2008 (UTC)

SmackBot and "name, State" links

I see that in Blaine, Minnesota, SmackBot has recently converted a couple of links from the format [[name, state]] to [[name, state|name]] [[state]]. For example, it changed the link Anoka, Minnesota to Anoka, Minnesota. Could you point me to the WP:MOS or other section that indicates this is the current desired practice? Also, I don't see this task listed anywhere at User:SmackBot. Thanks. – Wdfarmer (talk) 16:57, 1 April 2008 (UTC)

Farmer, it's helpful to have separate links to the community and the state: for example, it's long been the practice in article intros to link separate to PLACENAME, STATENAME, United States. Nyttend (talk) 23:11, 2 April 2008 (UTC)

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Veteran editor

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This editor is a
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Let Me Live In Your Life -= Citation Needed For...?

A tag was cited on Let Me Live In Your Life as not having a valid citation when referencing the album Rhapsody. If a user were to click on the latter album, anyone viewing the list could compare the tracklists and find that the six unnamed tracks from the former's list are also on the latter album. A citation is not required in this case as the songlists prove the statement in the Let Me Live In Your Life article. Am I required to otherwise link a citation for every single individual songlist, which is referenced in some cases on many sites? Or do I do a citation in Let Me Live In Your Life to the Rhapsody album? Or should I just reference each song that is repeated as such and maybe bold new titles?

I'm still fairly new, so if there is something I'm not understanding, I'm happy for advice. For now, I have removed the tag.

Cyclone CycloneGU (talk) 02:52, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

Received your reply on my page, Rich. Thanks. =) —Preceding unsigned comment added by CycloneGU (talk • contribs) 11:37, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

adding references section

Suggestion: Most editors now favor the {{reflist}} template over the bare <references/> tag. Would it be reasonable for SmackBot to insert reflist, when appropriate, instead of references? This recent edit is the first time I've noticed it doing either. Is that a new feature? Very helpful bot, by the way. —EncMstr 19:06, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

The problem with reflist is that the text is small, making it hard to read - maybe not for you youngsters (?) but for those of us in our forties or with certain visual impairments. SB has done this before and was adding reflist/references as the debate swung back and forth, but the deciding factor in the present case is that the tag is recommended for short lists.

Incidentally there is no very valid reason for using small text for references, providing the references/footnotes section goes right at the end of the visible page.

Thank you for your kind words.

Rich Farmbrough, 22:00 3 April 2008 (GMT).

SmackBot

On a recent edit, your (otherwise fantastic) bot added <references>. Why not add {{reflist}} instead?—Markles 00:42, 4 April 2008 (UTC)

The problem with reflist is that the text is small, making it hard to read - maybe not for you youngsters (?) but for those of us in our forties or with certain visual impairments. SB has done this before and was adding reflist/references as the debate swung back and forth, but the deciding factor in the present case is that the tag is recommended for short lists.

Incidentally there is no very valid reason for using small text for references, in any event, providing the references/footnotes section goes right at the end of the visible page.

Thank you for your kind words.

Rich Farmbrough, 22:00 3 April 2008 (GMT).

Reference location

Thanks for the alteration to the references placement! Will the bot revisit those geographic articles previously edited? Huwmanbeing ☀★ 02:22, 5 April 2008 (UTC)

Not sure. Rich Farmbrough, 19:28 6 April 2008 (GMT).

TfD nomination of Template:Citations missing

Template:Citations missing 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. — Terraxos (talk) 02:57, 5 April 2008 (UTC)

Bot removes whitespace in headers

Hi, today the 'bot removed the spaces in the heading:

 == References ==

in ASUS Eee PC. This makes the heading much harder to read for humans, while editing. It looked like:

 ==References==

Is fixable? Ideally to add spaces if they are not there?

Thanks -- quota (talk) 13:20, 5 April 2008 (UTC)

Following up your reply on my talk page -- yes, the spacing is up to the original editor -- so why change it? It's not an error (and it's more readable, as already mentioned). Thanks -- quota (talk) 09:16, 6 April 2008 (UTC)

Busy next Sunday?

Meetup? Hope it's not too short notice. Majorly (talk) 14:45, 5 April 2008 (UTC)

Afd

Since you have recently contributed a fair amount to the Celebrations of the September 11, 2001 attacks article, you may want to comment here I am Dr. Drakken (talk) 15:00, 5 April 2008 (UTC)

Bad reference edits

At least two recent edits of about forty are leaving code debris in the articles:
Graeme Smith (Radio DJ and TV Presenter)
Graffiti Blasters
--Knulclunk (talk) 17:45, 5 April 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for the note: these are articles with bad references in them. Both fixed. Rich Farmbrough, 18:18 5 April 2008 (GMT).

Reference edits

Hi. SmackBot is leaving old code for references. The code should be {{reflist}}. Timmeh! 14:23, 6 April 2008 (UTC)

The problem with reflist is that the text is small, making it hard to read - maybe not for you youngsters (?) but for those of us in our forties or with certain visual impairments. SB has done this before and was adding reflist/references as the debate swung back and forth, but the deciding factor in the present case is that the tag is recommended for short lists.

Incidentally there is no very valid reason for using small text for references, in any event, providing the references/footnotes section goes right at the end of the visible page.

Rich Farmbrough, 22:00 3 April 2008 (GMT).

Merge template Talk changes

I noticed that SmackBot had touched up the merge template on John Doherty (baseball 1992–96) changing

{{mergeto|John Doherty (MLB pitcher)|Talk:John Doherty (MLB pitcher)#Merger proposal|date=April 2008}} to

{{mergeto|Talk:John Doherty (MLB pitcher)#Merger proposal|date=April 2008}}

but this meant the links in the template were suggesting a merge with the Talk page and so a broken Talk:Talk: link was shown. I assume this is not intended behaviour -- Que (talk) 20:42, 6 April 2008 (UTC)

Indeed. Thanks for the message. Rich Farmbrough

Fixed. Rich Farmbrough, 21:13 6 April 2008 (GMT). 20:48 6 April 2008 (GMT).

References and edits on Ruud Lubbers

I have added references and edited the resignation section. I have tried to incoporate suggestions which add balance, but have left out scape goating accusations which are unsubstantiated. I leave in a couple of days trekking out of reacch of the www (as traumatic as it might seem) and would appreciate it if you could keep half an eye on the entry. --Joel Mc (talk) 13:04, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

Smackbot adding reflist marker to articles using another accepted reference method

See here. Thanks. -- Avi (talk) 19:18, 6 April 2008 (UTC)

The article uses both styles. If you could cenvert the <ref> tag, then you could remove the <references />. Rich Farmbrough, 19:24 6 April 2008 (GMT).

I missed that. Thanks for pointing it out! -- Avi (talk) 05:54, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

Template:Infobox Disease

Why did you change "&" for "and" - this was deliberate as the header then appears on one line rather than two - see http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:Infobox_Disease&diff=104205215&oldid=101946709 by Jfdwolff "(text generally overruns box boundaries on FireFox)", that was true for internet explorer too. David Ruben ^Talk 13:41, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

We don't generally use these in headers or titles. Rich Farmbrough, 20:00 10 April 2008 (GMT).

Query!

Hey! Sorry I hadn't gotten back to you. I rewrote my old program this week, and just finished running it against the latest (3+Gb! They grew!) dump. No results... SQL^{Query me!} 20:29, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

Oh interesting, I ran a regex and got 16000 hits I think it was. They are all fixed up. I also ran the fix-up for some thousands that used {{GR}} - which was what reminded me. And I changed the dummy data for {{Infobox settlement}} not to include </ref> so that problem is now reduced. All the best. Rich Farmbrough, 20:33 10 April 2008 (GMT).

Possible bot task

Do you think your bot could delink common units of measurement?
Lightmouse (talk) 09:36, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

Help with updating Wikipedia:List of monthly maintenance categories

Thank you for creating Wikipedia:List of monthly maintenance categories. I have attempted to clear the list of articles for Wikification that include old categories from 2006, but I am unsure if I broke the template. In short, the list needs everything marked with 2006 for Wikification to be removed. Can you check that my edit did not affect other areas listed in this maintenance log? Guroadrunner (talk) 23:57, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

1. Well done for clearing those lists!
2. Yes you broke the template, no problem.
3. To take 2006 of the list just take that off the page itself. But as the instructions say "Old years should not be removed until they have been empty for a few months at least." This is because reversions and undeletions can re-introduce members, and we can see using popups if the cats are empty (even if they don't exist). Having said that, the invalid date category makes this less of a problem.

Rich Farmbrough, 17:36 21 April 2008 (GMT).

SmackBot

Hi Smack Bot, Thanks for showing your interest in Oriya Literature . I want to project a true pics of Oriya Literature , which was un touched by any wikipedians .My motto is to paint a real and established pics of Oriya Literature not to make ita bias article .you have marked I am trying to bring all information about Oriya Culture,Oriya Celebrities ,Oriya Language and oriya Literature . I need your help to make the articles authentic, aesthatic and readable .Please help the project by editing the grammar portion of the articles .Ask me if you have any doubt for sources or references .We may usr the user talk page for our suitability . Again I am in hope for a poitive anticipation .

Kanu 786 —Preceding unsigned comment added by 117.200.224.39 (talk) 01:30, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

SmackBot!

Made some edits ([18] [19] [20] [21], and perhaps more) that caused cite errors in a few articles. It might not be that the bot's edits were faulty, as <ref name="ned" /> was in the infoboxes of the articles for some reason. Just letting you know. — Bob • (talk) • 04:53, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

Bob, you are right, these refs have no content. I'm asking the originator about them, Rich Farmbrough, 17:41 21 April 2008 (GMT).

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Template:Citations missing

See: Wikipedia:Templates_for_deletion/Log/2008_April_5#Template:Citations_missing - Nabla (talk) 02:58, 18 April 2008 (UTC)

Bot not quite working - Henry Paul

The bot caused a problem on the players infobox, just thought i'd inform.Londo06 10:44, 23 April 2008 (UTC)

TfD nomination of Template:The Bob & Tom Show

Template:The Bob & Tom Show 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. --Josh (talk) 04:10, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

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I-275 History section rewrite

As suggested, I rewrote the History section as prose and added Wikilinks and web citations. This is my first attempt at such a large edit, so your comments are welcome. Thomprod (talk) 03:13, 26 April 2008 (UTC)

Smackbot vs. Sectstub

I'm not quite sure what this means, but Smackbot has just deleted all the {{sectstub}} tags I've placed in this article I'm editing: Spiritism. Is this an expected behavior? If so, why are these tags undesired? -- alexgieg (talk) 22:08, 27 April 2008 (UTC)

SmackBot feature addition request

Please can you take a look at Wikipedia:Bot requests#DashBot? Thank you for your time. --Adoniscik^{(t, c)} 22:47, 28 April 2008 (UTC)

Space:1999 entries

Hi Rich, a lot of the Space:1999 entries have been tagged with the "no citation or references" tag by a user who frankly seems to be a newbie, and as far as I know, that's all he's done. I asked him what sort of stuff he needed as I didn't see anything wrong with the page but he has yet to answer. Some help would be appreciated. It's the pages like the Eagle Transporter, Mark IX Hawk, Moonbase Alpha Technical Manual and so on. Douglasnicol (talk) 16:16, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

Hi Rich, I tried some basic work on the Eagle Transporter, mainly the variants, does that help? One part that was taken out of the main Space:1999 page was the fact that an Eagle Transporter appeared in a Futurama episode, I can see how that might be regarded as trivia in the main entry, however, would you mind if I put it under a section in the Eagle page for instance "In other Media" or "In Popular Culture". The Serenity from Firefly has got such a section. I have the DVD's and can cite an episode and if it helps even do a screen grab, although personally I think the Eagle page has enough images already. Douglasnicol (talk) 14:41, 26 April 2008 (UTC)

Hi Rich, I lifted a section that had been deleted from the general trivia and put it in the Eagle page. The section called References to other shows. If this grows to include more, I'll change it to 'shows and other media'. Does this seem ok? Douglasnicol (talk) 22:17, 29 April 2008 (UTC)

Dennis Oliver

Can you please help to stop deletion of Dennis Oliver article?, this is a nice article and some people has removed nice pieces without obvious reasons.. the most good version is the one restored by the administrator of name Tatcher, but there is a user of name Pigman that after the administrator restored, Pigman returned and deleted again and placed deletion tag...at this point it looks malicious intention because the article has references to every single word noted on it, links to the actors database and newspapers. I understand that Dennis Oliver is not famous as John Deniro, but is does not mean that cannot be mentioned in Wikipedia. Please help to stop this deletion request and keep the article integrity. I've worked very hard in that article.. thank you!Ralicia (talk) 13:31, 30 April 2008 (UTC)Ralicia

SmackBot

In this edit, SmackBot updated a tag on a Talk page. The tag was being used to show the context of a disputed section as it was at the time of the dispute. Changing that tag has the potential to confuse the issue for future readers. I can't think of a case where a {{fact}} tag would be used on a Talk page except in that sort of context. Unless there's a reason that's not obvious to me why those tags should be updated, would you consider pointing the bot away from Talk pages? Thanks. Rossami (talk) 06:22, 1 May 2008 (UTC)

Interesting. Thank you for the update. Rossami (talk) 13:23, 1 May 2008 (UTC)

Dating maintenance tags in talk pages

Sometimes an editor will say something like "why don't you add a {{fact}} tag?" in a Talk page without using nowiki. SmackBot comes along and dates the tag; even ones in Talk page archives. No biggie, of course, but something to think about fixing if you have some spare time burning a hole in your pocket. RedSpruce (talk) 11:07, 1 May 2008 (UTC)

Yes, the example you gave SB will change to "why don't you add a {{Fact}} tag" (because the word "tag" follows). From manual testing these types of tests catch most use-mention distinctions. Also I am now using for this run {{Talkfact}} for the rest. Rich Farmbrough, 14:36 1 May 2008 (GMT).

SmackBot and Lifetime template

Hi. I appears that SmackBot behaves strangely with {{Lifetime}}. Both Category:Living people and Category:Year of death unknown was added. Also DEFAULTSORT was omitted. [22]. By the way, is it preferable to avoid this template? – Leo Laursen – ☏ ⌘ 14:31, 1 May 2008 (UTC)

This is an AWB fix, I noticed that earlier and assumed that it was OK. I'll look in more depth, presently. Rich Farmbrough, 14:36 1 May 2008 (GMT).

there is a bug logged, and fixed in the next release. Rich Farmbrough, 19:12 4 May 2008 (GMT).

Dennis Oliver

Dear Rich Farmbrough, I can see that you have visited Dennis Oliver article and because I do not know much the way around wikipedia, I am appealing to your help. An editor of name Ralicia has created an article about Dennis Oliver and an editor of name "Pigman" wants to delete it a any cost. An administrator of name "Tatcher" has restored after "Pigman" deleted it rareway. Then "Pigman" returned and placed the "deletion" tag. Because I placed my opinion to keep the article in the "articles for deletion page", Pigman is accusing me of "puppetry" which I understand it means of having more than one log in in wikipedia?, also accusing me of being another person of name Jorge M. Perez, who happens to be a multi-millonaire from Cuba!. I answered him that "I wish to be that person"!! .I do not understand why Pigman is so stubborn in to delete the article of Dennis Oliver. His excuse is that Dennis Oliver does not have notability as an actor. Because I am spanish and italian, I was reading all the links to spanish newspapers on Dennis article, and there are very good reports about him as an actor an as a assitant director, also in most of them is Dennis picture! which clearly shows his acting notability. Furthermore, not every actor is lucky enough to be famous as a Brad Pitt or Tom Cruise, but that does not mean that cannot have an article in wikipedia, right?... Wikipedia is not a printed book with limited space....and Dennis has a reputable career as an actor with important roles on theatrical pieces. Please, help me to prove to this person that it is wrong to delete Dennis article. Also, what really calls my attention is that always are the same three editors requesting the deletion of the article, everybody else seems to agree to the article stay but few are saying that. In Dennis article every single line is backed up by a link to prove it, including Dennis website and his listing in the actors database. Below I am attaching the link to Dennis-articles for deletion listed. Please help, Thank you for your help! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Dennis_Oliver justice all the way (talk) 18:52, 1 May 2008 (UTC)justice all the way

Hi, justicealltheway. You could also, as a safety measure, create (copy) that page to the Italian and Spanish versions of Wikipedia. Click on those links to take you to the right areas; you may like to add an {{main|LINK} line at the top of the english-language article to make it clear it's there as a lingua franca useful stub. At least then, no matter what English-only speakers think, your article will survive in an area that people who DO find him important will see. Saltation (talk) 22:07, 1 May 2008 (UTC)

New Project

Myself and several other editors have been compiling a list of very active editors who would likely be available to help new editors in the event they have questions or concerns. As the list grew and the table became more detailed, it was determined that the best way to complete the table was to ask each potential candidate to fill in their own information, if they so desire. This list is sorted geographically in order to provide a better estimate as to whether the listed editor is likely to be active.

If you consider yourself a very active Wikipedian who is willing to help newcomers, please either complete your information in the table or add your entry. If you do not want to be on the list, either remove your name or just disregard this message and your entry will be removed within 48 hours. The table can be found at User:Useight/Highly Active, as it has yet to have been moved into the Wikipedia namespace. Thank you for your help. Useight (talk) 17:52, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

SmackBot

I just wanted to leave a note of thanks for the good work that your bot is doing. :) --217.44.216.204 (talk) 10:36, 4 May 2008 (UTC)

In use

Can SmackBot be programmed not to edit articles that have the {{inuse}} template displayed please? Mjroots (talk) 11:15, 4 May 2008 (UTC)

It is... I just accidentally turned it off... Rich Farmbrough, 12:44 4 May 2008 (GMT).

Dead Links

It appears that SmackBot adds dates to {{dead link}} tags. I noticed a {{deadlink}} tag on 1980s oil glut, which did not have a date. Note no space in deadlink; I think there are a few other templates that redirect to {{dead link}}. If you look in Category:Articles_with_dead_external_links there are a few more articles that apparently have undated dead links for various reasons. Could you get SmackBot to fix them? (Also, I noticed that SmackBot's user page doesn't mention dating of dead links as one of its tasks.) —AlanBarrett 18:12, 4 May 2008 (UTC)

Yes. The reasons are varied, but in that case (which I was just looking at) it's because the dead link is in an Image descriptor. Rich Farmbrough, 19:16 4 May 2008 (GMT).

Thanks. —AlanBarrett 20:37, 4 May 2008 (UTC)

AWB

Since you run Smackbot using AWB, how do you run a script through it? I went through Tools -> External processing but I don't know what to put in "Working Directory" "input/output file" etc. Your help is appreciated. Milk’s Favorite Cookie ^(Talk) 14:00, 4 May 2008 (UTC)

Oooh! I hadn't seen that feature.... Fantastic! Rich Farmbrough, 14:07 4 May 2008 (GMT).

Uhh... right. Can you answer my question on how you run a script through AWB? Milk’s Favorite Cookie ^(Talk) 15:34, 4 May 2008 (UTC)

Template substitution

Thanks for your pointer. Cheers, ·:· Will Beback ·:· 11:34, 5 May 2008 (UTC)

New Message

Hello, Rich Farmbrough. You have new messages at Addshore's talk page.
You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{Talkback}} or {{Tb}} template.

·Add§hore· ^Talk/_Cont 12:11, 5 May 2008 (UTC)

Chukwuma

Hi Rich. I'm puzzled by your edit http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Charles_C._Soludo&diff=prev&oldid=210309567

• What does "Copyedit. BAh Humans." mean?
• The "diff" shows lots of edits with no apparent differences. Given that the edits which do have apparent differences are generally the removal of spaces, are the others also removal of spaces?
• Why are you removing the spaces?

Cheers, Pdfpdf (talk) 12:51, 5 May 2008 (UTC)

Someone had put a date of May 2003 instead of May 2008 in the fact tag. Rich Farmbrough, 12:53 5 May 2008 (GMT).

Had they put no date at all, a bot would have put the correct one. As it is I have to trawl through and fix these errors. No big deal really. Rich Farmbrough, 12:54 5 May 2008 (GMT).

Actually, I did put no date at all, the bot did put the correct one, then some "helpful" person changed it.

And why is it that you "have to trawl through and fix these errors"?

Because after each User:SmackBot run there are always exceptions, and I need to constantly be improving the code to take into account new templates, new syntax and new redirects, among other things. If I let the exceptions build up, even with "oh yes I know what that is" type exceptions, then a.) the articles won't be correctly date categorised, and b.) I won't be able to see where I need to improve SB's code to allow for the changes in WP, and of course general improvement to deal with user errors, sytntax mangling etc. Regards, Rich Farmbrough, 13:26 5 May 2008 (GMT).

I see. Good luck with it all then. Cheers, Pdfpdf (talk) 13:32, 5 May 2008 (UTC)

(P.S. I still don't know what "BAh Humans." means, nor why you're removing spaces ... Pdfpdf (talk) 13:32, 5 May 2008 (UTC))

Yes, but that's the one edit I wasn't asking about. :) Pdfpdf (talk) 12:57, 5 May 2008 (UTC)

Yes they are spaces, and just a general fix. Rich Farmbrough, 12:57 5 May 2008 (GMT).

And what does "BAh Humans." mean? Pdfpdf (talk) 13:01, 5 May 2008 (UTC)

And why remove the spaces? Pdfpdf (talk) 13:14, 5 May 2008 (UTC)

Smackbot

I was just wondering. Is the bot meant to do this? [23]. Changing one after another. I know they were a few days apart and i know there is a good reason if you added an extra thing for the bot to do. Also does your bot get the list of articles from recent changes or something, or is it a manually added list? If it is from recent changes how? :D ·Add§hore· ^Talk/_Cont 16:17, 4 May 2008 (UTC)

It gets them from categories. The particular template here is a new redirect, so it wasn't until I added it to the rules that it worked properly. Rich Farmbrough, 19:08 4 May 2008 (GMT).

Just a question - What the hell is going on with this? [24] I actually started putting the date on the fact templates because i saw your bot do it to one of my edits. So why is it undoing this work? Strange non? Sillyfolkboy (talk) 02:46, 5 May 2008 (UTC)

• Oh, just got it, i've been putting 2008-05-05 instead of May 2008 on the fact tags. Sillyfolkboy (talk) 14:46, 5 May 2008 (UTC)

First Partition

Please check the edits by the bot at First Partition. If is breaks the tag again, I'll shut it off.-- Matthead  Discuß   16:19, 5 May 2008 (UTC)

thanks for the note, fixed. Rich Farmbrough, 16:56 5 May 2008 (GMT).

SmackBot behavior

This edit doesn't seem quite right. Is it supposed to do this on archived pages? Foobaz·o< 00:12, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

Yes, because the page is already in Category:Articles with unsourced statements - so it needs dealing with. Rich Farmbrough, 10:17 2 May 2008 (GMT).

I think that should have been changed to <nowiki>{{citation needed}}</nowiki>, or {{template|citation needed}}. It was clearly intended to talk about the template, not invoke the template, so adding nowiki tags or using {{template}} seems right. Changing from "citation needed" to "Fact" seems wrong. Similarly, in another part of the same edit, adding a date and changing the capitalisation seems wrong. —AlanBarrett 07:23, 7 May 2008 (UTC)

ChatterBot

have you ever made a chatterbot? If so, what one?--I am a Wikipedian (talk) 01:27, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

No. Rich Farmbrough, 10:19 2 May 2008 (GMT).

Well yes... in about 1975 on a tele-type. Rich Farmbrough, 10:20 2 May 2008 (GMT).

Oh Ok thanks guess it wasn't you :)--I am a Wikipedian (talk) 22:35, 6 May 2008 (UTC)

BAh Humans?

Me again. What does "BAh Humans" mean please? Pdfpdf (talk) 12:16, 7 May 2008 (UTC)

"Bah Humans" was a joke at the way they (from SmackBot's point of view) keep getting the dates wrong or wrongly formatted. In addition to the rump of errors that I correct manually, SB corrects a whole slew of standard errors, from mis-spellings of "date" to wrongly formatted dates. Rich Farmbrough, 15:48 8 May 2008 (GMT).

Clarke County

What did Smackbot do on the Clarke County page? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Matteosartori (talk • contribs) 21:20, 7 May 2008 (UTC)

Which Clarke County? Look at the history an you will see. Rich Farmbrough, 15:50 8 May 2008 (GMT).

No content in Category:Accuracy disputes from December 2006

Hello, this is a message from an automated bot. A tag has been placed on Category:Accuracy disputes from December 2006, by another Wikipedia user, requesting that it be speedily deleted from Wikipedia. The tag claims that it should be speedily deleted because Category:Accuracy disputes from December 2006 has been empty for at least four days, and its only content has been links to parent categories. (CSD C1).

To contest the tagging and request that administrators wait before possibly deleting Category:Accuracy disputes from December 2006, please affix the template {{hangon}} to the page, and put a note on its talk page. If the article has already been deleted, see the advice and instructions at WP:WMD. Feel free to contact the bot operator if you have any questions about this or any problems with this bot, bearing in mind that this bot is only informing you of the nomination for speedy deletion; it does not perform any nominations or deletions itself. To see the user who deleted the page, click here CSDWarnBot (talk) 16:00, 9 May 2008 (UTC)

Speedied Rich Farmbrough, 17:03 9 May 2008 (GMT).

BLP problems continue

Howdy, could you take a look at DrDoRo again in the next few days? Her PR agent keeps removing tags and inserting nonsensical garbage along with its edits. Do you know anyone who specializes in such articles? It needs serious help, and the editor uses misleading edit summaries and does not respond to messages, making communication difficult. It seems easier in such situations if the "community" (at least more than one person) tries to talk sense into the editor. JackSchmidt (talk) 21:25, 9 May 2008 (UTC)

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Smackbot and {{lifetime}}

Hi - I noticed the bot was inappropriately removing {{lifetime}} to add in birth and date categories here - any particular reason for this? Bencherlite^Talk 08:13, 13 May 2008 (UTC)

It's an AWB general fix, don't know why it's considered a Good Thing. Rich Farmbrough, 11:10 13 May 2008 (GMT).

SmackBot

Apparently this edit was before the bug was fixed that caused this bot to treat superscripts that way. I fixed it a few minutes ago. Is there some automated way to identify other such cases that may be left over from that time? Michael Hardy (talk) 21:45, 13 May 2008 (UTC)

SmackBot

That Big Red Button is so tempting :) (just fealt like saying)--I am a Wikipedian (talk) 02:59, 14 May 2008 (UTC)

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WP:HAU has a new format

Due to popular demand, HAU has a new look. Since the changes are so dramatic, I may have made some mistakes when translating the data. Please take a look at WP:HAU/EU and make sure your checkmarks are in the right place and feel free to add or remove some. There is a new feature, SoxBot V, a recently approved bot, automatically updates your online/offline status based on the length of time since your last edit. To allow SoxBot V to do this, you'll need to copy [[Category:Wikipedians who use StatusBot]] to your userpage. Obviously you are not required to add this to your userpage, however, without this, your status will always be "offline" at HAU. Thanks. Useight (talk) 17:20, 17 May 2008 (UTC)

Smackbot on Thornbury Township, Chester County, Pennsylvania

Smackbot reverted some minor copy edit and clarifications I made on Thornbury Township, Chester County, Pennsylvania. Before I revert them, can you take a look and see what the problem was? Thanks. Daddy.twins (talk) 13:03, 20 May 2008 (UTC)

Hm, no you reverted yourself. Rich Farmbrough, 13:08 20 May 2008 (GMT).

Well, now that I'm looking at 'my contribs', I can see that you're absolutely correct. Don't know how I fat-fingered that. My bad. Thanks for pointing that out. Daddy.twins (talk) 13:14, 20 May 2008 (UTC)

Got it. I was recently granted rollback privs. This edit was the first time I saw the rollback feature on a history page, and I must have clicked on it out of curiousity. I understand now that it reverted all my sequential changes back to the last change made by a user other than myself. Sometimes you have to learn the hard way (or knuckleheaded way). Daddy.twins (talk) 13:19, 20 May 2008 (UTC)

SmackBot

your smackbot is screwing up scientific references, e.g. illudens or irofulven, keeps citing one of my older publications which is not pertinent. mkelner (at) ucsd.edu —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.85.186.139 (talk) 06:32, 23 May 2008 (UTC)

Oh... where to start?

1. Who are you? How do I/we contact you to discuss this?
2. SB doesn't add references, merely makes those visible that are invisible.
3. YOur co-author doesn' t seem to agree (Kelner)
4. This was 8th April that's "was" not "is" a long time ago in WP years.

Rich Farmbrough, 09:41 23 May 2008 (GMT).

The reference in question was added by Mjkelner (talk · contribs). Why do you feel it is not pertinent to the article? Would you like to have it removed? (copied to Talk page of above IP) Fvasconcellos (t·c) 14:03, 23 May 2008 (UTC)

Requrements for Friendly AI

Hi Rich. I noticed it was you who added the requirements for friendly AI here. Would you please explain further how the first-mover advantage fits in the context? Thanks, Waldir ^talk 17:22, 26 May 2008 (UTC)

You are now ranked the second in WP:EDITS: User:Bearcat has surpassed you!!!

Now you are the runner-up as the most-edited Wikipedian in the English Wikipedia! Any comments and piece of advice for your successor? 60.50.8.38 (talk) 14:15, 28 May 2008 (UTC)

Yes, hardly anyone notices. Rich Farmbrough, 19:08 28 May 2008 (GMT).

Kevin Kinsella

Just wondering; why did you do this? - CobaltBlueTony™ _talk 19:54, 28 May 2008 (UTC)

And many MANY more reverts to Smackbot, most of which seem unhelpful? Paulbrock (talk) 20:12, 28 May 2008 (UTC)

I think it was done because smack bot was putting in the wrong month,"February 2008".R00m c (talk) 20:25, 28 May 2008 (UTC)

Bah, it's just the old "the bot has a bug, so I need to revert" trick to regain first place in edit count. JackSchmidt (talk) 20:43, 28 May 2008 (UTC)

Laughs... 130 reverts... SB has a backlog of 17000 thank goodness I spotted it early or Jack would be right. And my Carpel Tunnel would get bad again. Rich Farmbrough, 21:20 28 May 2008 (GMT).

Due to (temporarily) reverting to an old version SB was dating tags Feb instead of May. I didn't spot this immediately becasue the first few (which I generally do manually) were fixups of bad capitalisation ("may" -> "May"). Rich Farmbrough, 21:20 28 May 2008 (GMT).

D'oh! TOTALLY missed that it was putting Feb rather than May! Keep up the good work! Paulbrock (talk) 00:54, 29 May 2008 (UTC)

PixelPoint

any reason you reverted the bot, I thought maintenance tags needed dating. _{TravellingCari}^{the Busy Bee} 20:31, 28 May 2008 (UTC)

Never mind, I see this above _{TravellingCari}^{the Busy Bee} 20:32, 28 May 2008 (UTC)

Smackbot down?

Smackbot hasn't been adding date tags to {{deadend}} (well, making any edits at all) for a while. Is this temporary, or is a request for a new bot needed?

Thanks for all your past work. I see you'll be offline a lot -- hope all is well.--Fabrictramp | talk to me 19:36, 26 May 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for the reply. No hurry at all, real life always comes first. My thoughts are with you.--Fabrictramp | talk to me 19:47, 26 May 2008 (UTC)

Thanks again for getting Smackbot back up! The work it does is appreciated, wrong month and all. :)--Fabrictramp | talk to me 22:10, 30 May 2008 (UTC)

Bot approved: dabbing help needed

Hi there. Fritz bot has been approved at Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/FritzpollBot for filling in a possible 1.8 million articles on settlements across the world. Now dabbing needs to be done for links which aren't sorted as the bot will bypass any blue links. and I need as many people as possible to help me with Wikipedia:WikiProject Missing encyclopedic articles/Places to prepare for the bot. If you could tackle a page or two everything counts as it will be hard to do it alone. PLease also pass on the message to anybody else who you may think might be willing to help. Thankyou ♦Blofeld of SPECTRE♦ ^$1,000,000? 12:23, 30 May 2008 (UTC)

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undated {{orphan}} backlog

Hi, It's not a lot yet, but there are 100+ articles in CAT:ORPHAN with undated orphan tags. As far as I know, SmackBot has always kept pretty current on that. Is the bot running behind?--Aervanath's signature is boring 09:42, 31 May 2008 (UTC)

Yes it did a big catchup. Rich Farmbrough, 21:18 31 May 2008 (GMT).

Sweet. I'd hate to go through and date all those myself. :) --Aervanath's signature is boring 09:37, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

Minor SmackBot nit

Minor capitalization changes like this seem like they add unnecessary 'churn' to Recent changes etc.--maybe there's a way to make it less picky about whether the first letter of maintenance tags is capitalized or not? Other than that, you perform a great service with the bot. Shawisland (talk) 07:55, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

I'm using an older version of the software, due to a machine failure. The {{internallinks}} should have been picked up. The most receent version should be recovered RSN, and this will happen a lot less. Rich Farmbrough, 10:54 1 June 2008 (GMT).

Notability of Once Nothing band

Right here. http://solidstaterecords.com/artist_bio.php?id=297 —Preceding unsigned comment added by Sector311 (talk • contribs) 13:47, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

Capital

If all that is "wrong" with a template entry is the first letter is in lower case (as here with unreferenced) please don't "fix" it. --Philip Baird Shearer (talk) 13:59, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

See above, pretty much a rare event for various reasons. Rich Farmbrough, 08:45 3 June 2008 (GMT).

Cyrillic accented-i

pretty clever bot, fella, useful stuff!

however, please see this change here: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bulgarian_language&diff=216614260&oldid=216480357

Please ask your bot not to revert it to the way it was before (which is did several days ago) - as non-unicode-compatible computers can't read the symbol it substitutes.

Thanx, and keep up the good work! 62.176.111.68 (talk) 12:57, 2 June 2008 (UTC)

Hi, thanks for your message, SmackBot makes a number of changes that are available to all WP:AWB bots - in general these provide a number of non-controversial minor improvements. The issue you raise is related to these, I have left, or will leave, a message about your concerns on the WP:AWB pages. Regards, Rich Farmbrough, 13:09 3 June 2008 (GMT).

Thank you :-)62.176.111.68 (talk) —Preceding comment was added at 13:13, 3 June 2008 (UTC)

WP:HAU

Hello yet again. I regretfully inform you that the bot we were using to update the user status at Wikipedia:Highly Active Users, SoxBot V, was blocked for its constant updating. With this bot out of operation, a patch is in the works. Until that patch is reviewed and accepted by the developers, some options have been presented to use as workarounds: 1) Qui monobook (not available in Internet Explorer); 2) User:Hersfold/StatusTemplate; 3) Manually updating User:StatusBot/Status/USERNAME; or 4) Not worry about it and wait for the patch to go through, which hopefully won't take long. If you have another method, you can use that, too. If you have any questions, feel free to contact me. Useight (talk) 22:25, 3 June 2008 (UTC)

Invalid date

If you can, have a look at Drainage in New Orleans, it shouldn't be in the category, but I don't have time to figure out why it is. Thanks. Rich Farmbrough, 10:23 4 June 2008 (GMT).

Hmm looks like cats aren't gettign updated properly either, but... Rich Farmbrough, 10:33 4 June 2008 (GMT).

That was a weird bug in {{unreferencedsection}} that caused it. I've fixed it now. Harryboyles 13:04, 4 June 2008 (UTC)

Japanese alias & ARC

I have edited that Japanese alias article, split the 'how-to' stuff into a non-WP article, and put the Alien registration cardinfo into a separate WP article. I have applied for a peer review. If you would like to contribute to either article, please do so. If you need to discuss the article, pleased do it on the article discussion page, and not my talk page. Thanks.--Mak Allen (talk) 02:45, 5 June 2008 (UTC)

TfD nomination of Template:Ongoing event

Template:Ongoing event 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. — Yellowdesk (talk) 03:20, 5 June 2008 (UTC)

Cats

Thank you for explaining! Now I will know should I ever be the one to create the montly category again. ♦Tangerines♦·Talk 13:38, 5 June 2008 (UTC)

strange edit

Hi, Rich. Strange edit by the bot [25]. Please check. Other edits appear to be good Alex Bakharev (talk) 11:55, 6 June 2008 (UTC)

Thanks, I was forced to revert to an old version of the software, which re-introduced this bug, but it should be fixed now. Rich Farmbrough, 18:08 6 June 2008 (GMT).

Smackbot error

In the article Yotare Minami-no-wari, Aza-take-no-gō, Ōaza-tobishima-shinden, Tobishima-mura, Ama-gun, Aichi-ken, Smackbot replaced {{Disputed_title}} with {{Disputed title$2 in a revision as of 22:41, 12 March 2008. Another user corrected that on 21:14, 23 May 2008, but Smackbot made the same edit again in a revision as of 11:17, 6 June 2008. I have corrected it and added a date tag, so this particular article shouldn't be affected again. -- Zyxw (talk) 15:51, 6 June 2008 (UTC)

Thanks, I was forced to revert to an old version of the software, which re-introduced this bug, but it should be fixed now. Rich Farmbrough, 18:08 6 June 2008 (GMT).

Changing City, State to City, State

In the vast majority of cases, such as in articles like this, only the city is relevant to the article. The state is included only in order to fully qualify the city name; the state is irrelevant to the context of the article and ought not be linked separately. So, changing City, State to City, State only complicates the markup in source and creates over-linking. —Centrx→talk • 21:16, 7 June 2008 (UTC)

Unhelpful smackbot edit

This edit doesn't seem helpful enough to warrant cluttering the article history with it. Is there some threshold below which smackbot realizes it could make an edit, but chooses not to do so? (sdsds - talk) 03:11, 8 June 2008 (UTC)

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Add split templates to your "Date the maintenance tags"

Can you add the four split templates ({{Split}} {{Split-apart}} {{Splitsection}} {{Splitsections}}) to the list of templates to which you add the date? -- Alan Liefting (talk) - 10:14, 8 June 2008 (UTC)

archival

I left a message here but it was archived before you replied to it. I just want to make sure you don't loose track of it (in case you were thinking of replying to it -- if not please let me know). The message is now located at User talk:Rich Farmbrough/Archive/2008May#Requrements for Friendly AI. Cheers, Waldir ^talk 13:32, 8 June 2008 (UTC)

Thanks! I tried to reword it a bit and add that to the article, feel free to fix any detail I might have got wrong. Cheers, Waldir ^talk 23:09, 8 June 2008 (UTC)

Tags on Samrat Hem Chandra Vikramaditya

Hi ! On the above page Tag on neutrality and POV has been put again. Page has only well researched and verifiable information, with all the citations and references. Still, some editors raise issues and create controversies. The administrators or editors are doing nothing to preserve the quality of the page. An action from your side is anticipated. Please respond!

--Sudhirbhargava (talk) 11:01, 9 June 2008 (UTC) Samrat Hem Chandra Vikramaditya

Category:All articles with unsourced statements

Do you have any idea what changed to make this jump from 40,000+ articles to 110,000+ articles? I can't figure out where they came from.--BirgitteSB 16:32, 9 June 2008 (UTC)

No it's nor obvious. I looked at a small sample, maybe examining a few more will show a new template has the cat? Rich Farmbrough, 20:10 9 June 2008 (GMT).

I looked through a bunch and only found {{fact}} and {{Citations missing}} which is what it always had been.--BirgitteSB 20:20, 9 June 2008 (UTC)

Also related changes is usseless without a namespace filter. I went through about a thouseand text searching for "Template" but I guess going through more like that is probably the best bet.--BirgitteSB 20:25, 9 June 2008 (UTC)

Nevermind I simply made mistake the last time I updated the list of totals. It wasn't 40,000 range anytime recently. Sorry.--BirgitteSB 21:39, 9 June 2008 (UTC)

SmackBot

Hi, could you check SmackBot's behavior in connection with the template {{Tracklist}}? It appears to remove the extra line breaks between individual tracks (note that the diff could take a little to load), which are there to keep the overall template maintainable, much like those between groups in navboxes. – Cyrus XIII ^(talk) 20:39, 9 June 2008 (UTC)

Hi, thanks for your message, SmackBot makes a number of changes that are available to all WP:AWB bots - in general these provide a number of non-controversial minor improvements. The issue you raise is related to these, I have left, or will leave, a message about your concerns on the WP:AWB pages. Regards, Rich Farmbrough, 21:13 9 June 2008 (GMT).

SmackBot

I believe that Army1987's last change was for headers, so I am surprised that SmackBot followed with a clean up date. You might reply on the talk page for Time in physics if you wish. --Ancheta Wis (talk) 00:26, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

There was a cleanup template: SB dated it... I don't see the suprise? Unless that SB has been a little slower than usual... Rich Farmbrough, 08:03 11 June 2008 (GMT).

Smackbot changing date in AFD templates?

It appears from this diff that the Smackbot is changing the date format on the AFD templates, now I've not noticed this before, and as the "wrong version" was generated by subst'ing the relevant template, I wasn't sure if this was in error, or if the syntax has changed recently and you're tidying up... -- Ratarsed (talk) 07:59, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

This is a bug, that may be fixed in more recent versions of SB. It is low impact, because the subst is generaly sdoen bfore SB comes along, but I will attempt to fix ASAP. Rich Farmbrough, 08:05 11 June 2008 (GMT).

SmackBot

Smackbot went through Fire captain twice in rapid succession, leaving a mangled mergeto tag behind. [26] [27] I'm hand-fixing what it did, just bringing this up as a bug report. Thanks! Jclemens (talk) 21:17, 11 June 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. There's a limit to the amount of stuff in the cleanup tag it can deal with. Rich Farmbrough, 22:18 11 June 2008 (GMT).

I have now fixed the fixed version... Rich Farmbrough, 22:22 11 June 2008 (GMT).

RfD

I forgot to notify you at the time, but (in an effort to help out another user) I nominated Scientific Mathod, a redirect that you created, at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2008 June 11‎. You may want to comment there. Deor (talk) 02:06, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

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SmackBot vs. Persondata/Lifetime

Hello! I'd like to ask again that SmackBot be corrected so that when it finds the sequence:

{{Persondata...}}
{{Lifetime...}}

It stop swapping their position, as happened in this case.

{{Lifetime}} is expected to go below {{Persondata}}, not above it. -- alexgieg (talk) 17:30, 17 June 2008 (UTC)

Smackbot changed census data

Keosauqua, IA got changed from 1,066 people, 467 households, and 270 familes to 5,2 and 2, in the demographics area. Bug? -- Vaevictus (talk) 00:11, 18 June 2008 (UTC)

No an anon IP. [28] Rich Farmbrough, 00:53 18 June 2008 (GMT).

Homelessness article

Hi Rich. As usual, the Homelessness article is getting creamed with vandalism especially from anonymous editors. It is a real chore to keep up with it. Any help ? Bests. -- (Bob) Wikiklrsc (talk) 22:30, 17 June 2008 (UTC)

SmackBot

This bot removes paragraph (<p>) tags from text that's marked off with blockquote (<blockquote>) tags. It should not do this. If a blockquote contains more than one paragraph, removing the paragraph tags will concatinate these paragraphs, even if they are separated in the source by line feeds. For instance, this bot's recent change to Lucky duckies had this effect, but I've seen this bot cause the same problem on other pages as well. -Moorlock (talk) 02:16, 18 June 2008 (UTC)

SmackBot

Silly null edit You might want to make SmackBot stop doing things like this; it seems pointless. Let me know if there's something I'm missing here. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 05:33, 22 June 2008 (UTC)

Yes. "Date=" won't work "date=" will. Rich Farmbrough, 14:35 22 June 2008 (GMT).

There you have it It might be a good idea to edit the template, then, no? Thanks for your response. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 21:02, 22 June 2008 (UTC)

Well there are thousands of templates with tens of thousands of arguments, a;beit SB only deals with a few hundred. Should they all be edited? And SmackBot also corrects DATE, dAte, Dat, fate, dare etc. etc., fixes things like June2008, and a host of other typos, some of which are not amenable to template solutions. Rich Farmbrough, 23:37 22 June 2008 (GMT).

Smackbot stub tag and uncategorized tag behaviour

In this diff of Snake dentition, SmackBot removed the stub template from an article. Why did it do this? Is there some critical size of page beyond which it will remove stub tags? Also, in this diff of Democratic Center Party, SmackBot changed {{uncategorized}} to {{uncategorizedstub}} when the article was already in a stub category (but not a normal category). Why did it do this? Is this correct? Rhebus (talk) 12:07, 23 June 2008 (UTC)

Yes there is some point, it is an AWB general fix of the platform SB uses. Uncategorized stubs are stubs that are not in categories, apart from stub categories, so yes this is correct. Rich Farmbrough, 21:30 24 June 2008 (GMT).

Date error

[29]. Might indicate a more general problem of using templates within templates. Does your bot just look for the next }} and put the date in front of it? --- RockMFR 18:39, 25 June 2008 (UTC)

Um not exactly. It knows which parameters are allowed for a given template. But there are various sophisications, some of which have been lost until I recover a certain machine. Rich Farmbrough, 22:10 25 June 2008 (GMT).

{{fact}} to {{Fact}}

Hello there. Unless there's a nuance I'm missing, this edit, where the already-dated {{fact|date=June 2008}} becomes {{Fact|date=June 2008}}, seems a bit on the redundant side. --McGeddon (talk) 23:10, 25 June 2008 (UTC)

You are right, an normally this wouldn't happen (See FAQ). SB is trying to fix {{Fact|date=June 200}} and failing. The canonicalisation of the templates is not easy to separate from the attempt, however, and SB has a high success rate with Category:Articles with invalid date parameter in template. Rich Farmbrough, 08:35 26 June 2008 (GMT).

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SmackBot

Hello! It's the 3rd time (I think) I report this bug. As you can see in this diff, SmackBot takes {{Lifetime}} and places it above {{Persondata}}. This SHOULD NOT happen. "Lifetime" (and its redirects) are shorthands for "DEFAULTSORT" followed by two categories. Thus, it should always go below "Persondata".

Can you please fix SmackBot to avoid this behavior? Or if not, at least explain why not? -- alexgieg (talk) 14:22, 27 June 2008 (UTC)

It's a problem not as far as the system is concerned, but because it disrupts the easy understanding of the end-page contents for those editing. "Lifetime" being placed right before the categories, as part of them, makes it intuitive. It being way above, separated from them by who knows which unrelated content, makes things harder to understand and follow. Not to mention that SmackBot, in moving it up (or Persondata down, I don't know), also separates the Persondata template from the comment preceding it. See these two examples:

• A. Before SmackBot:

<!-- Metadata: see [[Wikipedia:Persondata]] -->
{{Persondata
|NAME              = Macnab, Angus
|ALTERNATIVE NAMES = 
|SHORT DESCRIPTION = Writer and historian on Medieval Spain
|DATE OF BIRTH     = 1906
|PLACE OF BIRTH    = [[London]], [[United Kingdom]]
|DATE OF DEATH     = 1977
|PLACE OF DEATH    = [[Madrid]], [[Spain]]
}}

{{Lifetime|1906|1977|Macnab, Angus}}
[[Category:Study of religion]]
[[Category:British medievalists]]
[[Category:Traditionalism]]

[[pt:Angus Macnab]]

• B. After SmackBot:

<!-- Metadata: see [[Wikipedia:Persondata]] -->

{{Lifetime|1906|1977|Macnab, Angus}}

{{Persondata
|NAME              = Macnab, Angus
|ALTERNATIVE NAMES = 
|SHORT DESCRIPTION = Writer and historian on Medieval Spain
|DATE OF BIRTH     = 1906
|PLACE OF BIRTH    = [[London]], [[United Kingdom]]
|DATE OF DEATH     = 1977
|PLACE OF DEATH    = [[Madrid]], [[Spain]]
}}
[[Category:Study of religion]]
[[Category:British medievalists]]
[[Category:Traditionalism]]

[[pt:Angus Macnab]]

Which one is easier to follow when editing? IMHO, it's clearly A. -- alexgieg (talk) 15:28, 27 June 2008 (UTC)

Thanks! -- alexgieg (talk) 16:58, 27 June 2008 (UTC)

General SmackBot praise: Great general-purpose utility. Thanks for the contribution! E^robson (T^alk) 03:35, 28 June 2008 (UTC)

Date sorting of the split tags

Can you get SmackBot onto date sorting of the {{split}} tags? Cheers. -- Alan Liefting (talk) - 03:58, 28 June 2008 (UTC)

stub template removed from A Few Good Men

SmackBot erroneously removed {{1980s-play-stub}} from A Few Good Men. Perhaps it is not smart enough to be able to tell that an article about a play and its film adaptation could be a stub in one case but not the other. 67.100.127.220 (talk) 03:50, 30 June 2008 (UTC).

SmackBot

Hi -I think citation is needed for 'Allegation'section of Christmas Humphreys page. Secretly taped conversation between Andre McCallum and Christmas Humphreys appears in RUTH ELLIS MY SISTER'S SECRET LIFE. Perhaps this info could be uplifted please. Thanks.Charlton1 (talk) 18:18, 1 July 2008 (UTC)

MTBEbot

As you are the creator of SmackBot I was wondering if you could help me with this idea. I am willing to be responsible for running and maintaining it if you could help me with the first round of coding (I am an old semi-retired programmer but I have never created any WP software or bots before).

I am exploring the feasability of creating functionality similar to what I described here. The heart of this idea is to create a fair and objective way to determine what is "a reasonable amount of time for a response". For purposes of discussion (these numbers may change) I am assuming 3 days is reasonable but I am also assuming that many editors are not on Wikipedia every single day. My solution is to try and determine how often an article is editted (ie: Mean Time Between Edits) and give 3x that number (max=30) days suggested waiting period for a response. This would be advisory only and would not alter policy in any way.

My first thought was to make this a function that the template parser would handle (like the PROD template does) but now I am wondering if this could be implemented into a bot similar to SmackBot.

I see two options.

OPTION 1:

Have MTBEbot add more parameters to certain templates. Example, SmackBot currently changes

{{notability}} to {{notability|date=June 2008}}. What I propose is that MTBEbot would change it to:

• {{notability|date=June 2008|timestamp=20080630235959|MTBE=3,9|RTR=23:59, 8 July 2008}}

  or perhaps more simply just:

• {{notability|date=June 2008|MTBE=9,20080708}}

OPTION 2:

Have MTBEbot create a new section using a template in the talkpage which would include the above parameters and also the last 50-100 characters prior to the tag. I think it would look something like:

---

{{MTBEtag|fact|"...ew York City Mayor declared that he enjoyed meeting [[Marylin Monroe|Miss Monroe]] very much and looked forward to doing it with her next year."|timestamp=20080630235959|MTBE=3,9|RTR=23:59, 8 July 2008}}

---

This would of course be expanded into a meaningful message.

While I actually like this better I am not sure if this can be done ... can a WP bot pull data from a relative byte position within the article text?

Obviously the hardest part is calculating MTBE by analyzing the edit history. That is why I suggest a separate bot since it probably would run slower than SmackBot.

If you think such functionality could be developed I would pursue getting templates authorized for modification to take advantage of such parameters. These modified templates would then leave a small text comment at the bottom of the template saying something like:

"Analysis of the edit history of this page suggests a reasonable time to wait for a response on this tag would be 9 days, which would be sometime after 8 July 2008."

What do you think? Low Sea (talk) 18:30, 1 July 2008 (UTC)

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SmackBot's shutoff button

I'm thinking it needs to be a tad bigger. I can barely see it. ;) Rockfang (talk) 19:25, 6 July 2008 (UTC)

SmackBot

Bug

See this diff, where the bot incorrectly makes a substitution that afouls the template (see the rendered template). /Blaxthos ( t / c ) 04:13, 8 July 2008 (UTC)

WP:HAU, Status, and you!

As you may know, the StatusBot responsible for maintaining the status of the Highly Active Users was taken offline. We now have a replacement in the Qui status system. This semi-automatic system will allow you to easily update your status page found at Special:Mypage/Status which the HAU page code is now designed to read from. If you are already using Qui (or a compatible system) - great! - no action is needed (other than remembering to update your status as necessary). If not, consider installing Qui. You can also manually update this status by changing the page text to online, offline, or busy. While it is not mandatory, the nature of HAU is that people are often seeking a quick answer from someone who is online and keeping our statuses up-to-date will assist with this. Note if you were previously using your /Status page as something other than a one-word status indicator, your HAU entry may have been set to "status=n" to correct display issues. Please clear this parameter if you change things to be "HAU compatible". Further questions can be raised at WT:HAU. This message was delivered by xenobot 23:09, 8 July 2008 (UTC)

SmackBot - caps in templates

Is this really a change worth making? —  Tivedshambo  _(t/c) 22:43, 12 July 2008 (UTC)

No. See FAQ.Rich Farmbrough, 21:08 13 July 2008 (GMT).

SmackBot

Since there's no actual change happening, can it be worth the bot's time and effort expenditure to just convert a lowercase to a capitalized template as here? — pd_THOR ^{| =/\=} | 03:40, 13 July 2008 (UTC)

No. See FAQ.Rich Farmbrough, 21:09 13 July 2008 (GMT).

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SmackBot capitalizing and adding "date=" to fact tags

Edits like this seem completely unnecessary. Am I wrong? II | (t - c) 07:26, 15 July 2008 (UTC)

Yes, the date parameter needs to be there explicitly named so that article is in the hidden category Category:Articles with unsourced statements since July 2008. Rich Farmbrough, 09:51 15 July 2008 (GMT).

Very minor smackbot bug

I just reverted smackbot, which got confused at Skolem's paradox and deleted the name of a journal (possibly because some other editor did something odd with the references). R.e.b. (talk) 03:12, 18 July 2008 (UTC)

AWB recognise the [[en: link and moves it to the end with the others. Rich Farmbrough, 11:56 18 July 2008 (GMT).

Dating the split tags.

Any chance of adding the date parameter to the four {{split}} tags? Cheers. -- Alan Liefting (talk) - 23:28, 19 July 2008 (UTC)

(this was done at some point Rich Farmbrough, 14:54, 12 October 2010 (UTC).
)

Minor SmackBot issue

Thought I should mention that SmackBot recently made an edit at Year 2038 problem in which it removed the underscore in "<code>[[time_t]]</code>" (changing time_t to time t). I fixed the edit and added the pipe trick, will this prevent any more SmackBot edits or is there another way to stop it? ^TH1RT3EN _{talk ♦ contribs} 03:29, 20 July 2008 (UTC)

This is an old (WP:AWB) problem affecting links to things like mod_perl. I forget the solution I proposed, but I think there was a whitelist created. Rich Farmbrough, 10:50 20 July 2008 (GMT).

Tone

Smackbot seems to have placed an "inappropriate tone" label on this page which I think is not correct. I edited it out but it's still appearing there. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academy_of_arms

No it didn't. Article fixed. Message left. Rich Farmbrough, 22:02 3 April 2008 (GMT).

Needs archiving. Rich Farmbrough, 08:46 27 June 2008 (GMT).

Pandemic

Here's the the link for original article on where the rumor started that Pandemic is developing the Dark Knight game.

Rumor: Pandemic to Develop New Batman Game by Matt Casamassina May 17, 2007 http://ps3.ign.com/articles/789/789648p1.html

I'm just signed up for Wikipedia and wasn't exactly sure how the editing process worked. —Preceding unsigned comment added by AzBat360 (talk • contribs) 05:14, 4 April 2008 Needs archiving. Rich Farmbrough, 08:46 27 June 2008 (GMT).

sources for Tenth Army page

I hope I am doing this correctly. I have no experience doing stuff with wikipedia.

Rich, I see that in 2005, you were one of the first people associated with the wikipedia entry on the Italian 10th army (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_Tenth_Army). I am trying to find out what sources the article in question was drawn from.

thanks,

Tom (gionpeters@comcast.net)

Answered out of band. Rich Farmbrough, 12:28 8 June 2008 (GMT).

WikiProject:Software

Hello Rich Farmbrough. You have been invited to join WikiProject Software, a WikiProject dedicated to improving the Software-related articles on Wikipedia. You received this invitation due to your interest in, or edits relating to or within the scope of the project. If you would like to join or just help out a bit, please visit the project page, and add your name to the list of project members. You may also wish to add {{User WikiProject Software}} to your userpage and {{Wikipedia:WikiProject Software/Announcement-u}} to the top of your talk page with the heading ==WikiProject Software Announcement==. If you know someone who might be interested, please pass this message onto others by pasting this code into their talk page {{Software invite|~~~~}} with the following heading == WikiProject Software ==. Thanks, Tyw7, Leading Innovations ‍ ‍‍ (Talk ● Contributions) 11:38, 16 August 2008 (UTC)

Archive please: Rich Farmbrough, 08:51 27 June 2008 (GMT).

farkhonda hassan, my grandmother

hi there, my name is omar abdel ghaffar khalifa, and i'm the grandson of dr. farkhonda hassan, i may have useful information on her personal life, photos, experience, anything you need. my email is okhalifa@aucegypt.edu. feel free to contact me anytime.

best regards,

Omar Khalifa

Archive pleaseRich Farmbrough, 16:53 28 July 2008 (GMT).

Lazs AREN'T KARTVEL/GEORGIAN

"Some Laz living in Turkey do not accept the umbrella term "Kartvelian" no no no Anybody Lazs dont accept that fascist 'Kartveli' term.Stop vandalism and all Kartvelist attacks.Lazs arent Georgian.All Lazs living in Turkey believe that reality.In some Laz living Georgia believe.But not important.Because Kartvelism, Kartveli languages and Lazs and other Georgians what is this ? Are you insane ?Lazs arent Georgian.Lazs are a Caucasic claim in Georgia-Turkey.I'm a Laz(Ma Lazi vore-Me Lazi var) but im not brother of Kartvelians/Georgians.Lazs are brother claim of Mingrelian nation.And Lazs are cousin of Georgians.

In Georgia, The number of Mingrelian speakers is declining, and most Mingrelian speakers positively identify themselves as "Georgian" (Kartveli).There are no Mingrelian language schools, books, or newspapers, although there were periodic attempts at establishing Mingrelian as a literary language in the late czarist and early Soviet periods.The assimilation of Mingrelians by the Georgians, which accelerated in the nineteenth century under the impact of modernization, was completed after the Soviet annexation and MİSHA's Georgia's...

And i didnt see Georgian Catholic Laz :) This is stupidly lie. Yes a small minority(in Sakartvelo) Lazs are Orthodox Predominantly Lazs are Muslim.Not Catholic.

We know they.Stop "Georgianization" ATTACKS.Thats way please open Laz people page.And i shall change that falsesMy documents from MINORITYRIGHTS.COM gropus.Please we(Lazs) believe and much want.TuTastemre LAZ

SmackBot and Template:Tracklist again

Hi, did you get a chance yet to bring up SmackBot's removal of linebreaks in the {{tracklist}} template? It still appears to be an issue. – Cyrus XIII ^(talk) 08:36, 18 July 2008 (UTC)

Yes at http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia_talk:AutoWikiBrowser/Bugs&diff=prev&oldid=208996804 Rich Farmbrough, 20:55 18 July 2008 (GMT).

Ok, I'll follow up on that one. Just to be clear, SmackBot itself relies on (the current version of) AWB? – Cyrus XIII ^(talk) 15:10, 20 July 2008 (UTC)

Yes indeed, AWB is the platform. Rich Farmbrough, 16:40 20 July 2008 (GMT).

Template:Footballer George Best

I just saw this template. I assume you forgot about it, what to do with it? Garion96 (talk) 21:46, 23 July 2008 (UTC)

Moved. Rich Farmbrough, 16:54 28 July 2008 (GMT).

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neologism comment at Social Information Processing

Hi Rich,

You (or your bot) left a neologism note at Social_Information_Processing, a page that I recently developed. Would you tell me the next step. Am I supposed to defend the term in some forum? If I don't is the page going to be deleted? I'm confused about what happens next.

Thanks.

-- RussAbbott (talk) 19:38, 28 July 2008 (UTC)

P.S. Looking for other possible acceptable neologisms, I just checked today's Main page. It includes a pointer to History of Solidarity. Isn't that a neologism? It certainly isn't the name of a defined entity. It's simply a descriptive phrase that refers to the history of the Solidarity movement. My term, Social Information Processing, although fairly new, is the name of an actual conference sponsored by a respected organization (AAAI) and held at a respected University (Stanford). It also appears in the title of a paper published in a respected journal (IEEE Internet Computing). This is an important field for which there is no other name. As it turns out, I have the time to devote to creating a page about the field. I hope that Wikipedia will be willing to accommodate it. -- RussAbbott (talk) 19:57, 28 July 2008 (UTC)

Hi again, Rich,

I'm not sure how to proceed. You neologism marker on the Social Information Processing page will discourage people from contributing. So I'm going to remove it. My response is in the P.S. above. Let me know what else we should do about this if anything.

If yuo want to continue this discussion, I'd appreciate it if you would continue it on Talk:Social Information Processing. Thanks -- RussAbbott (talk) 03:03, 30 July 2008 (UTC)

RPA (Rubin Postaer and Associates) article

Hi Rich,

I work for RPA (Rubin Postaer and Associates,) and I noticed that you revised the agency's article. I'm hoping you can provide some guidance on how to best edit our profile in order to remove the "The tone or style of this article or section may not be appropriate for Wikipedia" message. I'm keen to understand how to make the entry more encyclopedic and where to address inappropriate tone.

Thank you, Britt McColl Bdainorpa (talk) 20:30, 28 July 2008 (UTC)

How can I upload images?

Hi, I need to upload to some of the articles I started, but still I cannot do that? Could you tell me why and how can I do that please? Dhammika98 (talk) 12:09, 28 July 2008 (UTC)

What happens when you click "upload file" ?Rich Farmbrough, 17:03 28 July 2008 (GMT).

Your bot sucks. It keeps trying to say articles are similar when in fact they are very different. Fix it. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.209.52.69 (talk) 07:00, 2 August 2008 (UTC)

Link added

Greetings. As per your 2006 request (in the talk page about today's total solar eclipse), I have added a link to the definition of central eclipse in the article. CielProfond (talk) 07:41, 1 August 2008 (UTC)

Invitation to Wikipedia meetup in London

Wikimedia UK logo

Date: 13:00 onwards, Sunday 10 August 2008

Venue: Penderel's Oak pub, Holborn WC1 map

More information: Wikipedia:Meetup/London 12

Hello,

I noticed that you have listed yourself as a Wikipedian in London, so I thought you might like to come to one of our monthly social meetups. The next one is going to be on Sunday 10 August, which might well be rather short notice, but if you can't come this time, we try to have one every second Sunday of the month.

If you haven't been before, these meetups are mainly casual social events for Wikipedia enthusiasts in which we chat about Wikipedia and any other topics we fancy. It's a great way to meet some very keen Wikipedians, but we'd also love for you to come along if you're interested in finding out more about Wikipedia, other Wikimedia projects, or other collaborative wiki projects too.

The location is a pub that is quite quiet and family friendly on a Sunday lunchtime, so hopefully younger Wikipedians will also feel welcome and safe. Alcohol consumption is certainly not required!

Although the meetups are popular, many UK-based editors still don't know about them. It would be great to welcome some fresh faces, so I hope you can come along.

Yours,

James F. (talk) 09:27, 3 August 2008 (UTC)

Please forgive the slightly impersonal mass-invite!

Brian Fox: Biography and other info...

I'm trying to understand the criteria for removing biographical information. For example, why is the biographical information for one open source advocate and programmer relevant, while the biographical information for another is not?

Brianjfox (talk) 14:08, 8 August 2008 (UTC)

There are some guidelines for notability, but you have to be a little more explicit. Rich Farmbrough, 03:39 9 August 2008 (GMT).

about the things you said about my talk page

Which are article are you referring to? --Ramu50 (talk) 18:31, 9 August 2008 (UTC)

Error edit with SmackBot: VC template detection

Diff 2Aug08 Bot detected Template:VCT as a Verify Credibility template instance. 75.132.192.205 (talk) 02:34, 10 August 2008 (UTC)

Thanks, fixed. Rich Farmbrough, 11:20 10 August 2008 (GMT).

SmackBot

You're bot is undoing my hard work (here) over and over again. When I write an article, I format it properly. What I have done is set it like: [[Human|Humans]] to display the word "Humans" while linking to the article "Human." It continuously reverts my edits to format it as such: [[Human]]s. The result is a half-hyperlinked word. CindyAbout/T/P/C/ 02:28, 11 August 2008 (UTC)

Humans - Humans they both display and link the same way. Rich Farmbrough, 02:42 11 August 2008 (GMT).

Also SB has only edited that article once, not "over and over" . Rich Farmbrough, 02:47 11 August 2008 (GMT).

Another thing that stayed to long

Added something to your list. Cheers, Face 08:12, 11 August 2008 (UTC)

Paleo article

Hi Rich. Is this article, namely Paleo, a self-advert ? Bests. --- (Bob) Wikiklrsc (talk) 23:16, 8 August 2008 (UTC)

probably.Rich Farmbrough, 21:08 10 August 2008 (GMT).

Thanks, Rich, for your help. Trust you're having a brilliant summer. Cheers. -- (Bob) Wikiklrsc (talk) 22:44, 11 August 2008 (UTC)

A proposal

At Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical)#Change_DATE_from_monthname_year_to_year-month a proposal is raised to change the DATE template. It will may affect the working of your bot. Is the proposal a way to go? Nsaa (talk) 20:12, 11 August 2008 (UTC)

SmackBot

Re: [30]: Why does the bot move the stub tag below the language links? The stub tag is temporary and is most relevant to the text of the article, and should not be lost below other meta-information. I would prefer it to go right below the text, otherwise it fails some of its purpose, but regardless above the category tags is normal. Could you set the bot not to move stub tags? —Centrx→talk • 16:11, 10 August 2008 (UTC)

It doesn't, it puts it after the cats and before the langs. After the cats because the stub category is less important from a readers perspective than the real cats. Rich Farmbrough, 21:02 10 August 2008 (GMT).

Sorry, that is what I meant: The stub tag is relevant to the text and belongs near it. The tag might even be best above any "External links" or "Reference" section. Unfortunately, the category is mixed up with the text of the tag; and, in general, people are wrongly going so far as to alphabetize category links rather than order them by relevance. —Centrx→talk • 23:44, 12 August 2008 (UTC)

There have been extensive discussions on all these matters. There is sense in "all maint tags the the end" or "all maint tags the the top" or even "all maint tags the the talk page". However the status quo is as described, except for the alphabetisation of cats which I had not heard of. Rich Farmbrough, 01:09 13 August 2008 (GMT).

What happened to what I wrote?

Do you have any involvement with "Orval Hobart Mowrer"? If so, can you tell me what the unverified content is? ```` —Preceding unsigned comment added by Rose bartram (talk • contribs) 20:52, 12 August 2008 (UTC)

No none. Rich Farmbrough, 01:02 13 August 2008 (GMT).

Is SmackBot's calendar confused?

I saw several SmackBot edits today that are using May for the current month instead of August.[31][32][33] [34]   — Chris Capoccia ^T⁄_C 07:30, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

Here's another one [35] Edgepedia (talk) 08:22, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

Came here to say the same thing. Seems the bot is broken. Or, perhaps just confused. —Slipgrid (talk) 12:27, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

Yes.. I recovered the hard drive with the "latest" SB code yesterday, and forgot to change the month. Realised when I woke up this morning! Thanks. Rich Farmbrough, 13:23 13 August 2008 (GMT).

Constructive editing? (Smackbot)

Surely this is pointless? Clutters the edit history? Punkmorten (talk) 13:23, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

Yes I'm on it, fixed thanks. Rich Farmbrough, 13:45 13 August 2008 (GMT).

SmackBot edit warring with TestEditBot

Fortunately it's a low key edit war. They haven't gotten to calling each other names, or making nasty comments on each other's user talk pages. :-) Still, take a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Harper%27s_Bazaar&action=history . I'll drop a similar note on the other bot maintainer's page - can the two of you straighten it out, please? --GRuban (talk) 20:38, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

SmackBot and splitting

Thanks for the date parameter on the split tags. A great help for maintenance. Cheers. -- Alan Liefting (talk) - 00:44, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

Vinny Pop is back

And self-promoting on wikipedia again. Not flogging the Beatles Last Memento anymore but a piece of his own: Make a Friend Out of Me which involves a duet between him and er.... a whale. Oh and there's another here: Halley's Comet (song)

DavidFarmbrough (talk) 13:59, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

template:Fact

Thanks for the friendly notice about parameters for this template, which I do find quite useful. I have looked at the documentation once or twice, and somehow didn't understand the parameter calls. Perhaps I'll do a little copyediting there - cheers, Easchiff(talk) 15:52, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

What is the intention of...

You just made some date fix changes on the manga page (or your bot did), which leads to a question I've never seen answered to my satisfaction. The issue is so strange that it might warrant being included in your "Things that stayed too long" page. Thus -- and it's only one example of many:

Reference #63 in the Manga article arises from the following text:

The influence of manga on international cartooning has grown considerably in the last two decades.

So we click on the October 22 link. Among a large number of other things, we get:

▪ 202 BC - Hannibal Barca, leader of the Carthaginians, is defeated by the Roman legions under Scipio Africanus in the Battle of Zama.

▪ 362 - The temple of Apollo at Daphne, outside of Antioch, is destroyed in a mysterious fire.

▪ 794 - Emperor Kanmu relocates Japanese capital to Heiankyo (now Kyoto).

I admit that I did not read the entire list, but only gazed and skimmed. I didn't find anything about manga or about Daniel Pink or about the Manga Industrial Complex. So, my question, why link this particular example of "October 22" to the list of Hannibal, mysterious fires, and Emperor Kanmu?

Unfortunately, Wikipedia has its fill of people who don't like it when their ways are questioned. I hope that you're not one of them. I question the value and intention of linking the manga article to a list of really quite varied but irrelevant events that happened on October 22. And I can assure you that October 22 has no special relevance to manga.

I don't have the time to tilt at windmills and remove all these date links. But they have no meaning to, and convey no information about, the topic of the article.

So why is the date linked to an irrelevant list?

Timothy Perper (talk) 16:35, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

When a date includes a day and month, user formatting preferences ("my preferences" "Date and time") will be invoked by linking it, e.g. [[10 April]] can show as either April 10 or 10 April, and hence should almost always be linked. Any associated year should also be linked viz: 10 April 1962 because the software can display this as 1962-04-10 for those who have their date preferences set to ISO. In due course a feature may be added to MediaWiki allow a different syntax from linking to do this. Rich Farmbrough, 16:39 14 August 2008 (GMT).

Since you haven't answered my question, I've moved the discussion to the manga talk page. Please be assured that I will make every effort to be civil and courteous, but I think the question should be answered. Timothy Perper (talk) 16:50, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

Template:COI

Hi. I agree with the protection of this template, however cascading protection prevents editing of the documentation which is transcluded onto it. There are only two relevant transclusions and they are already fully protected. Would you mind removing the cascade? Thanks. -- zzuuzz ^(talk) 16:02, 16 August 2008 (UTC)

of course Rich Farmbrough, 17:10 16 August 2008 (GMT).

hey

you rock. your things that stayed too long always make me laugh when i look at them.--Priorburst0 (talk) 01:59, 17 August 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. Rich Farmbrough, 23:23 20 August 2008 (GMT).

SmackBot

This user seems to be alright . —Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.142.89.25 (talk) 02:53, 17 August 2008 (UTC)

Ray Harries

Thanks for the corrections. I want to change the title to Raymond Harries, as that is his full name, do you how? Dapi89 (talk) 16:36, 20 August 2008 (UTC)

Use the move tab, but I have done it. Rich Farmbrough, 23:22 20 August 2008 (GMT).

Great Is My Country

Hey Rich, I unfortunately have to disagree with your move there. Per WP:CAPS, titled works should have article titles in all uppercase with the exception of coordinating conjunctions and short prepositions. Since "Is" is a verb, and "My" is an adjective, they both should remain in uppercase, as per convention. (This is usually pretty consistent across all of the grammar books as well, such as Strunk/White and UChicago, IIRC.) Thanks, Girolamo Savonarola (talk) 20:07, 20 August 2008 (UTC)

Yes of course you are right. Rich Farmbrough, 23:22 20 August 2008 (GMT).

Many thanks! Girolamo Savonarola (talk) 02:47, 21 August 2008 (UTC)

Language Links

I recently found your SmackBot disarrayed Language Links in article Dream of the Red Chamber (Problem Details) . The zh-classical: and ja: is replaced in a wrong place. Can you help fix this problem? 百家姓之四 討論 (Discussion) 03:41, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

They are replaced according to a sort order agreed on, rather than the order of the abbreviations, for example ja sorts as something like "nihon", you can discuss this at the WP:AWB pages if you like. Rich Farmbrough, 16:02 22 August 2008 (GMT).

Your bot

Hello, Mr Farmbrough. You do realise you bit has the highest edit count for a non admin or sysop. You are aware, arn't you?--Andrzejestrować Zajaczajkowski Plecaxpiwórserafinowiczaświadzenie Poświadczyxwiadectwo-Bjornovich talk Special:Contributions/contribs 22:16, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

Yes, thanks. Rich Farmbrough, 22:24 22 August 2008 (GMT).

Signpost updated for July 28, August 9, 11 and 18, 2008.

Sorry I haven't been sending this over the past few weeks. Ralbot (talk) 05:47, 23 August 2008 (UTC)

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SmackBot

A little unusual: [36] is a bit weird as it included Category:Living persons to the article although the article also has Category:1929 deaths. Is this a bug? x42bn6 Talk Mess 08:41, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

Maybe it is anyway, nbut it was in cat 1929 births .Rich Farmbrough, 15:56 22 August 2008 (GMT).

Oops, I didn't read that properly. x42bn6 Talk Mess 20:40, 23 August 2008 (UTC)

SmackBot

Hey - can you have a wlook at this article on "WikiJob". Linking to the domain www.wikijob.co.uk is blacklisted, although I would ahve thought this article needs a link to the website in question.86.0.221.59 (talk) 15:15, 23 August 2008 (UTC)

SmackBot tagging

Hi Rich,

would you please give your balanced opinion on the tagging that your Smackbot added to the "References in popular culture" section of the Tetragrammaton article ? I'm talking about http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Tetragrammaton&oldid=206376574

I'm not well enough versed in Wikipedia culture to assess this situation. I started this section with a few entries, and I was satisfied to see various new contributions. By April 2008, it had become an intriguing list of a handful of references from all sides of popular culture.

At that moment, your Smackbot recommended avoiding such a trivia list. I can understand the imperative of not using Wikipedia as a free database of random shopping lists and cheat sheets ; on the other hand, I would think that a section like "References in popular culture", occurring in many articles, will always be of a somewhat diverse nature. What is the rule of thumb here ... ?

Unrelated to your Smackbot's intervention, somebody removed the section altogether some time later. I think on erroneous grounds, and I regret the loss of what I felt was interesting information, but I won't start debating it on the article's talk page, until your bot's guideline can be confirmed or revoked. After all, it might prove to have been a good thing that the bot's opinion was put into action.

Incidentally, this article seems controversy-prone and has a vivid history of edit wars. This one item is just the least of its worries. Even when you would agree that the section did belong in there like it once existed, I'm a bit timid about raking up the mud in that cesspool. Perhaps I should call in an editor or an arbitrator or something, but I doubt that I'm motivated that much.

Walter —Preceding unsigned comment added by Bokske (talk • contribs) 21:13, 23 August 2008 (UTC)

Hi, thanks for your message, SmackBot does not generally add tags, but merely dates those that are already there. Regards, Rich Farmbrough, 22:38 23 August 2008 (GMT).

(see http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Tetragrammaton&diff=prev&oldid=206376574)

Gee, excuse me so much ... twice. First for falsely attributing the trivia list tagging to your SmackBot, and second for not signing my message, a beginner's error that I can't seem to shake off.

I'll try to take up the trivia list tagging with the original author of that change. Bokske (talk) 19:29, 24 August 2008 (UTC)

Not a problem! Both happen all the time. Rich Farmbrough, 19:31 24 August 2008 (GMT).

SmackBot: august vs August

Hi, just a note about SmackBot regarding [37] and [38]; "August" needs to have a capital "a" otherwise it doesn't categorise properly and the page ends up in Category:Articles with invalid date parameter in template. It's no big deal as I'm keeping an eye on the category and fixing anything that shows up there but I just thought you would like to know. ~ AmeIiorate _{U T C} @ 04:02, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

Yes I'm aware of this slight limitation, however SB will fix this in the next pass. Incidentally it does fix most of the invalid date category members, which I am quite proud of.. Rich Farmbrough, 04:10 25 August 2008 (GMT).

Format of BR elements

Sorry, I seem to have found another chore for SmackBot. Andy Mabbett | Talk to Andy Mabbett 15:59, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

Sailormoon Sectstub

That was a section expander for a wiki-project that was recently brought up to latest code. There was a vote on it a while back and we were allowed to keep it. Please put votes up for these things before doing them. Lego3400: The Sage of Time (talk) 04:05, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

Please also see the discussion we've opened up at WT:SM about the future of this template, and feel free to participate. -Malkinann (talk) 07:11, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. Rich Farmbrough, 07:22 29 August 2008 (GMT).

SmackBot

SmackBot incorrectly removed underscores from links to dynamic_cast from the Comparison of programming languages (object-oriented programming) article. .--Btx40 (talk) 15:14, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

SmackBot digging into personal userspace

Is this really necessary? Sometimes (as in my case) a userspace page remains as a shapshot of a historical version of the page (an edit sandbox as at the moment when the article was first released to public space). The bot tagged its "expand" boilerplates with August 2008 while in fact it was February 2007. I admit that leaving those boilerplates active was misleading but the bot shouldn't have been there! Regards, NVO (talk) 09:34, 28 August 2008 (UTC)

There is a reason, which is simply this: the pages are a member of a maintenance category. Many of the templates have been made smarter to ignore userspace, or have some special setting such as "category =" (which I'm not too keen on, I would prefer something like "nocat=y"). Anyway the basic idea is these "undated" categories should be empty, an the dated ones worked through, and user space fits in with this even if "working through" simply means someone removing, altering or fixing at source the tags. I'll have a quick look at {{expand}} later if I get time. Rich Farmbrough, 12:16 28 August 2008 (GMT).

Template:Lang

Your edits at Template:Lang broke some links on the bottom of the main page. I don't have time to look at what's going on, so I just reverted them. --- RockMFR 19:54, 28 August 2008 (UTC)

Template:Wikipedialang uses Template:Lang within links - these break if they contain categories. For example, [[foo|bar[[Category:Contents]]]] won't do what you think it would do. --- RockMFR 20:31, 28 August 2008 (UTC)

List of planetary bodies

Hi! Your bot continiously breaks this table: List of planetary bodies. Please stop.--Dojarca (talk) 06:48, 29 August 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for your note. I fixed the table so it should be good in future. Note that ALL CAPS CASE IS NOT USED in Wikipedia, and I have my doubts about the vertical headers, they are probably not accessible to screen readers, apart from anything else. Rich Farmbrough, 07:26 29 August 2008 (GMT).

Accessibility fixed (somewhat). Andy Mabbett | Talk to Andy Mabbett 21:44, 29 August 2008 (UTC)

Speedy deletion of Template:ISO 639 name ht

A tag has been placed on Template:ISO 639 name ht, requesting that it be speedily deleted from Wikipedia. This has been done under section G1 of the criteria for speedy deletion, because the page appears to have no meaningful content or history, and the text is unsalvageably incoherent. If the page you created was a test, please use the sandbox for any other experiments you would like to do. Feel free to leave a message on my talk page if you have any questions about this.

If you think that this notice was placed here in error, you may contest the deletion by adding {{hangon}} to the top of the page that has been nominated for deletion (just below the existing speedy deletion or "db" tag), coupled with adding a note on [[ Talk:Template:ISO 639 name ht|the talk page]] explaining your position, but be aware that once tagged for speedy deletion, if the article meets the criterion it may be deleted without delay. Please do not remove the speedy deletion tag yourself, but don't hesitate to add information to the article that would would render it more in conformance with Wikipedia's policies and guidelines. Lastly, please note that if the article does get deleted, you can contact one of these admins to request that a copy be emailed to you. frogger3140 (talk) 21:23, 29 August 2008 (UTC)

Language name templates

To avoid future confusion, I suggest adding all templates like {{ISO 639 name tel}} to a category, say Category:Language name templates with an explanatory paragraph on the category page.

Regards, Andy Mabbett | Talk to Andy Mabbett 21:37, 29 August 2008 (UTC)

Yes I'll do something like this with AWB once they are all done. Rich Farmbrough, 21:39 29 August 2008 (GMT).

But pressing whatlinks here seems elementary. :) Rich Farmbrough, 21:43 29 August 2008 (GMT).

Speedy deletion of Template:ISO 639 name lu

A tag has been placed on Template:ISO 639 name lu requesting that it be speedily deleted from Wikipedia. This has been done under section T3 of the criteria for speedy deletion, because it is a deprecated or orphaned template. After seven days, if it is still unused and the speedy deletion tag has not been removed, the template will be deleted.

If the template is intended to be substituted, please feel free to remove the speedy deletion tag and please consider putting a note on the template's page indicating that it is substituted so as to avoid any future mistakes (<noinclude>{{transclusionless}}</noinclude>).

Thanks. --Vianello (talk) 23:23, 29 August 2008 (UTC) Vianello (talk) 23:23, 29 August 2008 (UTC)

Speedy deletion of Template:ISO 639 name lu

A tag has been placed on Template:ISO 639 name lu, requesting that it be speedily deleted from Wikipedia. This has been done under section G1 of the criteria for speedy deletion, because the page appears to have no meaningful content or history, and the text is unsalvageably incoherent. If the page you created was a test, please use the sandbox for any other experiments you would like to do. Feel free to leave a message on my talk page if you have any questions about this.

If you think that this notice was placed here in error, you may contest the deletion by adding {{hangon}} to the top of the page that has been nominated for deletion (just below the existing speedy deletion or "db" tag), coupled with adding a note on [[ Talk:Template:ISO 639 name lu|the talk page]] explaining your position, but be aware that once tagged for speedy deletion, if the article meets the criterion it may be deleted without delay. Please do not remove the speedy deletion tag yourself, but don't hesitate to add information to the article that would would render it more in conformance with Wikipedia's policies and guidelines. Lastly, please note that if the article does get deleted, you can contact one of these admins to request that a copy be emailed to you. Vianello (talk) 23:31, 29 August 2008 (UTC)

Speedy deletion of Template:ISO 639 name msa

Thank you for experimenting with Wikipedia. Your test worked, and the page that you created has been or soon will be deleted. Please use the sandbox for any other tests you want to do. Take a look at the welcome page if you would like to learn more about contributing to our encyclopedia.

If you think that this notice was placed here in error, you may contest the deletion by adding {{hangon}} to the top of the page that has been nominated for deletion (just below the existing speedy deletion or "db" tag), coupled with adding a note on [[ Talk:Template:ISO 639 name msa|the talk page]] explaining your position, but be aware that once tagged for speedy deletion, if the article meets the criterion it may be deleted without delay. Please do not remove the speedy deletion tag yourself, but don't hesitate to add information to the article that would would render it more in conformance with Wikipedia's policies and guidelines. Lastly, please note that if the article does get deleted, you can contact one of these admins to request that a copy be emailed to you. Boss Big (talk) 00:08, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

Sorry 'bout that!

I didn't realize that was actually supposed to... well, be anything. You know what I mean. Try to look at it from my perspective there. ;) Sorry about the spam though! - Vianello (talk) 03:29, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

Hey you!

Remember me? :) I've got something for smackbot! User:SQL/Reflist/1. I've re-written my software, and, gone back to analyzing references, if you're interested in a run, I've got about 7500 of them to work :) (The e-mail I sent you, had 30,000 that were not checked against the live wiki.... So, go ahead and disregard that :) SQL^{Query me!} 04:35, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

{{Lifetime}} and PData

The PersonData project states that PD comes before categories. I would take the template {{Lifetime}} to be akin to categories, hence coming so PD precedes LT. I am wondering why SmackBot is going through and reversing the order. It seems unnecessary, and trivial. -- billinghurst (talk) 15:07, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

Hi, thanks for your message, SmackBot makes a number of changes that are available to all WP:AWB bots - in general these provide a number of non-controversial minor improvements.

The issue you raise is related to these, and has been already fixed by the AWB developers, but not yet released to all AWB users.

Regards, Rich Farmbrough, 15:31 30 August 2008 (GMT).

SmackBot

Hi. SmackBot just added a reference section and reflist to Bianco (surname). It's harmless, but in this case also pointless. Is there a reason? SamuelTheGhost (talk) 21:36, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

Yes, the infobox was broken Rich Farmbrough, 22:20 30 August 2008 (GMT).

SmackBot - broken ref lists

Hi, you might want to take a look at: [39], [40] and [41]. It seems that if there's a maintenance template right before where the reflist should go, SmackBot doesn't handle it right. Thanks, ~ AmeIiorate _{U T C} @ 02:29, 31 August 2008 (UTC)

Oxford Wikimania 2010 and Wikimedia UK v2.0

Hi there Rich Farmbrough,

As a regularly contributing UK Wikipedian, we were wondering if you wanted to contribute to the Oxford bid to host the 2010 Wikimania conference. Please see here for details of how to get involved, we need all the help we can get if we are to put in a compelling bid.

We are also in the process of forming a new UK Wikimedia chapter to replace the soon to be folded old one. If you are interested in helping shape our plans, showing your support or becoming a future member or board member, please head over to the Wikimedia UK v2.0 page and let us know. We plan on holding an election in the next month to find the initial board, who will oversee the process of founding the company and accepting membership applications. They will then call an AGM to formally elect a new board who after obtaining charitable status will start the fund raising, promotion and active support for the UK Wikimedian community for which the chapter is being founded.

You may also wish to attend the next London meet-up if you are located near London at which both of these issues will be discussed. If you can't attend this meetup, you may want to watch Wikipedia:Meetup, for updates on future meets.

We look forward to hearing from you soon!

Thanks for reading.

·Add§hore· ^Talk/_Cont 08:17, 31 August 2008 (UTC)

On a different note but I will add this to the same section. Smack bot has a function of adding ref lists to articles that have the ef tag but no current ref list. I was wondering if you would be willing to share the code for this part of the bot so that I can try to develop it for another use. ·Add§hore· ^Talk/_Cont 12:07, 31 August 2008 (UTC)

More date-template tasks for SmackBot

I don't know if you fancy tackling these:

• Wikipedia:Botreq#Convert founded dates to template
• Wikipedia:Botreq#Convert release dates to template

or whether you add them to SmackBot's tasks at some point in the future, once the bulk of the changes have been made by another bot?

Thanks. Andy Mabbett | Talk to Andy Mabbett 23:11, 24 August 2008 (UTC)

No probs. Note that MoS is moving to not linking dates. Sigh. Rich Farmbrough, 23:16 24 August 2008 (GMT).

Thank you. At least having dates templates will make future policy reversals easier to implement! Andy Mabbett | Talk to Andy Mabbett 23:19, 24 August 2008 (UTC)

Not wishing to nag, but any idea when that might start, please? I'm adding to the lists on the Botreq page, but wouldn't want to do so after you'd fired up the bot. Would it be better to note additions here? Andy Mabbett | Talk to Andy Mabbett 14:57, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

Nudge ;-) Andy Mabbett | Talk to Andy Mabbett 17:05, 31 August 2008 (UTC)

BC redirects

From what I saw, these redirects you are creating are to themselves.  Blanchardb -^{Me•MyEars•MyMouth}- timed 17:49, 31 August 2008 (UTC)

Correct, read the edit coment :) Rich Farmbrough, 17:50 31 August 2008 (GMT).

Sorry. :-0 It's just that with Huggle the edit summary is not displayed for new pages. -- Blanchardb -^{Me•MyEars•MyMouth}- timed 17:53, 31 August 2008 (UTC)

SmackBot on Balinor Buckhannah

The bot added a second reference section...it's not that big of a deal, but it might be a bad line of code or something? Just thought that I'd let you know. Sorry for the inconvenience...(see this edit.) the_ed17 23:31, 31 August 2008 (UTC)

Thanks, fixed.Rich Farmbrough, 12:31 1 September 2008 (GMT).

Minor glitch.

When adding {{reflist}} to an article that ends with an external reference, the bot placed it inside the closing square bracket. See http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Borrowash&oldid=235387109 -Arb. (talk) 14:16, 1 September 2008 (UTC)

Thanks, fixed. Rich Farmbrough, 20:00 1 September 2008 (GMT).

1. deild 1983

Hi Rich. It's at that name because the standard naming format for football league seasons is "League Name Year", e.g. The Football League 2007-08, so that's the 1. deild article for the 1983 season. Cheers, пﮟოьεԻ 57 14:44, 1 September 2008 (UTC)

Spaces out of headings

Hey, I noticed edits like this were you/SmackBot removed the spaces out of headings. Please could you stop such edits (or start putting spaces into headings for better readability). Thanks, Cacycle (talk) 19:13, 1 September 2008 (UTC)

I'm looking for incorrect capitalisation, spelling errors and singulars. I've changed the code so that it won't change headers unless they in error. Rich Farmbrough, 19:59 1 September 2008 (GMT).

Reference vs. References

Hi, you may want to be aware of edits like this one where Smackbot changed the word from singular to plural. The singular is correct here as there is only one reference in the section. This came up previously at an attempt at featured article status and was agreed it should be singular. Redfarmer (talk) 01:16, 2 September 2008 (UTC)

TfD nomination of Template:Citations missing

Template:Citations missing 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. — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 01:17, 2 September 2008 (UTC)

Addition of uncategorised tag

Hi. I notice SmackBot added an uncat tag to 1932 in baseball. Although the article itself doesn't have any categories (as per the 1931, 1933...etc. articles), it is picking up a category (1932 in baseball) - presumably from a template, and so probably shouldn't be tagged. It's also curious that it picked on 1932, and not any of the other years.... :-) CultureDrone (talk) 08:07, 2 September 2008 (UTC)

Thanks: Doubly curious, as it was running from lonely pages or new pages, neither of which this is. Rich Farmbrough, 09:51 2 September 2008 (GMT).

It may have been following a deleted new redirect- still shouldn't tag it though. Rich Farmbrough, 10:42 2 September 2008 (GMT).

SmackBot

Hi Rich, Smacky thinks it's still August: [42], [43], [44], [45], [46], etc. —Angr 11:19, 2 September 2008 (UTC)

Thanks.. so do I... Rich Farmbrough, 11:21 2 September 2008 (GMT).

Reflist error?

Did you know your bot was adding {Reflist} to articles that also contained {reflist}, thereby producing double entries? See here [47]. MickMacNee (talk) 15:06, 2 September 2008 (UTC)

Actually that article contained {{refist}} (no "l"). Rich Farmbrough, 16:19 2 September 2008 (GMT).

Line break removal by Smackbot

As an editor who regularly works on WP:AIR aircraft articles, the removal of the line spaces within the {{aircraft specifications}} and {{aircontent}} templates is extremely annoying. The SPecs template in particular is very long, and the Aircontent one can be, and the line spaces help aid in spotting the correct group of fields quickly, especially to those whose eyes are no longer 20/20. Please have Smackbot stop removing these line spaces. Thanks for your consideration of the physical limitations of others over mere guidelines. - BillCJ (talk) 19:12, 1 September 2008 (UTC)

My apologies on the is last SmakBot stop. My mistake, as I should have paid more attention! Thanks for the adjustments, it will help alot. - BillCJ (talk) 10:18, 3 September 2008 (UTC)

SmackBot error?

Why does Smackbot move the {{Lifetime}} template outside of the category tags see http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Patrick_Rothfuss&diff=235794193&oldid=235702402? Thanks. -- Avi (talk) 12:34, 2 September 2008 (UTC)

Hi, thanks for your message, SmackBot makes a number of changes that are available to all WP:AWB bots - in general these provide a number of non-controversial minor improvements.

The issue you raise is related to these, and has been already fixed by the AWB developers, but not yet released to all AWB users.

Regards, Rich Farmbrough, 13:22 2 September 2008 (GMT).

Thanks. -- Avi (talk) 16:06, 2 September 2008 (UTC)

WikiJob

Can you have a look at the discussion page for WikiJob? thank you! 86.0.221.59 (talk) 18:30, 2 September 2008 (UTC)

SmackBot vs. AloysiusLiliusBot

I'm not sure if you're aware of this, but there's another bot awaiting approval that does some of the same things as SmackBot. While reviewing its trial contributions, I noticed that SmackBot seems to be unwilling to yield the last word to anyone else. Since such edits are pretty useless, would it be possible for you to modify your bot so that it won't make edits that only affect the capitalization of template names? —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 01:54, 3 September 2008 (UTC)

Replied on RFA page. Rich Farmbrough, 16:43 4 September 2008 (GMT).

Collective:Unconscious

THx for your help making a better article. --Justindavila (talk) 13:06, 3 September 2008 (UTC)

SmackBot whitespace edits

What's up with these? 1 2 3 The AWB Rules of use caution to avoid making insignificant or inconsequential edits, as they waste resources and clog up watch lists. I am sure that an experienced bot-operator such as yourself is familiar with these guidelines, so are these somehow slipping through the cracks? Plasticup ^T/C 19:25, 3 September 2008 (UTC)

Yes, thanks, must have had a check-box unchecked. Rich Farmbrough, 11:03 4 September 2008 (GMT).

I remember the run now, fixed part way through, working on the last 169 "stubborn" articles from the previous daily run. Rich Farmbrough, 11:22 4 September 2008 (GMT).

Incidentally SB was trying to fix {{Fact|date=3 Sept 2008}} but there are reasons that it can't at them moment. Rich Farmbrough, 11:08 4 September 2008 (GMT).

Sounds good. Just making sure that you were aware of it. I don't think 3 inconsequential edits are going to stress the servers overly much :-) Plasticup ^T/C 16:35, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

Reflist and appendices

Hi. I've been mulling over the standard WP:Layout of our appendices, for a few months. Re: your latest comment at reflist - I really like the idea of moving the reflist below the usual navbox placement, to the end of the article. One problem is that it then separates the categories off by themselves. The categories/navboxes/seealsos all belong together... However! Your suggestion has led me to this idea for restructuring:

• Main article body
• See also
• Navboxes
• Categories box
• External links
• Notes and References and Further reading

Example Mockup in sandbox

Just thinking out loud, feedback welcome. (I'm quite sure everyone has different opinions on ideal appendices ordering, and nothing is going to be a perfect fit for every situation. And this idea has probably been suggested before. But I thought I'd put it out...) -- Quiddity (talk) 19:45, 3 September 2008 (UTC)

Categories are really.. an anomaly.. A very useful one, but you should ideally be a able to select from the text or an infobox. So "Jack Jones (1880-1960) was an English butcher who.. " should somehow enable you to select

• People called Jack
• People called Jones
• People born 1880
• People died 1960
• English people
• Butchers

And all combinations of the above..

Hmm.

I also wonder if references should be hover-over links which when clicked ideally take you to the actual document cited, rather than a footnote.

Rich Farmbrough, 01:17 4 September 2008 (GMT).

That's WP:Category intersection. ;) I don't know what stage they're at currently. -- Quiddity (talk) 06:43, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

Think it's stalled. Look how many years single sign-on took. Regardless - my main point is a little less subtle, the manual and semi-manual categorisation is a kludge in the first place. Rich Farmbrough, 11:01 4 September 2008 (GMT).

It's unavoidable. You're asking that the Wikipedia back end be somehow automatically be able to understand that the word "English" puts the article into category "English people", while "butcher" is something that goes with "Butchers", and "was" and "an" go with nothing. And note you're not even getting into the ball players who put English on a ball, and the hack writers who butcher a sentence, and ... You're essentially asking the back end to understand human language, which is one of the classic intractable problems, it's what the Turing test is all about. Until someone wins that, we are stuck with manual categorization, it's not a kludge any more than writing the encyclopedia by hand is. Note that if the back end did understand human language, we could hook it up to the Internet Archive's copy of the web, and have the encyclopedia write itself. --GRuban (talk) 20:29, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

SmackBot blanked an article! :)

I'm pretty amused by this, in general, but it should be looked at. At Sony Ericsson W890, over the course of two work passes over two days, the bot somehow decided that the article needed to be blanked. While the article is a little spammy, it's not *that* bad. :) - TexasAndroid (talk) 18:23, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

Same thing happened to Village Christian School. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Village_Christian_School&diff=236272589&oldid=234047674 http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Village_Christian_School&diff=prev&oldid=234047674 jonathon (talk) 19:21, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. These were a number of articles with substed clean-up tags. I'll check the changes near that time. Rich Farmbrough, 19:24 4 September 2008 (GMT).

Ok caught one more. Please let me know anyone who sees another. Rich Farmbrough, 19:35 4 September 2008 (GMT).

Liberian Companies - TexasAndroid (talk) 22:39, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

Village Christian School, twice. - TexasAndroid (talk) 22:41, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

That was the one I found.. <sigh> back to the drawing board. Rich Farmbrough, 00:04 5 September 2008 (GMT).

I could see that. My point was that the bot had blanked it a second time even after you cleaned it up. - TexasAndroid (talk) 11:26, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

Yes, that (the second occruance) is what I was sighing over... Rich Farmbrough, 12:28 10 September 2008 (GMT).

RFAR alert

One of the arbitrators has asked that every admin who is arguably involved in the events at Sarah Palin be notified of an arbitration case covering it. I therefore draw your attention to Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration#MZMcBride. In your case, you are, like me, one of those who made an edit to the article while it was full protected. GRBerry 19:45, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

Fixing misused date templates

Does SmackBot check for misuse of {{birth date}}, {{death date}}, et al. For instance, as fixed in this edit? If not, please can it? Thank you. Andy Mabbett (aka Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy Mabbett; Andy Mabbett's contributions 08:50, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

I can do a scan. and pick up that particular error. Rich Farmbrough, 11:30 5 September 2008 (GMT).

Thank you yet again. Andy Mabbett (aka Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy Mabbett; Andy Mabbett's contributions 19:31, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

POK article

this article has been posted for deletion..i have made the following appeal there:

• do not delete : PLEASE allow editing to take place in this article so that it gets balanced; disabling editing and then crying unbalanced is hypocrisy!!!..As we all know we didn't delete european union article just because there was an "england" article or "france" article or "germany" article (which are part of EU nevertheless) ... Similarly we did not destroy soviet union article just because it is divided into 15 parts..Further it is very very clear that POK is not the same as azad k as pok also includes trans karakoram tract...pok term is used by most if not all non pakistan media.so ip and soman contention invalid.. i think it is not "fork" since contents are not identical, verifiable, has reliable sources and differs from the other articles like "trans-Karakoram tract" or "Northern Areas" (at the maximum, there is a passing reference in the summary(if this is considered fork) style with redirect links to sub regions).So, i am opposing this high handed move based on ignorance..rather i suggest that those who suggest it as non neutral contribute towards making this neutral, if it is not already neutral..pahari sahib's contention of inflammatory not substantiated both in talk page of pok or otherwise..so DO NOT DELETEKashmircloud (talk) 10:13, 6 September 2008 (UTC)

if you can improve this article or if you believe that the article can be improved by removing the edit ban(say, exampple: semiprotect) and if you also concur that pok not equal to ajk, please help in saving this article from deleters with nationalistic (pakistani)/ religious(islamist?) motives for POK article removal(example: User:pahari sahib is pakistani)..please save the POKarticle...Kashmircloud (talk) 10:13, 6 September 2008 (UTC)

Why is this user being allowed to canvass for votes? Pahari Sahib 12:18, 6 September 2008 (UTC)

The closing admin will be aware,and ther are no votes. Rich Farmbrough, 19:18 7 September 2008 (GMT).

ISBN in template

AIUI, you check for badly-formatted ISBN numbers, but not badly formatted ISBN in in templates like that example. Can you, please? Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy Mabbett; Andy Mabbett's contributions 15:14, 6 September 2008 (UTC)

Andy, I haven't run that function for quite a while, but I hope to be recovering the disk with the code on soon... Having said that it will need work because AWB can't read that version of config files. Rich Farmbrough, 20:39 6 September 2008 (GMT).

Smackbot

Hi Rich. I wanted you to know that it hadn't escaped my notice, over time, that Smackbot provides a generally very useful set of functions for the community. Recall that I resisted the automatic dating of templates when it first started date tagging, because all the existing templates were at that point in time labeled with the same month. In due course, as the dates have spread out to be more representative of the actual dates of the tags, its date-tagging function has proven itself as a handy thing to have around. Just thought you might like to know. Good regards. ... Kenosis (talk) 19:09, 6 September 2008 (UTC)

Cool. Rich Farmbrough, 20:41 6 September 2008 (GMT).

Vandalism to many articles

Hi Rich. User:Threesamagicnumber has only eight contributions Special:Contributions/Threesamagicnumber and they are all vandalism. I undid them. I'm not sure of the procedure to get a flag on the vandaliser so I'm reporting it to you. Maybe you can throw up a warning or check it out. Thanks and bests. --- (Bob) Wikiklrsc (talk) 13:46, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

Thanks, Rich, for your action and information. I had checked it out a bit (warnings, etc.) but felt, perhaps incorrectly, that such items need an admin's strength of position. Bests. --- (Bob) Wikiklrsc (talk) 14:04, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

edit error

Is there a way for the bot to check for invalid months when fixing tags? see diff Should be September, not Sept Dbiel ^(Talk) 02:35, 6 September 2008 (UTC)

Sorry about posting to the bot page. Failed to read the page carefully. Had no intention of stopping the bot. Dbiel ^(Talk) 03:09, 6 September 2008 (UTC)

No problem/.Rich Farmbrough, 10:13 6 September 2008 (GMT).

Yes, it would have picked that up on the next pass. Basically it does fairly comprehensive month spelling errors (but requiring date=) before it fixes up the parameter names. I just made the parameter name fixing a little more forgiving of the date format it allows (obviously I want to be careful not to change something that is not supposed to be date=). This ruleset also is the main place where missing date parameters are put on and the highest maintenance part of the code, so it's undesirable to stick stuff in the middle of it. Possibly in the next version I could re-apply the month name fixes after that.

Rich Farmbrough, 10:13 6 September 2008 (GMT).

Thanks for the reply Dbiel ^(Talk) 18:52, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

Question on Norma Deletion Nominations

Smackbot just nominated Norma (female name) for deletion, but something tells me that combining Norma under Norman (name) would be more preferential rather than deleting. Please discuss any merging proposal you have about the section on my talkpage, if you must. Neurotic heart (talk) 18:04, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

Nike Oregon Project--Bad References?

Hi Rich! I've been trying to add citations to the Nike Oregon Project article and improve it in general, but I am not a Wiki veteran and I have a question.

Do you know what these items mean?

This article or section may contain original research or unverified claims.

This article needs additional citations for verification.

There are no longer any "citations needed" marked, and I would have thought these comment items and their unsightly icons would have disappeared. Is there any additional info needed? (They're ugly! LOL)

Thanks for helping me out! Tracktowner Tracktowner (talk) 03:30, 8 September 2008 (UTC)

The citations needed are to mark individual statements, the tag refers to the whole article - and shouldn't be used as well as exhaustive "citations needed" tags. I have removed the tags, see the talk page. Rich Farmbrough, 12:18 8 September 2008 (GMT).

Um...

If I was to accidentally press the off switch, would you be able to turn SmackBot back on again? I haven't done this, but I just want to rest assured.--Editor510 ^{drop us a line, mate} 17:31, 8 September 2008 (UTC)

Yes, have no fear. Rich Farmbrough, 18:41 8 September 2008 (GMT).

Editing on piped links

Hello! I had started to write a much longer post about SmackBot editing piped links, only to find my objection was unfounded when I actually read the article as opposed to looking at the diff. I also learned something important about making piped links from the edit it made, which I can use in my editing from now on.  :) But I also noticed SmackBot's userpage documentation stated that cleaning up piped links was an Abandoned Task. Since it does edit piped links, should that part of the page be changed? Thanks for your maintenance of the Bot and your time in reading this! LaughingVulcan 11:34, 9 September 2008 (UTC)

Hi,thanks for your message, SmackBot makes a number of changes that are available to all WP:AWB bots - in general these provide a number of non-controversial minor improvements.

The issue you raise is related to these, and is done as a "general fix", however SB used to have code to do this that was unique - whether AWB caught up or SB was a little smarter or both I can't remember. Regardless, it no longer does it as a task.

Thanks for the note, I'll update the documentation a little.

Rich Farmbrough, 14:21 9 September 2008 (GMT).

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You are receiving this message because you have signed up for the Signpost spamlist. If you wish to stop receiving these messages, simply remove your name from the list. Ralbot (talk) 21:13, 10 September 2008 (UTC)

Bot exclusion

Just trying to tidy these up . Your bot is excluded from Harry McNish/. If you can confirm it is wise to blockquote as on that page you could remove the bots template. Rich Farmbrough, 19:47 7 September 2008 (GMT).

Hi Rich.

Good idea. My bot no longer makes any changes to that page, so I've removed the bot exclusion template. I'll have a trawl for any others the next time I download a database dump too.

Cheers, CmdrObot (talk) 21:14, 10 September 2008 (UTC)

Bot requests and "birth" dates

Re your comments on my bot request for "birth dates" in templates generating hCards for organisations, etc. I have a 'better idea: I'll request the addition of class="bday" to {{Start date}}, which also allows YYYY and YYYY_MM dates. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 21:49, 10 September 2008 (UTC)

What drew the bot to this page?

Charles Peterson (disambiguation) - The only thing the bot did was move the disambig template after the Long Comment template, which is an invisible, maintenence template. I can sorta understand the bot doing this if it has other, additional work on the page, but if this is the only thing that the bot does to a page, it seems to me like it's a lot of wasted effort for a basically meaningless edit. So I'm wondering somewhat what it was that got the bot's attention in the first place, so that I can figure out if I can avoid catching it's attention. I place the comment template on a lot of pages, including disambiguation, and since it's a maintenance template, and not a part of the contents of the page, I generally want to place it after all valid contents of the page, which includes it being after the disambig templates. If there's something besides just the placement that I can avoid doing to avoid getting the bot's attention, it would be good to know. - TexasAndroid (talk) 17:13, 11 September 2008 (UTC)

It's the above attempt to pick up uncats and orphans. Probably from the new-pages report. INcidentlly is it worth having that page oin the "shortpages-monitored " cat?

I'm not a fan of that whole thing, but it was a compromise with some others who had problems with how the "long comment" template was being used by some of us short pages patrollers. I implemented it, because I had the knowhow to do so, and in general it did not inconvinience me other than the implementation time itself. So you will need to talk to the actual people who wanted it as far as just how useful it is or is not on any specific page. They wanted a way to track the pages bumped off of the various short pages reports, I gave them a way. And it tracks all pages bumped off for them to process or not process as they see fit. If you want to see the discussion that lead to it's creation, I can dig up the link. It's on the talk page of the main on-wiki short pages report. - TexasAndroid (talk) 22:39, 11 September 2008 (UTC)

As for it coming from New Pages, that makes sense. Not sure what I can do to avoid it though. I find my pages off of the Tools Server's short pages report. and generally see both new and not-so-new pages from there. Oh, well. - TexasAndroid (talk) 22:41, 11 September 2008 (UTC)

help

hi, i think you are administrator(forgive me for bothering you if you are not). can you semiprotect POK ARTICLE page to avoid vandalism by an anonymous 86 ip vandal..this dynamic ip vandal was previously banned as user: Nangparbat [48]..i am posting this message here because you had done an edit in the page that was later vandalised by that guy..Kashmircloud (talk) 21:28, 11 September 2008 (UTC)

Acknowledgement

I acknowledge your last message. Let me know when SmackBot gets fixed, okay? Oh, are you an admin? AdirondackMan (talk) 23:23, 11 September 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. Fine. Yes. Rich Farmbrough, 12:27 13 September 2008 (GMT).

Uncategorised tag

Hi. A quick question - is SmackBot the only (currently) automated means of tagging uncategorised tags with the {{uncat}} tag, and if so, is this bit still running ? I only ask as the list in the Category:Uncategorized pages is currently down to 411 which is about the lowest I've ever seen it - so either we've cleared the majority of the backlog and new articles are being categorised, or they're not getting tagged and there's a backlog/deluge/flood/catastrophe/armageddon (delete depending how poetic you feel) due to descend on that category....any thoughts ? :-) CultureDrone (talk) 07:18, 11 September 2008 (UTC)

Oh - of course, if SmackBot isn't what handles uncat tagging, any chance you could either let me know who to contact, or pass my comment/question onto them ? Thanks :-) CultureDrone (talk) 07:22, 11 September 2008 (UTC)

WP:AWB bots are all capable of tagging with (I think) orphan, uncat, wikify and stub:- SB generally has this option turned on. The problem is generating the list of candiates, Special:lonelypages for example has mostly disambiguation or already tagged orphans. I have done a few tagging runs agianst "Newpages" whic works quite well. Having said that there are a number of people who are expert catters, anbd uncat has usually been kept up with better than the other dated categories. I will look a little more closely when I return home later today or tomorrow. Rich Farmbrough, 12:02 11 September 2008 (GMT).

OK, I have done a run, and found you a few uncats! I will add this as a regular task, and should be able to keep the number ur untagged uncats low within a week or two. THere will be a fair few articles picked up, but not a deluge, I think. Rich Farmbrough, 13:06 11 September 2008 (GMT).

Thanks....I think ! :-) CultureDrone (talk) 17:45, 12 September 2008 (UTC)

Bots exclusion template in Alfa Romeo in Formula One

Hi, I added the template again to prevent that interwiki problem, dont know how to prevent it any other way --— Typ932^{T | C}  20:35, 12 September 2008 (UTC)

Pages to watch are:

• Un gars, une fille
• International Academy
• Monoicous
• Hoek
• Alfa Romeo in Formula One
• Timeline of the 2008 Pacific typhoon season

I'm trying to fix them all. Rich Farmbrough, 14:31 13 September 2008 (GMT).

Homelessness article and "Bumverstising" spam?

Hi Rich. I'm trying to avoid a revert situation. User:Wikiworker12 has put "Bumvertising" stuff all over the Homelessness article. It's specious at best. It denigrates the homeless and isn't a veritable help or solution to it. Please advise. User:Wikiworker12 is not very cooperative and seems to be selling it. Thanks. --- (Bob) Wikiklrsc (talk) 00:51, 17 September 2008 (UTC)

SitaxseNtan

A tag has been placed on SitaxseNtan, requesting that it be speedily deleted from Wikipedia. This has been done under the criteria for speedy deletion, because it is a redirect from an implausible typo.

Please do not remove the speedy deletion tag yourself. If you believe that there is a reason to keep the redirect, you can request that administrators wait a while before deleting it. To do this, affix the template {{hangon}} to the page and state your intention on the article's talk page. Feel free to leave a note on my talk page if you have any questions about this. --ἀνυπόδητος (talk) 10:44, 17 September 2008 (UTC)

Capitalizing tags

Just wondering if the benefit of making sure that tags are properly capitalized exceeds the amount of unnecessary storage and database overhead caused by additional changes. The uncapitalized tags seem to display correctly. Bongomatic (talk) 14:02, 17 September 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for the reply. I have seen instances where there's a dated but uncapitalized tag that is changed to be capitalized. I would suggest that if the only change to an entire page is capitalization it is probably worth skipping. Bongomatic (talk) 15:40, 17 September 2008 (UTC)

Bot requests and "birth" dates

{{Start date}} now outputs class="bday", so can be used for the hCards of organisations, venues and places, per [49] and my bot request. It can also be used for YYYY and YYYY-MM dates. Any idea when you might start, please? Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 16:50, 18 September 2008 (UTC)

Andy I did start a (test) run previously against the companies info box, but hardly any had the full date. Will review tomorrow. Rich Farmbrough, 01:21 19 September 2008 (UTC).

Thanks; but please note that I said above, that {{Start date}} "can also be used for YYYY and YYYY-MM dates". I did modify my bot request, and drop a note on your talk page, a week or two ago.

BTW, please add the opening date of {{Infobox Bridge}} to the pot. Thank you. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 09:47, 19 September 2008 (UTC)

Update: I'm now maintaining a list of templates needing the conversion, at User:Pigsonthewing/to-do#Date conversions. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 22:14, 21 September 2008 (UTC)

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Template: Coordinate TfD

I have nominated {{Coordinate}} for deletion. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 19:22, 22 September 2008 (UTC)

Intellectual Decathlon

Hi Rich,

I hope I am writing this to the correct place, I am not very familiar with editing, communicating on Wikipedia.

I think you edited an entry, named Intellectual Decathlon. Placed some "citation needed" marks and removed a link, because of "copyrighted material"

1. Citation is not needed, because I am the author of Intellectual Decathlon and I made the Wikipedia entry on it. My name (Gabor Laufer, M.D.) is clearly stated in the Article and can be identified in the edit history as the original article creator too. Therefore, there can be no better citation than my own words about the program I wrote.

2. The same applies to the removed link to copyrighted material. I made the PC emulator version available for download, and since I own all the rights to the program, I have the right to put it up for download. The packaged Apple emulator is freeware.

In the extreme case, if you would think that MUSE owns the program, it does not. It didn't already when they went bankrupt and out of existence, because we had a 2 years contract which I refused to renew at the time.

Therefore, please undo the changes you made in August 2008.

You may reach me on docobgyn@yahoo.com, if you wish.

Thank You,

Gabor Laufer, M.D. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Gabor Laufer (talk • contribs) 22:16, 22 September 2008 (UTC)

British Theatre Season, Monaco

Hi I see that you have tagged this page as of questionable notability. I assume that you a) don't live in Monaco or you would know the importance it has there. b) Do not appreciate the significance of the Season being awarded HSH's High Patronage (the equivilent of a UK Royal Warrent) in its first year - other groups and artistic institutions have been in the Principality for YEARS and have never received High Patronage and c) are not involved in Theatre otherwise you would know what an important cultural initiative this is. Please accept the notability of this and remove the tag. Thank you. Crowley666 (talk) 12:57, 23 September 2008 (UTC)

PS Also, please do not remove the correct form of address for HSH Prince Albert. This is a matter of form and not political, republican or any other reason. It is correct and polite to address anybody by their correct title. Crowley666 (talk) 13:03, 23 September 2008 (UTC)

Thank you for your response, but I had not seen that tag there before. As I think that I have proved its notability, may I therefore remove the tag? Crowley666 (talk) 16:55, 23 September 2008 (UTC)

It is not just one season. 2007 was the first season thats all. The new 2009 season has been announced and the details must NOT be merged with the Theatre Princess Grace for two reasons: 1) Theatre Princess Grace is a venue only, is not a producing venue and was not producing the season, just receiving it and 2) the 2009 season will be at a different venue in Monaco. I also notice that you have arbitrarily removed the wording "graciously awarded". This is the precise wording from the Royal Palace documents and it is expected that the correct wording should always be used. With great respect, I do not understand why these things should have to be explained retrospectively. The matter of their deletion should be discussed before someone, who may not necessarily know the proper form or wording, just takes it on themselves to change things. Would you not agree that it would be nice to see that Wikipedia was actually using the correct form of wording for once? Crowley666 (talk) 18:27, 23 September 2008 (UTC)

Thank you for that. The term High Patronage is indeed a technical and authoritative term, similar to your Royal Warrant, awarded to 'Suppliers of ... to the UK Royal Family'. The correct form would also include a capital H for "His High Patronage" but as it is obviously unsettling for you, perhaps you would prefer it as a lowercase h? Crowley666 (talk) 19:41, 23 September 2008 (UTC)

Link to Royal Warrant now included. Thanks. Crowley666 (talk) 22:53, 23 September 2008 (UTC)

SmackBot

Elastolin - Smackbot changed "REFERENCES" to "ReferenceS" - missing the cap in the last letter. Greetings, --Janke | Talk 07:12, 26 September 2008 (UTC)

---

What was the point of this edit? - [50] - AnonMoos (talk) 22:40, 26 September 2008 (UTC)

It's an error. Thanks, fixed. Rich Farmbrough, 00:08 27 September 2008 (UTC).

SmackBot - Embolden Title

Hi. I don't think it's working as you expect. On Wapping Hydraulic Power Station just now, Smackbot has done a change labelled "Embolden title and general fixes". What this actually amounted to was the removal of the double-square brackets on the first mention in the lead (which would have emboldened the title, by default) without their replacement with triple quotes. Hence the action 'Embolden title' has actually done the opposite! I've fixed the article, but I think the bot will need some attention...

EdJogg (talk) 00:30, 27 September 2008 (UTC)

Yes I detected that this was happening and stopped the run. Thanks. Rich Farmbrough, 01:53 27 September 2008 (UTC).

references→References

Was this change a bug or intentional?--Rockfang (talk) 00:58, 27 September 2008 (UTC)

Bug, fixed see above, thanks. Rich Farmbrough, 01:52 27 September 2008 (UTC).

{{By whom?}} => {{Fact}}

In Quark, your bot replaced a "By whom?" tag with a "Citation needed" tag. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Quark&curid=25179&diff=241381336&oldid=241374700 -- A r m y 1 9 8 7 ! ! !  20:18, 27 September 2008 (UTC)

please

take a look at this, where your name also appears, please: User_talk:Jennavecia#blanked_-_why.3F

Cesar Tort 16:48, 30 September 2008 (UTC)

Hm can't see where. @Rich Farmbrough, 20:04 30 September 2008 (UTC).

Well, you might see this. —Cesar Tort 20:35, 30 September 2008 (UTC)

Five Finger Death Punch

The official chart positions of the singles: The Bleeding : #7 Never Enough : #8

Five Finger Death Punch - The Bleeding top position on Active Rock Charts was #7 proof: http://a911.ac-images.myspacecdn.com/images01/116/l_6713f8944a49e5d2f3530dc7dece4826.jpg

The second single - Never Enough - top position on Active Rock Charts were #8 proof: http://a63.ac-images.myspacecdn.com/images01/121/l_f2745bb18b3eeca4a9a52d2440fabfa6.jpg

Please stop changing it.

The albumsales: 189,896 copies Ref: Nielsen Soundscan

++ Thank You +++

Not SB making that change. Rich Farmbrough, 12:31 1 September 2008 (GMT).

embolden title

In this edit[51] to Landmark Center (St. Paul) the bot did some general fixes but failed to embolden the title (which was needed). Other examples include Orono High School and Island Station Power Plant. Thanks for your efforts!--Appraiser (talk) 16:30, 2 October 2008 (UTC)

SmackBot bug

In cases where the article title is emboldened by a self-link, your bot has been removing the self-link, thus disemboldening the title rather than emboldening it (e.g. [52],[53].) Spacepotato (talk) 17:59, 2 October 2008 (UTC)

MM yes I'm asking the AWB devs to look at this bug, and them ore general one above. Rich Farmbrough, 18:01 2 October 2008 (UTC).

Incorrect Lifetime template moves

Smackbot's edit here, which moved the Lifetime template before the categories was reverted here. The Lifetime template Usage guideline states that the Lifetime templateshould be placed after the last category, not before them. Would you please instruct Smackbot to correctly handle this, and to revert any changes that were done in error. Thanks. Truthanado (talk) 01:55, 3 October 2008 (UTC)

Useless smakbot edits

Are edits like this necessary? I thought these were discouraged as per here. 71.210.190.90 (talk) 02:10, 3 October 2008 (UTC)

Yes, but hard to avoid altogether, for the reasons in my FaQ as well as the bugs discussed above. Rich Farmbrough, 20:26 3 October 2008 (UTC).

Template:Testafd

Hi Rich. Do you still have a need for Template:Testafd? If not, please list it for deletion. Thanks. -- Suntag ☼ 00:58, 3 October 2008 (UTC)

Gone. Rich Farmbrough, 20:25 3 October 2008 (UTC).

Thanks. FYI, I found it while adding to Category:Articles for deletion templates. -- Suntag ☼ 13:46, 4 October 2008 (UTC)

Dates

[54] It missed some full dates and a number of partial dates. See also WP:AN/I#SmackBot_changing_date_formatting_in_artlces_in_violation_of_MOS Gimmetrow 12:57, 4 October 2008 (UTC)

Other cases being missed: [55] Gimmetrow 13:13, 4 October 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. Rich Farmbrough, 15:12 4 October 2008 (UTC).

Ray Parker, Jr. page

First, thank you for your edits. I take it that you are a common user who is familiar with this. I am a new user whose sources of updated information came from interviews shared with the public by Ray Parker, Jr. His original page sadly lacked updates as any musician should receive when new information becomes public so in gathering information about him and attempting to stay within Wikipedia guidelines, I have sources that I placed in however, there are still the warnings. Would you be kind enough to help me do what needs to be done in order for the page not to be deleted and it can stay 'verifiable'? Thank you

Cybdisco--Cybdisco (talk) 13:02, 4 October 2008 (UTC)

Smackbot, and blank lines before stubs

I've noticed that (whilst making other edits) Smackbot is collapsing the blank lines before stubs (for example, this edit). This seems to go against the guidance at WP:STUB:

It is usually desirable to leave two blank lines between the first stub template and whatever precedes it.

And was wondering if this is a fault with the bot, or if there is a some other guidance that says "never have two blank lines" or something? -- ratarsed (talk) 09:33, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for your message, SmackBot makes a number of changes that are available to all WP:AWB bots - in general these provide a number of non-controversial minor improvements.

The issue you raise is related to these, and has been discussed in the past [56]. I have left, or will leave, a message about your concerns on the WP:AWB pages.

Regards, Rich Farmbrough, 09:49 5 October 2008 (UTC).

Monoicous

Monoicous Bot mis-linking problems have started again. A non-English speaker began interwiki linking the articles incorrectly (again), and the bots are proliferating the same old problem again. --EncycloPetey (talk) 10:42, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

Repeated vandalism to Subsidized Housing article

Hi Rich. We need some help with this. User:68.40.143.123) continues to vandalise the Subsidized housing article and essentially it is turning into a revert war which is useless. Other editors and I remove his POV ramblings inserted into the article and he keeps re-inserting it with no discussion. Can we get some protection ? Thanks. --- (Bob) Wikiklrsc (talk) 17:19, 28 September 2008 (UTC)

Thanks, Rich, for your help on this. User:68.40.143.123 is not making coherent contributions to the article. Were he to have done so, there would be no issue. Bests. --- (Bob) Wikiklrsc (talk) 18:13, 28 September 2008 (UTC)

Rich, right after the protection was lifted, the previous vandaliser (User:68.40.143.123) resumed battering the article with the same edits which were rejected before by many people. Help ? He has been warned and editors tried to converse with him but there is no hope. --- (Bob) Wikiklrsc (talk) 16:33, 3 October 2008 (UTC)

Rich, I did read and add some books and articles by Professor Patrick Minford, as you mentioned. Thanks. --- (Bob) Wikiklrsc (talk) 01:44, 6 October 2008 (UTC)

Merge Templates

Cheers. Need to watch my typing. (Rueful smile) Ka Faraq Gatri (talk) 15:35, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

Edmond Dantès

Smackbot changed the correct spelling (Dantès) to an incorrect one (Dantes) of in a DEFAULTSORT tag for Edmond Dantès. Should it do that? --Ccady (talk) 14:32, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

Just found the same issue with Gérard de Nerval --Ccady (talk) 14:36, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

Yes it should. Otherwise Dantès, Edmond would be listed before Dantes, Andrew. Rich Farmbrough 14:43 5 October 2008 (UTC).

Isn't that a problem with the Wikipedia sorting on category pages? If Wikipedia does not change that, then I would think that it is more important to spell it right than to sort it right.--Ccady (talk) 22:26, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

But DEFAULTSORT is ONLY used for sorting, and nothing else. It was invented to work around the problem that Wikipedia sorting isn't correct in many cases, and the bug is hard enough to fix that other issues have taken priority ahead of it. Studerby (talk) 00:37, 6 October 2008 (UTC)

Smackbot: sorting

Looks like Smackbot isn't handling all the issues around apostrophes correctly. A common case is a name "X'Y" (such as O'Reilly), that sorts as "Xy" (e.g. Oreilly). Smackbot is leaving the "Y" capitalized. I can't think of case where the "Y" shouldn't be lower case; in essence, we're simulated case in-sensitive sorting by forcing each word to have a capitalized first letter and an all lower remainder. Studerby (talk) 00:50, 6 October 2008 (UTC)

Yes, I'm planning another pass to deal with Rich Farmbrough, 02:43 6 October 2008 (UTC).

Smackbot and names with ' in them

The bot is changing names like "Queen's College", which is correct, to "Queens College", which is incorrect and will get up the noses of members of that College who are always careful to get it right. It did the same with "Woman's College". I can not see a reason for it and it is wrong. --Bduke (Discussion) 21:40, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

This is purely for the purposes of sort order. It will still appear under the article title in categories, but will be sorted as if it were titled as shown in DEFAULTSORT . For many articles in many categories it will make no difference but, for example if "Jo's Boys" were sorted by the title it would come before "John Dory". Rich Farmbrough, 14:38 6 October 2008 (UTC).

Exactly, as it should. --Bduke (Discussion) 21:09, 6 October 2008 (UTC)

SmackBot is tagging and breaking redirects

I have noticed that Smackbot has been breaking redirects by tagging them as stubs and orphans. Examples of this behavior are available here, here, and here. The redirects being tagged are of the form #REDIRECT:[[target]] and date from 2004, so this may be a case of Smackbot not recognizing an old redirect syntax. --Allen3 ^talk 13:44, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

Thanks fixed. Rich Farmbrough, 14:17 7 October 2008 (UTC).

Virgin America

Virgin America Hello, I'd ask that you please not edit a page that is protected, as your recent edit in removing capitalization on the phrase 'Main Cabin' is incorrect formatting. 'Main Cabin' is the official name of the cabin per Virgin America, and therefore is a proper noun and must be capitalized. In my opinion, it is unfair to take advantage of a page protection when most users cannot make corrections to your edits. Regards, NcSchu_(Talk) 13:02, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for the comment. It's not "taking advantage" - there are over 1000 admins who can correct me, and you can leave a note here if I make a mistake and I will correct myself. If I was edit-warring on the page it would be "taking advantage". Rich Farmbrough, 15:33 7 October 2008 (UTC).

Yea you need to stop abusing your privileges with Virgin America or I am more than ready to alert other administrators to your actions! Consider yourself warned. 45Factoid44 (talk) 15:29, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

Oh for heaven's sake, if it's a problem I'd self-revert, left a talk page note. Rich Farmbrough, 15:33 7 October 2008 (UTC).

P.S. Neither of you asked me to revert my edit, that was what was needed. Since you didn't I almost assumed that it had been done by someone else - I have reverted. Rich Farmbrough, 16:17 7 October 2008 (UTC).

Sorry, I was just trying to hint towards it, without yelling at you to revert or something. I just look at 1000 out of the millions of non-admin editors as a very small proportion of the editing population. NcSchu_(Talk) 18:41, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

OK. Don't tell anyone (:-) but most of those millions of accounts have never edited, and many are thought to be mass created vandals.Rich Farmbrough, 18:44 7 October 2008 (UTC).

AfD nomination of Texline Independent School District

An article that you have been involved in editing, Texline Independent School District, has been listed for deletion. If you are interested in the deletion discussion, please participate by adding your comments at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Texline Independent School District. Thank you. Do you want to opt out of receiving this notice? Whenaxis (talk) 23:03, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

Clarify -> Confusing

Hi, just writing regarding the recent edit SmackBot made to PRINCE2. I added a 'Clarify' tag (inline), to which SmackBot correctly added a pipe and date, but it changed '{{Clarify}}' to '{{Confusing}}' which is not inline, leaving a banner in the middle of a paragraph. I've reverted 'Confusing' to 'Clarify' and left the pipe. Cheers, Millstream3 (talk) 09:58, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

Thanks, and oh buggerit. Rich Farmbrough, 10:29 8 October 2008 (UTC).

The redirect was changed.. sigh. Rich Farmbrough, 10:32 8 October 2008 (UTC).

British dates

Incidentally these are not British dates, they are used by extensively in the UK and less extensively in the US (my estimates 85%-95% and 30-40% respectively).

Hi,

I don't think changing dates to British format (day, then month) automatically is a good idea, since it affects even pages that should go the other way, as was recently done in Project for the New American Century. Maybe the bot can somehow sense which way the dates go on a page it's editing, and stick with that one? Korny O'Near (talk) 16:33, 6 October 2008 (UTC)

Yeah, that's definitely broken. It is correctly removing the wikilinks, but it shouldn't be changing the order. e.g.:

• [[May 30]], [[2007]] → 30 May 2007

should be

• [[May 30]], [[2007]] → May 30, 2007

Also, this seems like dup work that at least one other bot is doing (but doing correctly). —Danorton (talk) 19:45, 6 October 2008 (UTC)

FYI, I just now fixed the damage to Project for the New American Century from the bot and manually did what the bot should have done. —Danorton (talk) 20:08, 6 October 2008 (UTC)

Well that article did contain four international dates, calling it damage is going a bit strong. Rich Farmbrough, 22:51 6 October 2008 (UTC).

I fixed what I trust is the last 2 date errors that were related to the bot's edits in that article. Considering the amount of edits it has taken to make correct what the bot did, the term "damage" seems to be a valid use of the word. Don't be so defensive, Rich. Bots should help. When they don't, people have a right to complain. Truthanado (talk) 00:10, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

There's a revert button. Rich Farmbrough, 09:51 7 October 2008 (UTC).

For the record, there were over 100 dates in that article that were jumbled by the bot. Saying "there's a revert button" is like saying "just press delete" in response to spam. Such errors are disruptive and most article readers aren't editors. —Danorton (talk) 00:26, 9 October 2008 (UTC)

No it's not. One click on the revert button would have undone all those changes to dates whether there were 100 or 1000 of them. Rich Farmbrough, 08:49 9 October 2008 (UTC).

Nonetheless sorry to have put you to trouble, and your suggestion in the original post is appreciated. Rich Farmbrough, 08:57 9 October 2008 (UTC).

Dab pages

Just noticing that Smackbot has created a number of redirects over the last couple of days, in the format "XXXX (disambiguation)", which redirects to "XXXX". I was wondering if there's a particular project or initiative that this is in support of? Taking an interest only because dab clean up is a primary focus for me. Thanks! Mlaffs (talk) 02:36, 10 October 2008 (UTC)

Totally-disputed-section in Math equations

SmackBot was stopped a few days ago with the complaint that it had inserted {{Totally-disputed-section}} templates into Math equations. The bot has since been restarted, but I don't see any evidence that this problem was addressed. —Danorton (talk) 18:06, 10 October 2008 (UTC)

It is probably best to direct follow up on this incident to Dicklyon (talk). —Danorton (talk) 18:56, 10 October 2008 (UTC)

Yes, thanks for the response, Rich. Is it fixed now? I also reported it for vandalism, for the heck of it. Dicklyon (talk) 20:02, 10 October 2008 (UTC)

It's fixed as I said on your talk page. Ptolemy's theorem was the only page affected by this somewhat obscure bug out of hundreds of thousands of edits where it was present. Note that AIV is for ongoing problems. Rich Farmbrough, 21:49 10 October 2008 (UTC).

SmackBot

Hi Rich - any reason why SmackBot is marking redirects as stubs? Grutness...wha? 23:44, 10 October 2008 (UTC)

SmackBot: An Airman's Letter to His Mother

An Airman's Letter to His Mother Hi, just want to point out that the bot erroneously changed the default sort for this article from "Airman's Letter to His Mother, An" to "Airmans Letter to His Mother, An", dropping the possessive apostrophe. [57] Ed Fitzgerald ^{t / c} 23:18, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

That's correct sorting. Apostrophe's aren't used in sorting. Studerby (talk) 00:50, 6 October 2008 (UTC)

Why is it correct sorting? In many cases it is changing a name to something that is incorrect. --Bduke (Discussion) 01:10, 6 October 2008 (UTC)

What Studerby's saying is that the bot {{DEFAULTSORT}} modification doesn't affect how the name displays, only how it sorts in a list. But, as I point out below, it messes up the sorting, too. —Danorton (talk) 04:51, 6 October 2008 (UTC)

It's correct sorting for some things but it's not for many others. Consider this example list:

• Stephen's Academy
• Stephen's University
• Stephens School

Removing all apostrophes results in this incorrect ordering:

• Stephen's Academy
• Stephens School
• Stephen's University

Removing apostrophes puts things in the wrong natural order. The purpose is to remove things that don't affect natural order, but removing all apostrophes incorrectly affects the order.

"Stephen" (and "Stephen's") is a different name from and should appear before "Stephens".

The bot is doing the wrong thing. If it's following guidelines, stop the bot from doing that particular wrong thing while I fix the guidelines. —Danorton (talk) 04:36, 6 October 2008 (UTC)

How to treat apostrophes in sorting is conventional. Many reference publications, such as the online Encyclopedia Britannica, have chosen the convention that apostrophes are treated as if they are not there, when sorting article titles. (See for example that "Queens College" falls between "Queen's Chamber" and "Queen's Counsel" in their online index.)

The online Merriam-Webster dictionary has made a similar yet different choice, ignoring both apostrophes and spaces, as you can see for yourself.

Wikipedia has chosen the same sorting convention, to ignore apostrophes when sorting, but the only current mechanism to do this is an explicit sort key. In other words, the sort ordering you deem "incorrect" is correct.

The fact that ASCII-based sorting (or UTF-8-based sorting, which the wiki software uses) gives a different order is irrelevant. Studerby (talk) 16:51, 9 October 2008 (UTC)

You write: "Wikipedia has chosen the same sorting convention..." Where, exactly, does Wikipedia indicate that it has chosen this convention? (We should move this discussion there if the history there doesn't show that these specific issues were considered.) —Danorton (talk) 17:59, 9 October 2008 (UTC)

Rich, these links might be helpful to point people at:

• Wikipedia:CAT#Category sorting (especially Wikipedia:CAT#Other specifics)
• Wikipedia:Categorization of people#Ordering names in a category.

Will drop a note off to the others who commented here. Carcharoth (talk) 15:44, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

List_of_Wikipedians_by_number_of_edits

Hi Rich Farmbrough,

Greetings!

I just say your message here. Is it possible to generate a similar list for Malayalam wikipedia. http://ml.wikipedia.org/. --Shijualex (talk) 10:28, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

Thank you. I am looking forward to see that :) --Shijualex (talk) 17:37, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

DEFAULTSORT and other biographical metadata

Hi there. I noticed a few days (weeks?) ago, your bot doing DEFAULTSORT stuff (and I commented above on the sorting stuff), but would you be interested in Wikipedia:Biographical metadata? In particular, if there is stuff I've missed, I'd be grateful if you could help expand it. There is also some discussion on the talk page. Also, are you aware of {{Lifetime}}, which has DEFAULTSORT filled in as a parameter? How does your bot handle that? Carcharoth (talk) 15:51, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

You put defaultsort in all biog articles? Hmph! Wish I'd known that. I've been moaning that lots of articles lacked defaultsort! :-) The merging is a no-brainer. How to do it and get people to adapt to a new system is harder. One thing I think is that editors should always have the option to just type in plain text. It can be a big barrier to editing if people hit "edit" and are faced with a mass of templates. Maybe someone will think of something. Carcharoth (talk) 00:04, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

Hao Wang (academic) (disambiguation)

Why did SmackBot create a redirect under this name? --Metropolitan90 (talk) 13:23, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

Gary Young edits

Hi Rich,

I made several edits to comply with your advertisement image that was placed.

Thanks for the feedback - I think the new edits I made make it more editorial in nature.

Thanks!

Rich Nelson —Preceding unsigned comment added by Ragesteel (talk • contribs) 14:19, 9 October 2008 (UTC)

Rich - Could you take a look at the article again and see if it now qualifies for removal of that "advertisement" image. If it does not - please let me know what specifically I can do to make it more unbiased - I think it reads pretty well now -- your comments are appreciated -- thanks! —Preceding unsigned comment added by Ragesteel (talk • contribs) 15:22, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

Pectus edits

Hey Rich,

Sorry it took me so long to get back to you. I looked at the page recently, and it looks good, but I haven't gone back in the history to check specifically what you or others have done so far. Thanks for your help. --Seth Goldin (talk) 21:41, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

AWB

Hey how come you;ve suddenly become so active again!!! Your edit count seemd to have stabilised on 175,000 for ages but now it seems you are using AWB to make 500 edits ever half hour. You'll be doubling that count pretty soon!! Blofeld of SPECTRE (talk) 00:28, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

Yes. The reason I said was that everytime I patrolled the recent changes your name was appearing several times a minute!! Blofeld of SPECTRE (talk) 08:22, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

Digital divide

Hello Rich. Recently, User:Aacarling made an edit to the Digital divide article putting in a "hall of fame" by Certiport for people who "help out with digital literacy". Certiport are a commercial company involved in selling certification exams. Is it proper to have that award in the article ? Also, that user has made Digital literacy sound a bit like an advert to Certiport ? If you would have a look that would be appreciated. Bests. --- (Bob) Wikiklrsc (talk) 23:30, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

Thanks, Rich, for your help as always. --- (Bob) Wikiklrsc (talk) 14:24, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

Reducing Smackbot's load

Sometimes it seems like half the edits I see on my watchlist are from Smackbot, cleaning up after people. That's bothersome because it means that I have to look at the history to see the edit, and it increases the amount of edits that I have to scroll through in history (hiding minor edits is sometimes bad because people abuse it). At least one thing should be done: Smackbot should not need to capitalize fact to Fact. There's no reason for this to be case-sensitive. Further, I'm not sure these things even need to be dated, or that {{cn}} needs to be replaced. II | (t - c) 03:16, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

You can hide Bot edits. The reason that SB canonicalises templates is that there are hundreds of templates that need dating, an each may have many redirects. Furthermore the vatiants in syntax make things more complex still E.G. __: _ _Template _ _: _ Citation__ __needed SB is attracted to pages by there membership of a hidden undated category - such as "Category:Category needed" or "Articles with unreferenced statements". Once the tags are dated articles are in a dated category (see here for a liste). In general SB is unlikely to change capitalisation unless it is also dating a tag, see my FAQ for more on this. Rich Farmbrough, 14:04 16 October 2008 (UTC).

Changes on Munax

Thank you for editing the page about Munax. Would you please keep as much as possible of the original text, and keep it in it's original section, that would be great. Thanks! —Preceding unsigned comment added by Rick.nolan (talk • contribs) 13:10, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

Something's fishy here. Rich Farmbrough did not edit the page at all. What are you trying to say? - CobaltBlueTony™ _talk 13:40, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

SmackBot did. Rich Farmbrough, 15:32 16 October 2008 (UTC).

SmackBot: R to disambiguation

See this edit. Here, a template link to {{R to disambiguation}} (which is a redirect) was already defined. +mt 14:40, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

Thanks, fixed. Rich Farmbrough, 15:20 16 October 2008 (UTC).

r to dab/disambiguation/disambiguation page

Hi, A whole lot of your edits have just appeared on my watchlist, being pages where I'd put {{R to disambiguation}} wrongly instead of {{R to disambiguation page}}. But looking now at your contribs list, and investigating, leads me to find that {{r to dab}} is all that I need to type as it redirects to the full version, so I'll type that minimal amount from now on when creating these redirects! Always something new to learn on WP. Cheers, PamD (talk) 16:01, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

Yes, they're all fine. I'm only replacing them because there's only a few of the redirects, and I'm labelling a load of them, don't want to label them twice. Rich Farmbrough, 16:51 16 October 2008 (UTC).

Stubbed and orphaned

Hi. Your bot recently marked Sleep log as an orphan in category:stub. I agree, and I'm guilty. I stubbed and orphaned it a while back, in favor of Sleep diary, after discussion on someone-or-other's talk page. Very unprofessional, I know. Sleep log should be a redirect to Sleep diary, but I don't know how to do that without losing history. --Hordaland (talk) 16:49, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

I simply replaced the text. The history of sleep diary should show where anything was merged in, and the history of sleep log is intact. Rich Farmbrough, 17:03 17 October 2008 (UTC).

"Simply", as in magically.  :-) Thanks very much! --Hordaland (talk) 11:16, 18 October 2008 (UTC)

SmaxkBot tagging redirect as stub

Shome mishtake? Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 11:51, 18 October 2008 (UTC)

Same thing here Basement12 (T.C) 11:54, 18 October 2008 (UTC)

And here. I'm going to ask for a temporary block. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 12:03, 18 October 2008 (UTC)

French commune infoboxes

Hi. We have a large back log of French commune articles to add the infoboxes from French wikipedia Status check. All that needs doing is copying the infobox directly from the French wikipedia equivalent. Please see Vulaines. All that needs doing for each article is cutting and pasting the infobox from French wiki into every article which must be bot compatible. So for Vulaines all it requires is pasting the infobox into it from here and pasting it into the english wiki article. COuld somebody please programme a bot or use some form of coding to help complete the task in hours rather than months? Blofeld of SPECTRE (talk) 11:48, 18 October 2008 (UTC)

Redirect code change

This edit and other similar ones weren't necessary, as the redirect worked fine before. (See User:NE2/testing for a test with the colon.) --NE2 03:34, 19 October 2008 (UTC)

Yes I know, but the unexpected colon trips up a number of pieces of software, including WP:AWB; simple to get rid of them. Rich Farmbrough, 03:37 19 October 2008 (UTC).

OK - I didn't realize it screwed with AWB (though that should probably be filed as a bug). I do wonder why you lowercased the "redirect". --NE2 03:38, 19 October 2008 (UTC)

Sentence cased - doesn't really signify - guess I don't like SHOUTING. Yes it should be filed as a bug, I may have done - as the colon is a surprise, it broke at least one other piece of software. Rich Farmbrough, 03:43 19 October 2008 (UTC).

Assistance requested dealing with a new user

Rich - the other day I came across some editing problems created by a new user (User:Samanthadecanta), and have attempted to fix things. The situation was this - there previously was a page for "Darren Meade", an Irish soccer player. This new user insists that his name should be spelled "Darren Mead", so she just took over the existing Darren Meade page to create a bio for someone else (a bodybuilder) - wiping out the bio for the soccer player entirely. I made a DAB page at Darren Meade, restored the soccer player's bio at Darren Meade (soccer), and put the bodybuilder's page at Darren Meade (bodybuilder). I thought I should communicate with this new user to let her know why wiping out the old page was a bad idea, so I started a discussion on her talk page. Among other things, I'm trying to get the proper name for the soccer player straightened out. As you can see, I have cited a bunch of sources that confirm that the soccer player's name is "Darren Meade", and a search for "Darren Mead" only seemed to turn up references to an Australian Rules football player (who also has a WP entry). However, this user insists that she is right, and claims that she doesn't have to provide a citation to support her claim since I am not a paid employee of Wikipedia. So far, the only "source" she has provided that supports her claim is a Wikipedia entry at Meade (surname); her second link (to a newspaper article) is again referring to the Australian guy.

In any case, I'm trying to avoid "biting the newbie", but my suggestions to become familiar with standard Wikipedia procedure are clearly falling on deaf ears (since I lack "authority"). My concern isn't so much who's right or wrong regarding the name, but more the attitude - an apparent unwillingness to learn and follow standard WP policies and procedures, a closed mind when it comes to discussing a disagreement (it's simply "I'm right, no matter what sources prove otherwise"), and no interest in accepting suggestions or input from other users (unless they're "paid Wikipedia employess" with "authority") So perhaps a friendly suggestion or two from an admin might help. Thanks, Fbb_fan fbb_fan (talk) 04:25, 19 October 2008 (UTC)

edits on Dept Plant Sciences, Oxford

I saw you made some minor edits to the page I created for the Dept. Plant Sciences, Oxford. Thanks.

I wondered if you could help in making the page appear properly in the category page though as I notice it does not appear under 'P' but loose at the top of the category page? [[

Category:Departments_of_the_University_of_Oxford

]]

Any ideas - would love to know why.

earthtree (talk) 17:01, 19 October 2008 (UTC)

(Fixed)Rich Farmbrough, 19:27 21 October 2008 (UTC).

Redirect tags

The bot seems to be tagging some redirects which do have a redirect template, as here. It seems like it's because of the template's location. — TAnthony^Talk 19:21, 20 October 2008 (UTC)

Actually it was a different circumstance - tags that had been added recently and weren't "R to disambi.." ones/ BUt fixed now anyway. Thanks. Rich Farmbrough 00:16 21 October 2008 (UTC).

SmackBot List of mystics

[58] on List of mystics looks like an error --Rumping (talk) 22:28, 20 October 2008 (UTC)

[59] too, so there may be more --Rumping (talk) 22:33, 20 October 2008 (UTC)

[60] [61] so there is a systematic problem. --Rumping (talk) 22:40, 20 October 2008 (UTC)

I now think I know what is happening. If Smackbot comes across an article saying

#redirect [[:Category|Test pages]]

it changes it into

#redirect [[:Category|Test pages]] {{R to other namespace}}

but if it comes across

#redirect [[Category|Test pages]]

it changes it into

#redirect {{R to other namespace}}

 

[[Category|Test pages]]

which breaks the redirect badly. So it all depends on the colon before Category, which is desirable but not essential as its absence only leads to the article title being listed in the category it redirects to. --Rumping (talk) 22:59, 20 October 2008 (UTC)

Yes you are right. But the colon before the category isn't necessarily desireable (so I can't just put them in) because sometimes you want to list the redirect: arguably you should then have an explicit cat as well. So the solution is simply turn off the minor fixes whic do this moving, and review the last 500 coross-space redirects of which only a small percentage will have categories. Thanks again for letting me know. Rich Farmbrough 00:15 21 October 2008 (UTC).

Date in infobox templates

Hi,

Did you get anywhere with the conversion of release/ foundation/ start dates in infoboxes, to use {{Start date}}? I've compiled a list of relevant templates at User:Pigsonthewing/to-do#Date conversions. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 22:38, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

Nudge. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 18:40, 21 October 2008 (UTC)

SmackBot incorrect edits in the Help namespace

Based on recent contributions, it's tagging any redirects in the Help: namespace as {{R to other namespace}} even when they aren't. This could be an issue with the way most of the substantive contents are pushed from Meta, but I don't know for certain. I posted on the bot talk page to stop it, but I'm not going to be around, so feel free to restart without trying to reply to me, as long as the tagging issue is fixed. — Gavia immer (talk) 16:33, 21 October 2008 (UTC)

Yep got it thanks. Easy to fix, just odd that it was picking up those redirects in the first place. Still it's a one-off run pretty much. Rich Farmbrough, 18:29 21 October 2008 (UTC).

Gotcha, thanks for the quick action. — Gavia immer (talk) 21:42, 21 October 2008 (UTC)

SmackBot namespace edits

What's happening with these edits? First one looks like an error, and the second a fix of the first edit, that introduces a separate syntax error.

BTW, file me under the list of people who find it odd that SB's changing the case of redirects, and indeed finds "sentence case" in that context rather odd in the first place. Alai (talk) 02:55, 22 October 2008 (UTC)

The first is a systemic error that affected a relatively small number of redirects: basically a small percentage of those that had a : in the title and weren;t cross namespace. The second is simply a manually overseen fix of the first, in this case intervention by me introduced a bug, which I picked up shortly afterwards. Scanning now for any more like this. Rich Farmbrough, 09:47 22 October 2008 (UTC).

SmackBot

malfunction. garbles text containing HTTP. see: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_HTTP_headers&diff=246864819&oldid=246445274 —Preceding unsigned comment added by 194.154.205.47 (talk) 10:46, 22 October 2008 (UTC)

SmackBot: Date maintenance tags and general fixes

SmackBot has now twice (one, two) changed the format of a bulleted list which extended over four paragraphs in the article Nigger. According to Help:List#Paragraphs in lists, using the HTML tags <p>…</p> is the only way to format such paragraphs in lists. Please modify SmackBot to allow such constructs. Michael Bednarek (talk) 11:52, 22 October 2008 (UTC)

SmackBot issue

Hi Rich, just noticed that SmackBot is interfering with links in merger tags, as seen here. I'm not sure why it is inserting the date into that tag, perhaps you could take a look at it. I did fix that page, but I don't know if it is doing that to all the merger tags or not. Cheers! Ariel♥Gold 00:22, 23 October 2008 (UTC)

User talk:Samanthadecanta

Rich - I've been attempting (with little success, I'm afraid) to help User talk:Samanthadecanta get her feet on the ground here. She's the one who was the primary editor of the "Darren Meade (bodybuilder)" page that was recently the subject of a AFD discussion. I believe you did a speedy delete on the page, but she recreated it, and User:Uncle G deleted it the second time. Anyway, on her talk page, she is now threatening legal action because of the perceived wrongs that have been committed against her. She is alleging religious persecution (believe it or not), and is also making allegations of a variety of inappropriate actions by other editors (which have no basis in reality, from what I can see in edit histories). Anyway, I'm starting to run out of ways to tactfully help her out, and I thought you might, as one of the alleged offending individuals, want to be aware of the threat for legal action. 71.233.6.118 (talk) 01:45, 23 October 2008 (UTC)

Don't edit posts I made.

as you have done. Thanks, --------71.10.88.69 (talk) 02:21, 23 October 2008 (UTC)

This is needful: see {{fact}} and the categories associated with it. Rich Farmbrough, 02:49 23 October 2008 (UTC).

Ok, But still. I'm not going to add date=October 2008, because it's faster to just type fact. {{fact}} {{fact}} that was a test. to see if they do the same thing.03:25, 23 October 2008 (UTC)03:25, 23 October 2008 (UTC)03:25, 23 October 2008 (UTC)03:25, 23 October 2008 (UTC)03:25, 23 October 2008 (UTC)~ <<<It's only seeming to add the date for my sig, not my IP address

• I prefer it for you (everyone) just to add {{fact}} as I spend a fair amount of time fixing up mistyped dates etc. The robot makes our life easier which is good.
• If you go to "my preferences" and the misc tag you will see a bunch of check-boxes. If you check the bottom one "Show hidden categories" and press save you will see that the pages with these tags on are categorised according to the date.
• Signing - 3 4 and 5 tildes - ~~~ ~~~~ ~~~~~ - leave name, name and date, and date respectively.

Rgds, Rich Farmbrough, 11:04 23 October 2008 (UTC).

SmackBot and shortcuts

I just noticed that your bot has started to edit the CAT: shortcuts. See for instance this edit. There are two odd things about those edits:

1: Your bot adds the template {{R to other namespace}}. At a first glance that might seem correct, but I think it is wrong. The "CAT:" prefix is the standard prefix for shortcuts to categories. But now that your bot adds the {{R to other namespace}} template to them they get added to the Category:Cross namespace redirects. That category helps us keep track of and find cross namespace redirects. One reason to keep track of them is that many of the cross namespace redirects are considered a problem and needs fixing. But the CAT: shortcuts are correct and don't need to be fixed. Thus if you fill up Category:Cross namespace redirects with them you just make it harder to see the redirects that really need handling in that category. But it is of course good that your bot finds other cross namespace redirects for us. Although I recommend not adding that template to the prefixes listed at Wikipedia:Shortcut#List of prefixes.

2: Your bot changes all upper-case #REDIRECT [[]] tags to lower-case #Redirect [[]] tags. Both works, but pretty much all documentation here at Wikipedia and at Meta shows that tag in upper-case. And the redirect insert buttons in the edit window also inserts it as all upper-case. So it is unnecessary and confusing to change it to lower-case, and it breaches tradition.

Those two things are of course only minor issues, really mostly just a matter of opinion. But I suggest you change your bot's behaviour.

--David Göthberg (talk) 11:51, 23 October 2008 (UTC)

1. Probably the best thing to do with these is move CAT:, WP: into a subcategory, membership to be transcluded by {{R from shortcut}}. This can be done automatically or manually.
2. I turned off sentence casing yesterday - putting REDIRECT instead , but found that most of the items were "redirect" - as you say it does not matter greatly, but I prefer as much WP-ease (template names, style on talk pages/documentation etc.) to be sentence case and full words as it creates a conducive environment for reducing the amount of work fixing article MoS problems. I may tweak this to only change lower-case to sentence case.

Thanks for your note. Rich Farmbrough, 12:01 23 October 2008 (UTC).

1: Oh, using a subcategory for the cross namespace shortcuts is a splendid idea! But note that the "WP:" prefix is an alias (abbreviation) for the "Wikipedia:" namespace, it is not a pseudo-namespaces that ends up in main space like the CAT: and MOS: prefixes. So they work differently. And a template (like for instance {{R from shortcut}}) can not automatically detect if a shortcut is a cross namespace shortcut, and it can not even detect if the page name starts with "CAT:" or "MOS:". So it can not automatically categorise accordingly. That has to be done by humans or a bot that adds the subcategory or a special template (or a parameter to a template) that in turn adds the subcategory.

2: Yeah, just a matter of opinion. And I don't have that much of an opinion on the matter.

--David Göthberg (talk) 12:29, 23 October 2008 (UTC)

WP: YEs I remembered that after I posted.. "template cannot.. detect" I can't keep up with which parser functions are implemented, but that sounds like a challenge! (To our template gurus - I hasten to add.) Rich Farmbrough, 12:34 23 October 2008 (UTC).

SmackBot

Can you review my edit on Angel Locsin. Thanks! Backmeupof2 (talk) 05:46, 24 October 2008 (UTC)

Moving Template:Infobox German Location

I noticed you moved the {{Infobox German Location}} to {{Infobox German location}}. Now, I'm not terribly well versed in these things, but it seems to me the pages Template:Infobox_German_Location/doc and Template:Infobox German Location/Instructions also need to be moved. Michael Bednarek (talk) 11:53, 24 October 2008 (UTC)

Thanks done. Rich Farmbrough, 11:58 24 October 2008 (UTC).

SmackBot

You've made an error in this edit http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Publication&diff=247515709&oldid=247502345

You've changed the mergeto target to be the Talk page, and changed the discussion page to be a Talk:Talk: page.

I left a msg at the bot page first, sorry. Nurg (talk) 03:13, 25 October 2008 (UTC)

PS. I have fixed the error, but I think you need to check the bot's operation in cases like that. Nurg (talk) 03:25, 25 October 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. It's absolutely right to stop the bot when this sort of stuff happens. I can restart any time, but fixing errors can be tedious. Rich Farmbrough, 03:48 25 October 2008 (UTC).

Fixed. Rich Farmbrough, 03:57 25 October 2008 (UTC).

Redirects

I've just come across Shin Min-a (actress) (disambiguation), and was wondering why SmackBot would create such a pointless redirect. I wasn't sure what the rationale was or whether this is part of a series of newly created redirects, so I wanted to check before I listed it at RfD. Regards. PC78 (talk) 13:25, 25 October 2008 (UTC)

I've deleted it since the target isn't a dab page. Rich Farmbrough, 16:29 25 October 2008 (UTC).

Cheers! PC78 (talk) 16:31, 25 October 2008 (UTC)

Cleanup templates

Thanks for your mentioning on my talk page, 23 Oct. 2008, that clean-up templates are, most often, best not substituted. On a rare occasion I might use the template result and edit it, where it doesn't quite fit. May I asked what occasioned your comment? --Bejnar (talk) 22:15, 25 October 2008 (UTC)

SmackBot removing a stub tag

Not sure what happened here. Was this stub tag meant to have been removed? Chris Cunningham (not at work) - talk 23:23, 26 October 2008 (UTC)

Template:Irrel

Wow. That's way back. :) I closed it as delete, got browbeaten by a few users and decided to relist it instead. It ended up being deleted the second go round. --Woohookitty^Woohoo! 11:56, 27 October 2008 (UTC)

Angel Locsin

Can you help me to put this image "Angel-Locsin.jpg" on Angel Locsin?, Thank you!. Traders 21 (talk) 08:33, 29 October 2008 (UTC)

Your bot

Hello, Mr. Farmbrough. Regarding this edit, that your bot made, I think I've found a glitch in it. If I put in ~~~~~ instead of the date, it makes a second parameter, which doesn't quite work as Template:Fact only has one parameter.--Stereotyper (talk) 18:12, 29 October 2008 (UTC)

So 3 tides make just Name (71.10.88.69 (talk)), 4 makes name and date (71.10.88.69 (talk) 03:50, 24 October 2008 (UTC)), and 5 make name date and time (03:50, 24 October 2008 (UTC))? Correct?

Cleanup templates

Thanks re note. I keep being nagged by bots to use "subst", but I didn't understand where it is/isn't recommended (hence the accident with Norman Cota). Gordonofcartoon (talk) 14:12, 30 October 2008 (UTC)

SmackBot

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Wilcox_(Canadian_musician)

Dear Richard - you seem to have edited out historic, accurate, and previously posted information - including my album credits! Kosenrufu (talk) 18:50, 30 October 2008 (UTC)

I think not. Rich Farmbrough, 21:58 30 October 2008 (UTC).

SmackBot making unnecessary edits

SmackBot seems to be making edits solely to capitalize the first letter of the template name ({{fact|date=Nov...}} to {{Fact|date=Nov...}}, as seen here. Seems a waste to me. --Sable232 (talk) 02:18, 1 November 2008 (UTC)

See my User:Rich_Farmbrough/FAQ#SmackBot_capitalised_a_tag.2C_and_made_no_other_changes._Why.3F FAQ, in this case reason 4.3 applies - the article was in Category:Articles_with_invalid_date_parameter_in_template as Category:Articles with unsourced statements since November 2008 was not created until after that run began. Rich Farmbrough, 12:07 1 November 2008 (UTC).

Wikipedia's Expert Peer Review process (or lack of such) for Science related articles

Hi - I posted the section with the same name on my talk page. Could you take part in discussion ? Thanks ARP Apovolot (talk) 22:37, 25 October 2008 (UTC)

User: Shotwell suggested (on my talk page) "I would endorse a WP:EXPERTADVICE page that outlined the wikipedia policies and goals for researchers in a way that enticed them to edit here in an appropriate fashion. Perhaps a well-maintained list of expert editors with institutional affiliation would facilitate this sort of highly informal review process. I don't think anyone would object to a well-maintained list of highly-qualified researchers with institutional affiliation (but then again, everyone seems to object to something)."

We could start with that if you would agree ... - could you help to push his idea through Wikipedia bureaucracy ? Apovolot (talk) 16:25, 1 November 2008 (UTC)

Bot request for the bot expert (you)...

You know more about bots and editing than anyone else I know, so I've got my fingers crossed that you can help me...

Can you use one of your bots, or create one, to pull a piece of data from one set of pages and place it on another set of pages?

What I've got are two items on a bunch of pages that need to be filled in.

One is

"Population: "

And the other is

"Size: "

These need to be filled in on the pages listed at User:The Transhumanist/Country list. The items to be filled in are in the "Geography of x" section (where "x" is the name of the respective country).

A few of them are already filled in. (I hope that doesn't present any problems).

The data is located in the infobox on the corresponding country articles.

Is this something you could do?

If so, it would sure save a lot of man hours. I don't currently have access to a machine upon which I could use macros or learn and apply Python, and I'd really like to avoid having to do these chores manually.

I requested bot approval at Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/Worldbot and was told that these tasks don't need bot approval - we can just go ahead and create and use bots on 'em.

The desired format for the data is presented at Topic outline of Algeria#Geography of Algeria, Topic outline of France#Geography of France and Topic outline of Germany#Geography of Germany.

I look forward to your reply.

The Transhumanist    23:37, 1 November 2008 (UTC)

SmackBot-created page error?

Good evening. In this edit, SmackBot created a redirect. From the edit summary, this was apparently a naming standardization. The redirect was recently proposed for deletion, causing several people to dig into the history. We can't figure out why SmackBot created the page. The target has never been a disambiguation page that I can tell (and I checked a fair number of edits on either side of the creation timestamp. Can you shed any light on why this redirect would have been created? Thanks. Rossami (talk) 03:24, 3 November 2008 (UTC)

Deleting my comments

Hi Rich - any reason why you deleted my comments here? Grutness...wha? 05:30, 3 November 2008 (UTC)

Sorry, mistake. Rich Farmbrough, 12:19 3 November 2008 (UTC).

S'alright. Thought as much. I trust you too much as an editor to think you'd go around doing that sort of thing deliberately - you're one of the good guys :) Grutness...wha? 22:17, 3 November 2008 (UTC)

Expand- smackbot

Do we not use {{Expand|Date=November 2008}} any more? Thanks. --DerRichter (talk) 23:02, 3 November 2008 (UTC)

Bot (mis)correcting HTTP/ to http://?

I may have got this wrong, but from what I can see, SmackBot changed HTTP/1.1 to http://1.1 on HTTP_ETag. I'm just letting you know in case that's a bug. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.33.61.156 (talk) 14:33, 4 November 2008 (UTC)

Smackbot edit to Civitan International

With this edit, smackbot changed the publication date of a journal cited in a reference tag. SU Linguist (talk) 21:36, 4 November 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for that. Shows how easy it is to be tripped up, people were dating clean-up tags with seasons, and I put the season to month conversion in the same place as the month spelling errors. Of course it needs to be specific to clean-up tags only. Rich Farmbrough, 23:06 4 November 2008 (UTC).

Bot error?

Hi Rich. What's up with SmackBot changing "a_1" to "a 1" here? Paul August ☎ 22:26, 4 November 2008 (UTC)

It's AWB assuming the the text following a {{ is a template name, and applying some standard rules to it. Hard to fix but I'll drop a note. Rich Farmbrough, 02:51 5 November 2008 (UTC).

Secret Supper

Hey Robot dude, Im happyjord11 and im extremely thankful for your edits on my article on The Secret Supper. Im relatively new to WikiPedia, and creating and editing articles, as I am only 12 years of age. I don't know very much about what the Wiki Jargon means, and I sort of need some help,

Any helpful tips and hints would be much appreciated.

Thanks again,

Happyjord11

(Happyjord11 (talk) 06:35, 6 November 2008 (UTC))

New title for 2008 attack at Beijing Drum Tower during Olympics

• I have set up a poll to vote on the new name of the article. Please go to the talk page. Ohconfucius (talk) 06:56, 6 November 2008 (UTC)

No content in Category:Articles with dead external links since October 2006

Hello, this is a message from an automated bot. A tag has been placed on Category:Articles with dead external links since October 2006, by another Wikipedia user, requesting that it be speedily deleted from Wikipedia. The tag claims that it should be speedily deleted because Category:Articles with dead external links since October 2006 has been empty for at least four days, and its only content has been links to parent categories. (CSD C1).

To contest the tagging and request that administrators wait before possibly deleting Category:Articles with dead external links since October 2006, please affix the template {{hangon}} to the page, and put a note on its talk page. If the article has already been deleted, see the advice and instructions at WP:WMD. Feel free to contact the bot operator if you have any questions about this or any problems with this bot, bearing in mind that this bot is only informing you of the nomination for speedy deletion; it does not perform any nominations or deletions itself. To see the user who deleted the page, click here CSDWarnBot (talk) 07:50, 7 November 2008 (UTC)

cross namespace redirects

You bot got a bit confused; don't know how many more of those there are but it probably isn't the only one -- Gurch (talk) 16:03, 7 November 2008 (UTC)

Hmm indeed. I started checking, and will finish soon. Rich Farmbrough, 04:40 9 November 2008 (UTC).

SmackBot broke encoding

The replacement [62] was wrong: it converted Osmanya codes to codes from the Cyrillic block.--Imz (talk) 18:18, 8 November 2008 (UTC)

SmackBot

In the article Life of Pi, this bot changed a heading "===Tone===" to --> "===Tone = ==". Probably a glitch? WinterSpw (talk) 20:04, 8 November 2008 (UTC)

Thanks fixed. Rich Farmbrough, 04:39 9 November 2008 (UTC).

HTML comments as Category headers

It appears Smackbot is treating HTML comments as article text when moving comments to the bottom, resulting in category "headers" being floated out from between the categories. See Diocese of Quincy diff. I've put a couple of the comments on the same lines to avoid this now, but there are probably some other articles where this situation arises also, and WP:COMMENT doesn't address whether or not to do that. (HTML comments on Wikipedia are mostly used for circumstances that are unusual in the first place, I suppose.) I'm not sure what the fix would be, other than to consider comments between categories (or just before categories) to indicate grouping somehow; but I figure I'd give you a heads-up. --Closeapple (talk) 19:59, 10 November 2008 (UTC)

Names of Finnish municipalities

Hi Rich, I didn't quite understand this move. Has the MoS been changed recently? As far as I can see, most other Finnish names are spelled properly with their ä's and ö's on the English Wikipedia. In Finnish, ä and ö are independent letters, and in some cases you may get a completely different meaning if you omit the dots. --Silvonen (talk) 07:00, 11 November 2008 (UTC)

Date in infobox templates

Hi,

Did you get anywhere with the conversion of release/ foundation/ start dates in infoboxes, to use {{Start date}} (see also my earlier note)? If you're not able to oblige, please let me know, so that I can reissue my bot request, Thank you. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 13:44, 11 November 2008 (UTC)

SmackBot and the HTTP keyword

SmackBot created an URL of the text "HTTP/1.1" in Virtual hosting. This results in a meaningless URL, "http://1.1", which is not the intent of the original text. See also the diff, line 11: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Virtual_hosting&diff=249417729&oldid=248024179 ; Allsvartr (talk) 20:08, 11 November 2008 (UTC)

Re-request for help

You know more about bots and editing than anyone else I know, so I've got my fingers crossed that you can help me. If you don't have time, I completely understand. Perhaps you can at least point me in the right direction.

Can you use one of your bots, or create one, to pull a piece of data from one set of pages and place it on another set of pages?

What I've got are two items on a bunch of pages that need to be filled in.

One is

"Population: "

And the other is

"Size: "

These need to be filled in on the pages listed at User:The Transhumanist/Country list. The items to be filled in are in the "Geography of x" section (where "x" is the name of the respective country).

A few of them are already filled in. (I hope that doesn't present any problems).

The data is located in the infobox on the corresponding country articles.

Is this something you could do?

If so, it would sure save a lot of man hours. I don't currently have access to a machine upon which I could use macros or learn and apply Python, and I'd really like to avoid having to do these chores manually.

I requested bot approval at Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/Worldbot and was told that these tasks don't need bot approval - we can just go ahead and create and use bots on 'em.

The desired format for the data is presented at Topic outline of Algeria#Geography of Algeria, Topic outline of France#Geography of France and Topic outline of Germany#Geography of Germany.

I look forward to your reply.

The Transhumanist    23:38, 11 November 2008 (UTC)

I have looked at this before, a few months back.

Extracting the data is easy but inserting it into the articles is less so. I'll review again soon.

Rich Farmbrough, 19:20 12 November 2008 (UTC). 19:20, 12 November 2008 (UTC)

Thank you.

I look forward to seeing you in action. Once it's done, I'll be particularly interested in learning how you did it.  :)

The Transhumanist    23:12, 12 November 2008 (UTC)

SmackBot

Thanks for looking at that problem. Your suggested change would have helped in this case, but URLs these days generated by content management systems and databases produce such weird URL results that it is hard to figure out what character combinations you will find in them. In this case the full page URL was http://siris-thesauri.si.edu/ipac20/ipac.jsp?session=120981572FNL8.17&profile=planes&uri=link=3100020~!50828~!3100001~!3100002&aspect=subtab13&menu=search&ri=2&source=~!sithesauri&term=Schweizer+SGU+1+1+SGP+1+1&index=, which is a bizarre URL. I create webpages by hand and give them simple names and short URLs. This actual URL is cited in several other articles, so thanks for at least fixing the =link= problem! - Ahunt (talk) 15:14, 13 November 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for your note and for setting the bot to miss URLs - I think that will help avoid breaking links in refs! - Ahunt (talk) 16:20, 13 November 2008 (UTC)

Hi

Thanks, Rich Farmborough. You're a big help

Thankyou for contributing the way you do.

(Happyjord11 (talk) 06:02, 15 November 2008 (UTC))

Centuries

Hi. May I ask why you're changing "14th century" to "fourteenth century", etc? This seems to go against Wikipedia:Manual of Style (dates and numbers)#Numbers as figures or words. Thanks. Epbr123 (talk) 22:17, 15 November 2008 (UTC)

Category help?

I saw that you (Smackbot) edited my page the other day - no complaint - I added categories today, and see that "Peter Fox (artist)" shows up in the Contemporary Painters list under "P" rather than under "F". Can you fix this? I have no idea how to do it myself or I wouldn't bother you with it ...

Thanks so much!

Peterfoxny (talk) 06:27, 16 November 2008 (UTC)

Wm. Cushing

Updated and cited story about the phantom Chief Justice. Tell me what you think! Foofighter20x (talk) 19:58, 18 November 2008 (UTC)

WikiJob

Could you take a look at - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikijob#Blacklist - you commented way back on the domain being blacklisted - it's still blacklisted and no one has helped :( can you help? :) 86.0.221.59 (talk) 01:20, 19 November 2008 (UTC)

Are you who i think you are?

You're not the person i used to know as Bilbo, at Orwell Park? Or who hit a child during his driving test? (Astonishing what we remember of past conversations.)

I've tried to find a way to contact you less publicly but can't - sorry if i'm doing this wrong, i'm a sad beginner. ;0) Mandmaybe (talk) 15:52, 19 November 2008 (UTC)

Yes I am, and no I'm not. Sounds like a slight misrememberence! Rich Farmbrough, 02:42 20 November 2008 (UTC).

Well, half right will do for me. Hi Rich {waving}... Who the hell was the driving test conversation, i wonder. 80) Mandmaybe (talk) 15:15, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

User subpage

Hi Rich. Your name is mentioned on the user subpage here. Wasn't sure what to make of it. -- Suntag ☼ 18:29, 19 November 2008 (UTC)

Old junk. The guy had an issue with the picture of twins being used to illustrate a vandal detail page. We changed the picture, but this should probably go under BLP. Rich Farmbrough, 03:20 20 November 2008 (UTC).

Unexplained Smackbot edit

Hi,

smackbot recently changed

{{DEFAULTSORT:Smith, Juana María de los Dolores de León}}

to

{{DEFAULTSORT:Smith, Juana Maria de los Dolores de Leon}}

(i.e. it removed the accented letters in favour of unaccented ones.) Now I only have very limited understanding of that particular construct, and the clause wasn't even inserted by me in the first place, so from my POV this may or may not make sense. But it certainly is not obvious from Smackbot's page that it would do things like that. Could you verify this edit made sense?

To whoever left the above message: Accented characters shouldn't be used with DEFAULTSORT. That may be why the change was made. I'm not sure why though.--Rockfang (talk) 06:55, 21 November 2008 (UTC)

Could SmackBot update these

I'm a lazy editor, and quite like it how Smackbot adds the date to all my "fact" tags and so on. I have now created {{BLPunsourced}} and the redirect {{unsourcedBLP}}, which has dated subcategories like Category:Unreferenced BLPs from April 2007. Would it be possible to add these templates to SmackBot so that they are automatically dated (and thus added to the cats?). If I should have asked elsewhere, just give me a nudge in the right dierction... Fram (talk) 13:27, 19 November 2008 (UTC)

Yes no problem. Rich Farmbrough, 10:25 21 November 2008 (UTC).

Thanks! Fram (talk) 10:34, 21 November 2008 (UTC)

SmackBot

Richard, what needs to be done to remove "copyright infringement" from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Terranova ?

I have e-mails approving my post and coming from the original source but I didn’t want to post them here as it can be publicly accessed

I simply was trying to create a link from Joe Terranova listed under fast money CNBC http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_Money_(CNBC) (look under Panelists)

I would like to get this resolved as soon as possible as there are no copy right issues… Your help is greatly appreciated —Preceding unsigned comment added by Bizpress33 (talk • contribs) 15:54, 21 November 2008 (UTC)

SmackBot and blank lines

Hi, I've noticed that SmackBot removes extra blank lines, which is normally fine. But, according to WP:Layout, "It is usually desirable to leave two blank lines between the first stub template and whatever precedes it." Could SmackBot keep two blank lines there when it finds them? As a matter of fact, it would be great if SmackBot would actually add blank lines there when it encounters situations where they're missing, during the course of its other maintenance duties. MANdARAX • XAЯAbИAM 20:59, 21 November 2008 (UTC)

Hi, thanks for your message, SmackBot makes a number of changes that are available to all WP:AWB bots - in general these provide a number of non-controversial minor improvements.

The issue you raise is related to these, it is an issue known to the developers of WP:AWB.

:Regards, Rich Farmbrough, 22:02 21 November 2008 (UTC).

Signpost updated for November 17, 2008 and before.

Because the Signpost hasn't been sent in a while, to save space, I've condensed all seven issues that were not sent into this archive. Only the three issues from November are below.

The Wikipedia Signpost Weekly Delivery

Volume 4, Issue 42	8 November 2008	About the Signpost

From the editor
News and notes: The Price is Right, milestones	Dispatches: Halloween Main Page contest generates new article content
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The Report on Lengthy Litigation

Volume 4, Issue 43	10 November 2008	About the Signpost

Fundraiser opens: Over $500,000 raised in first week	ArbCom elections: Nominations open
Book review: How Wikipedia Works	MediaWiki search engine improved
Four Board resolutions, including financials, approved	News and notes: Vietnamese Wiki Day
Dispatches: Historic election proves groundbreaking on the Main Page	Features and admins
Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News	The Report on Lengthy Litigation

Volume 4, Issue 44	17 November 2008	About the Signpost

Lawsuit briefly shuts down Wikipedia.de	GFDL 1.3 released, will allow Wikimedia migration to Creative Commons license
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You are receiving this message because you have signed up for the Signpost spamlist. If you wish to stop receiving these messages, simply remove your name from the list. Ralbot (talk) 10:37, 23 November 2008 (UTC)

SmackBot tag "general fixes"

Hey Rich, I'm the developer of the JavaScript tool Friendly that helps editors put maintenance tags on pages. One of the users of the script brought to my attention that SmackBot is performing fixes to tags left by Friendly that amount to capitalizing the first letter of the tag. For instance, tags were add by an editor using Friendly here and SmackBot came around and capitalized the first letter of the tags here (along with a couple of other tag fixes). I was under the impression that on Wikipedia, not using a capital first letter was not a problem because the software automatically understands it as a capital letter for you. I know that leaving lots of maintenance tags using redirected templates instead of the actual names is considered bad form, but is the lowercase first letter as well? Ioeth _{(talk contribs friendly)} 14:27, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

Why does SmackBot replace HTML entities?

Rich, why does your SmackBot replace HTML entities with characters from a random character set? The HTML entities have understood definitions that should be respected by any web browser, regardless of character set, and are much easier to use when editing content. Can you direct me to the Wikipedia convention that says that HTML entities should not be used? Thanks. —TedPavlic | (talk) 14:12, 21 November 2008 (UTC)

I haven't seen a response to this. To be more specific, Smackbot is replacing things like the MARKUP &mdash; (which would get replaced by the browser with the symbol —) with the explicit symbol —. I'm not sure this is an improvement. I think the markup is much nicer (from an editing point of view) in the source. —TedPavlic | (talk) 14:18, 27 November 2008 (UTC)

Replied on user page. Rich Farmbrough, 14:18, 27 November 2008 (UTC)

SmackBot

SmackBot is currently responsible for ~0.6% of all edits ever made to Wikipedia, and ~1.0% of all edits to articles. Just wow. Dragons flight (talk) 08:44, 27 November 2008 (UTC)

Goodness. Rich Farmbrough, 09:25 28 November 2008 (UTC).

Smackbot bug - changed title for Mergeto 2600 Hz

Hello! Can you take a quick look at this diff. I think smackbot may have picked up part of the page to merge to (2600 hertz) as the year, and so changed that instead of adding a date. Thanks for the amazing bot --h2g2bob (talk) 01:59, 28 November 2008 (UTC)

Ty. Rich Farmbrough, 03:35 28 November 2008 (UTC).

Fixed Rich Farmbrough, 03:11 29 November 2008 (UTC).

Klein surface

I am not sure what the second "categorize" message is about. Katzmik (talk) 08:10, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

Looks like this is sorted. Let me know if not. Rich Farmbrough, 14:47 2 December 2008 (UTC).

SmackBot: Date maintenance tags and general fixes

The issue mentioned before still persists; so does my request. To refresh your memory:

"SmackBot has now twice [thrice] changed the format of a bulleted list which extended over four paragraphs in the article Nigger. According to Help:List#Paragraphs in lists, using the HTML tags <p>…</p> is the only way to format such paragraphs in lists. Please modify SmackBot to allow such constructs."

Michael Bednarek (talk) 09:30, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

OK I fixed the article. Rich Farmbrough, 14:46 2 December 2008 (UTC).

SmackBot

Can you please program your bot to manage {{EmptySection}}? Many people who use that tag do not specify the section number, so I was asking if you would be able to program your bot to do it automatically. The template is supposed to be used like this: {{Emptysection|date=DATE|section=SECTION NUMBER}}, but most people put it like this: {{EmptySection}} or {{EmptySection|date=DATE}}. -- IRP ☎ 12:16, 28 November 2008 (UTC)

{{Emptysection}}. Hmm the date is easy enough, I'll have to think about the section numbering though. Rich Farmbrough, 15:06 28 November 2008 (UTC).

It is the number after the "&section=" in the address bar after clicking the [edit] link just above the section header. -- IRP ☎ 01:54, 29 November 2008 (UTC)

Oh I know what it is. It's just generating it using regular expression substitutions that may not be easy. Rich Farmbrough, 02:55 29 November 2008 (UTC).

OK it's easy if I use the section name instead. Rich Farmbrough, 03:45 29 November 2008 (UTC).

Do you think you will be able to get the "add information" link to point to the section the template is placed on in the edit screen? -- IRP ☎ 17:11, 29 November 2008 (UTC)

No, I don't think so. Even putting the number in is fraught with problems because new sections will change the numbering. The name doesn't work with edit. Rich Farmbrough, 03:51 30 November 2008 (UTC).

Your bot can patrol the recent changes like ClueBot and keep the numbers up-to-date. -- IRP ☎ 00:26, 3 December 2008 (UTC)

Victor Borge

http://www.nypost.com/seven/11262008/tv/starr_report_140884.htm Hi, I am having trouble submitting this refrence on the Victor Borge page Electric Japan (talk) 16:44, 2 December 2008 (UTC)

License tagging for Image:Red balloon leanrer centres logo.gif

Thanks for uploading Image:Red balloon leanrer centres logo.gif. You don't seem to have indicated the license status of the image. Wikipedia uses a set of image copyright tags to indicate this information; to add a tag to the image, select the appropriate tag from this list, click on this link, then click "Edit this page" and add the tag to the image's description. If there doesn't seem to be a suitable tag, the image is probably not appropriate for use on Wikipedia.

For help in choosing the correct tag, or for any other questions, leave a message on Wikipedia:Media copyright questions. Thank you for your cooperation. --ImageTaggingBot (talk) 18:07, 2 December 2008 (UTC)

SmackBot

Hi there, I am Dr Karl Shuker and am concerned about the comments lately added to the Wikipedia article re me that have been left by user TheRedPenOfDoom immediately prior to your own tiding-up editing, especially as that user's user page has been repeatedly deleted recently. Does this mean that he/she has been responsible for attack pages? It certainly seems that my article has been the subject of attacks by this person as their comments do not seem justified. This user has claimed that the article re me needs to be more neutral, yet I cannot see anywhere where neutrality has not been maintained. Simiarly, the user states that citations and references are required, but to which sections of the article? All details re my books have the full reference to the books in question given, and my own website, cited at the bottom of the article, contains all of the info in the article. This article has existed in this same basic form for almost three years without anyone suggesting any such changes, so I would be grateful to receive any advice, explanations, or other information that you could offer. Obviously, I would be totally happy to make any changes to the article that seeem reasonable and justified, but I am presently baffled as to how I can go about this, faced by the criticisms levelled at the article by user TheRedPenOfDoom, so your advice would be very greatly appreciated. Thank you very much, Dr Karl P.N. Shuker, user czbiker Czbiker (talk) 22:07, 2 December 2008 (UTC)

Karl Shuker article

Following my earlier message about the changes recently made to the Karl Shuker article about me by user TheRedPenOf Doom, I've just realised that this person has removed considerable sections of the article, reducing it to a stub, yet has remarked that the article needs to be more encyclopaedic! Yet the sections removed by him/her are the very ones that describe in detail my contributions via my books to the subject of cryptozoology! Moreover, even the full publishing reference details to books that I have acted as consultant or contributor have been removed by him/her. Consequently, I shall add them back to the article, and would greatly value your views as to what has bene happening here and also what needs to be done to improve this article. Many thanks, Dr Karl Shuker Czbiker (talk) 22:50, 2 December 2008 (UTC)

SmackBot

I'm not talking about the "stub" template; I'm talking about the "WHO-Recognized English Medium Medical Schools (China)" template that disappeared subsequent to you bots activity on the Dalian Medical University page.

Compendium wmc (talk) 12:56, 3 December 2008 (UTC)

Sigh. I didn't change that. The name of the template was changed twice by a subsequent editor. Rich Farmbrough, 13:37 4 December 2008 (UTC).

Roman Catholic dioceses in Asia

Not meant to have many links. It's a sublist of Roman Catholic dioceses and a superlist of the individual episcopal conferences.

Hi, thanks for your message, SmackBot does not generally add tags, but merely dates those that are already there. Regards, Rich Farmbrough, 16:07 4 December 2008 (UTC).

the bot software can not read special pages and proccess links

My bot software cannot proccess special pages. it will only proccess categories. ^H_iⁿ_t^s_s ^talk 20:12, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

SmackBot

Hello

The story about Chioma Ansoh is a untrue. She has sued The Mirror Newspaper in Nigeria and has refuted the story on several occassions and in Thisday Newspaper ,Nigeria. The Nigerian customs has also denied the allegations. She has never been charged for any such thing neither has she ever been arrested. She has never had an abortion for any man and is not Femi Fani-Kayode's girlfriend. This story is libellous and defamatory. I strongly advise that the story should be removed.

Below is the reference.

http://www.thisdayonline.com/nview.php?id=82302

Also the original created was

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/femi Fani Kayode

but was changed to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/femi_Fani-Kayode

Pls help rename the back to the first http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/femi Fani Kayode

and make sure Chioma Ansoh story removed as the admin.

Thank you —Preceding unsigned comment added by Seiperi (toalk • contribs) 17:29, 7 December 2008 (UTC)

Date project

Rich, on your User Page under Date project, would you mind adding the word "away" where you say, "But blow me..."? I think the expression "blow me away" is probably what you meant to say. I hesitated to change it myself since this is your User page. Dennis Fernkes (talk) 23:04, 7 December 2008 (UTC)

See article [63] Dennis Fernkes (talk) 19:55, 8 December 2008 (UTC)

SmackBot

Hi. Fixes is ok. The Language is now better. Webmaster is different like Kauppinen. Can you help or show current revision —Preceding unsigned comment added by Finlandiana (talk • contribs) 19:34, 8 December 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia_talk:AutoWikiBrowser/Bugs#Sources_and_Unreferenced

Hi Rich, Doesnt make a whole load of sense that bug...

Template:Sources --> Template:Refimprove

But then Template:Unreferenced doesnt go anywhere

Could you clarify what your asking for please?

Im presuming your wanting something adding/updating/tweaking in the AutoTagger?

Thanks

—Reedy 20:33, 8 December 2008 (UTC)

rev 3538 adds sources/refimprove to be have the date subst'd on it as refimprove... —Reedy 20:37, 8 December 2008 (UTC)

That Crazy Feeling

You may be pleased to know I've removed this article from the orphan status you (or rather, your bot) set two months ago. I accidentally happened upon it today on a "What links here" search while considering a move of the "Through the Years" song page (others have also written songs using the title); I found the page in the search. Kenny Rogers' discography now links to it. =)

On to further importing of Rogers' discography. (Almost feels like "To Infinity and BEYOND!", the list is so long.)

CycloneGU (talk) 04:57, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

Bot request

Hello. I need a bot for something, and since User:SmackBot is affected by my plans either way, I figured I'd ask you directly. :) Per the recent TfD debate, I proposed to let a bot automatically remove the recent death template after one week from the articles it's being added to. So I need a bot (preferably yours) to do that. Additionally, I need the bot to add a new "day" parameter to the templates (in addition to the "date" parameter that's already being added) if it's not already added by the user, so the bot knows when a week is over. At least that's my idea. If your bot could remove the template after one week without any additional parameters, that would be even better, of course, but I don't know if that is even possible. --Conti|✉ 16:40, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

list please

Could I get a copy of smackbot's article list formatted as a list of internal links, one on a line.


for example an entry with plane and car would look like this

[[plane]]
[[car]]

User:Hintss

Every article SB has edited? What for? It's probably several hundred thousand articles long. Rich Farmbrough, 14:53 2 December 2008 (UTC).

I'd like to see such a list, too, with counts showing each time each article has been edited by SmackBot. Do you not keep logs of its activity? -- Mikeblas (talk) 04:05, 12 December 2008 (UTC)

Value?

How much does SmackBot cost Wikipedia in terms of increased storage, server load, and bandwidth usage? What value does it add? Does that value overwhelm its costs? -- Mikeblas (talk) 18:34, 7 December 2008 (UTC)

• Storage:The average SB edit is adding a string like "|date=December 2008" Depending on the efficiency of compression and diff algortihms this should equate to between 2 and a few dozen bytes. Multiply that by 2,000,000 and you get maybe 50 MB. With disk costing c. 10p/20c per gig, this is irrelevant
• B/W SB makes say 1000 edits per day (actually probably more like 700): see next bullet for how insignificant this is.
• Server load: Most of the server load is up to "60,000 page requests per second" to deliver HTTP pages
• Value - since WP doesn't place a cash value on page views etc. this is hard to measure. But without SB or someone else doing the same thing projects like Wikipedia:Unreferenced_articles would have a much harder time.

Rich Farmbrough, 19:41 7 December 2008 (UTC).

I think your numbers are a little off. The few bytes aren't stored because Wikipedia stores complete versions rather than diffs. (As far as I can tell, anyway. The database dumps you can download contain full images of each article rather than any sort of delta. The database backup wouldn't backup anything other than what's in the database--particularly when it's in this very expensive and large format.) This means that the changes that SmackBot makes cost the whole size of the article again, not just the zero to couple-dozen bytes they add.

700 edits per day with a mean article size of 10 kilobytes means seven more megs a day per storage. Over a year, thats 2.5 gigabytes. This is about 10% growth for the database image file, alone, with my guess at the average article size and your number for the edit count.

A disk you buy for your desktop might be as cheap as 20 cents per gig, but the redundant, distributed, high-performance storage that Wikipedia requires is far more expensive.

OK take 2.5g x $10 per G (50 times "desktop" costs), still only $25 per year. Of the $6million this is negligible. Rich Farmbrough, 02:27 11 December 2008 (UTC).

I'm not sure how you're measuring requests per second. Is smackbot doing 60,000 page requests per second? That can't be right.

We don't necessarily need a cash value here; what's the tangible value to users? Changing the case of tags is inconsequential; {{unreferenced}} works exactly as {{Unreferenced}}, doesn't it? Are there edits that SmackBot performs that are of any semantic value, or is it purely syntax love?

You should have a cash value, though. If you're growing the database by 10% each year, and Wikipeida is in the position of begging for donations to stay online, shouldn't you have a solid explanation for the benefit your providing and a better understanding of the costs? -- 04:02, 8 December 2008 (UTC)

OK you clearly don't understand what SB does. Go explore the cleanup categories. The 60,000 hits are what WP serves per second. And there is some delta-ing going on, although doubtless it's not that fantastic. And the database dumps are completely .. borked. They are XML produced from a SQL db, and take months to run. I have offered to help sort them out in the past. Rich Farmbrough, 02:27 11 December 2008 (UTC).

I'm very eager to do so. Which cleanup categories are you talking about, and what does smackbot do for them? -- Mikeblas (talk) 04:00, 12 December 2008 (UTC)

OK SB mainly dates cleanup tags. The reason for this is that humans were found to either not date or mis-date them an awful lot (SB also corrects many mis-formatted or mis-dated tags). A list of extant dated categories is [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_monthly_maintenance_categories here. The intention is to ensure that all the large cleanup categories (and some of the smaller ones) can be worked through in a methodical way. With, for example, the uncategorized stuff this is very successful, with the others at least we know how far behind we are, and everything should be taken care of in bounded time. Rich Farmbrough, 00:23 13 December 2008 (UTC).

Date in infobox templates

[relisted]

Hi,

Did you get anywhere with the conversion of release/ foundation/ start dates in infoboxes, to use {{Start date}} (see also my earlier note)? If you're not able to oblige, please let me know, so that I can reissue my bot request, Thank you. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 13:44, 11 November 2008 (UTC)

You archived the above without reply. I understand you may be too busy/ not interested, but if so please let me know, so I can re-open the request on WP:BOTREQ. Thank you. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 16:11, 8 December 2008 (UTC)

Hi Andy, the archiving is automatic. I have been busy clearing my late father's house which should be finished tomorrow, I will revisit this over the weekend or early next week. Rgds, Rich Farmbrough, 01:29 12 December 2008 (UTC).

I'm sorry for your loss. It must be a difficult time for you, Thank you for you reply and forbearance with my impatience, Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 12:27, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

SmackBot

Cfare jane ato budalleqet per Laberine ? Malloket dhe Lalucet dhe labet qenka me miret nga te gjithe... —Preceding unsigned comment added by 99.231.32.131 (talk) 21:07, 12 December 2008 (UTC)

Huh? Rich Farmbrough, 00:15 13 December 2008 (UTC).

SmackBot

I have a "newbie" question about a page that I added: Melissa Bellin. Her page had been deleted twice in the past, and now there is the following notation listed on it: "This article may not meet the general notability guideline or one of the following specific guidelines for inclusion on Wikipedia: Biographies, Books, Companies, Fiction, Music, Neologisms, Numbers, Web content, or several proposals for new guidelines. If you are familiar with the subject matter, please expand or rewrite the article to establish its notability. The best way to address this concern is to reference published, third-party sources about the subject. If notability cannot be established, the article is more likely to be considered for redirection, merging, or deletion, per Wikipedia:Guide to deletion."

My question is: how is it that her page is subject to deletion once already, and possible future deletion for "lack of notability"? How is she less notable than any of the other Nitro Girls who have their own pages? She was as popular, if not more, than any of the other Nitro Girls, in fact she was the choreographer for the group. I find it discouraging that pages get deleted for reasons that apparently have to do with the "deleter"'s personal dislike of the person the page is about. It makes me doubt whether I'll be making any more "contributions" to the Wiki project, due to there being people who have nothing better to do all day than to delete pages that they simply don't like, instead of making edits or notations that would improve the page.

Qzk1718 (talk • contribs) 02:46, 11 December 2008 (UTC)

I'm not Rich, but the Melissa Bellin article has referencing problems. There are no reliable sources. (IMDB is not one). The Nitro Girls article *does* have newspaper sources, which is good. If nothing can be found that comments on Melissa specifically, maybe her article should be replaced with a redirect to Nitro Girls. If you know how to find sources yourself, you might be able to fix this. EdJohnston (talk) 22:29, 15 December 2008 (UTC)

A suggestion for User:SmackBot

Hi there. Would you consider adding to User:SmackBot's tasks replacing <nowiki>'</nowiki> with {{'}}? The latter seems more compact to me. It Is Me Here ^{t / c} 12:48, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

' seems more compact still, and is usually fine. However I will take a look. Rich Farmbrough, 12:49 15 December 2008 (UTC).

Oh, {{'}} is used to avoid the effects of italics or bolding. For instance:

• The Godfather's author is Mario Puzo.
• The Godfather's author is Mario Puzo.

It Is Me Here ^{t / c} 16:50, 15 December 2008 (UTC)

Indeed, both the above work fine. But they can break I know. ~~

SmackBot: Addition of {{fact}} tags to lead sections

Hi, why is SmackBot adding {{fact}} tags to lead sections of articles? Leads are supposed to be summaries of the main body of the article, so if the main body content is already properly referenced there is no reason to also add footnotes to the lead. — Cheers, JackLee ^–talk– 09:42, 15 December 2008 (UTC)

Scratch that – the {{fact}} tag was added by another editor, and SmackBot merely dated it. — Cheers, JackLee ^–talk– 09:46, 15 December 2008 (UTC)

Template:Footballer

Rich, I wondered if this template did anything useful. It gives an error and is not used anywhere, but templates are sometimes used in mysterious ways, so I thought I'ld better check it first. Fram (talk) 14:15, 18 December 2008 (UTC)

Cataloged

"Cataloged" is an accepted spelling, so changing it to "catalogued" is not a spelling correction. 165.189.101.177 (talk) 14:54, 18 December 2008 (UTC)

Bot page edit

Your "smackbot" recently tagged the page After the War (Novel), and I have recently made some changes. Can you have a look at the page and tell me if it meets wikipedias standards or do I need improvements. Itz sensation 03:15, 22 December 2008 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Itz sensation (talk • contribs)

SmackBot Name

Just was out perusing da'pedia and saw SmackBot had made some changes. Wondered why it is called SmackBot and if it would be easy to change its name to one a little friendlier sounding? 24.20.149.88 (talk) 21:11, 22 December 2008 (UTC)

Thnx

Dear Smackbot,

thnx for help me to improve this site: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pál_Milkovics please help me how can I upload photo there. Thnx,

and Merry Christmas —Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.99.93.184 (talk) 22:28, 23 December 2008 (UTC)

Malformed category

The articles Sarajevo and Fayetteville, Arkansas are tagged with a red category Category:Articles with unsourced statements since November 2,008 (note the comma). Clearly the comma is the problem. I searched through the articles to find the malformed {{cn}} or {{fact}} tag, but I was unable to find it. It may be a problem with the code of the template. Perhaps you might be able to find the error. •Life of Riley (talk) 00:09, 24 December 2008 (UTC)

Articles sometimes stay in categories they shouldn't, for a while. Rich Farmbrough, 15:18 24 December 2008 (UTC).

OK the problem is in this code

{{Infobox Settlement |population_total = 72,208{{Fact|date=November 2008}} }}

Rich Farmbrough, 15:32 24 December 2008 (UTC).

Basically it's trying to format the number strings. Rich Farmbrough, 16:04 24 December 2008 (UTC).

Re-re-request for help

You know more about bots and editing than anyone else I know, so I've got my fingers crossed that you can help me. If you don't have time, I completely understand. Perhaps you can at least point me in the right direction.

Can you use one of your bots, or create one, to pull a piece of data from one set of pages and place it on another set of pages?

What I've got are two items on a bunch of pages that need to be filled in.

One is

"Population: "

And the other is

"Size: "

These need to be filled in on the pages listed at User:The Transhumanist/Country list. The items to be filled in are in the "Geography of x" section (where "x" is the name of the respective country).

A few of them are already filled in. (I hope that doesn't present any problems).

The data is located in the infobox on the corresponding country articles.

Is this something you could do?

If so, it would sure save a lot of man hours. I don't currently have access to a machine upon which I could use macros or learn and apply Python, and I'd really like to avoid having to do these chores manually.

I requested bot approval at Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/Worldbot and was told that these tasks don't need bot approval - we can just go ahead and create and use bots on 'em.

The desired format for the data is presented at Topic outline of Algeria#Geography of Algeria, Topic outline of France#Geography of France and Topic outline of Germany#Geography of Germany.

I look forward to your reply.

The Transhumanist    23:38, 11 November 2008 (UTC)

I have looked at this before, a few months back.

Extracting the data is easy but inserting it into the articles is less so. I'll review again soon.

Rich Farmbrough, 19:20 12 November 2008 (UTC). 19:20, 12 November 2008 (UTC)

The population figures are done.

I could sure use your help on the size figures. The size statistics are in the infobox of each country's main article (the "name" article on each country).

The bot needs to grab the statistics from the country articles and then insert them into the corresponding topic outlines in a specific format. Here is an entry in the standard format we've been using. (See the wikicode):

• Area of Iraq: 438,317 square kilometres (169,235 sq mi) - 58th largest country

Can you do this?

There are several other things that could probably be filled in by bot, which would save the project's volunteers a lot of time they could spend on tasks incapable of being done by bot.

• Form of government:
• Head of state: (title, incumbent)
• Head of government: (title, incumbent)
• Commander-in-chief: (title, incumbent)
• Currency of x: (where "x" is the name of the country)

The "Form of government" can be found on the country's "Politics of" article, in the opening sentence of the lead paragraph. In some cases, it is in the "Government of" article.

"Head of state" and "Head of government" can be found in List of current heads of state and government. See also List of heads of state by diplomatic precedence.

"Commander-in-chief:" can usually be found in the "Military of" article for each country, though there is no standard format in which it is displayed (that I'm aware of).

"Currency of x:" is displayed in List of circulating currencies.

The hardest one above appears to be the Commander-in-chief. I may have to make a list of all the commander-in-chief articles, so that you can more easily extract the commander's title and the name of the incumbent.

Please let me know when you can work on these. Your assistance would certainly speed this project to completion, and would make the pages more presentable for when they will be moved into article space.

Sincerely,

The Transhumanist    00:46, 28 December 2008 (UTC)

Quran

Islamic holy books article has so many sentenses which are not Quranic.when we talk about islam we must take Quran as reliable source and not the books or articles other than Qura. please compare bot articles and check which one is telling truth? the old one or new one with Quranic references.revert the article to know the truth as per quran.it is not NOR thanks--Farrukh38 (talk) 15:29, 22 December 2008 (UTC)

The von bondies clean up

I fact checked all the places you listed and cleaned up the page.

can you please update the von bondies level/page. thanks suzie

Needs archiving. Rich Farmbrough, 14:38 2 December 2008 (UTC)

Honda MT125R Page

LINK In question: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honda_MT125

I'm getting notices about the page needing this, need that, needing internal links (has them), wanting grammar changes etc. Yet, with nothing specific all it doesn't help much and is a bit annoying. I'm new to wikipedia, but not technical writing (which the article is) so could you point me in the right direction to keep these thing from popping up?.

I appreciate the help.

Tom

USER Page Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Tburklow

Replied on user page I think .

Needs archiving. Rich Farmbrough, 14:39 2 December 2008 (UTC)

whats your reality name i need it for school!!!!

I guess you have it now. Rich Farmbrough, 09:24 28 November 2008 (UTC)

"Cory Pesaturo", Updates

Hi SmactBot,

I'm not sure who to talk to on this, but I saw earlier that an admin was thinking of deleting the "Cory Pesaturo" article because too many things didn't have references and I'm very happy that you and Phil Bridger have added some. I know Cory not on a personal level, but to a degree and these claims are all true, but it seems Wikipedia dosn't understand that MOST issues that are in question are Impossible to reference - Such as....

"....playing for President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton at a total of 10 events"

4 of those were at the White House, so they could be found IF you want to search hard enough in the White House documents. about 4 of them were in the local newspapers as fundraising events, but about 3 or 4 of them were Completely private events, so how does wikipedia expect to find proof In writing of all 10?

He is known to many as "The Snowman" for his meteorological work

Does Wikipedia really need to have a reference on what people call him? Seems rather odd, and all you have to do is e-mail different meteorologists he has delt with, but again it's not going to be In print. Unless an e-mail verifies.

"Youngest person ever to perform at a State Dinner at the White House"

I know the White House Staff told him this when it occured, but I don't know who you would contact to verify it. He would know who to contact for verification though.

"Youngest accordionist ever to be the soloist with a symphony"

Here Wikipedia should know that "Accordion History" is not been well documented at all, so this is a statistic that accordion players can talk about, but it's impossible to have this in writing. If you ask legends of the accordion world, they will tell you they don't know anyone who did this feat at an earlier age though.

"The only person to major/graduate as an accordionist at the New England Conservatory of Music"

This would probably involved a call to one of his teachers at the Conservatory. I would think a call from a teacher would verify.

I'm not sure who the correct person is to talk with about making sure this article doesn't get deleted, but if you aren't the person, could you forward this message? His contact information is on his website and he's a Very nice person to talk with.

Thank You SmactBot!

Basically if we can't provide a verifiable reference, we don't include it. If we were writing a biography of Cory, we could use personal impressions, verbal conversations etc., but as an encylopedia we are only trying to distil the existing body of referenceable human knowledge. Rich Farmbrough, 14:51 2 December 2008 (UTC)

SmackBot - Please use minor edit flag

That says it all. They are minor edits, albeit importtant collectively. But, individually, each edit by the bot is minor by definition. Thanks. Paul Beardsell (talk) 05:13, 1 January 2009 (UTC)

Signpost updated for November 24, 2008 through January 3, 2009

Three issues have been published since the last deliver: November 24, December 1, and January 3.

The Wikipedia Signpost Weekly Delivery

Volume 4, Issue 45	24 November 2008	About the Signpost

From the editor: 200th issue
ArbCom elections: Candidate profiles	News and notes: Fundraiser, milestones
Wikipedia in the news	Dispatches: Featured article writers — the inside view
Features and admins	The Report on Lengthy Litigation

Volume 4, Issue 46	1 December 2008	About the Signpost

ArbCom elections: Elections open	Wikipedia in the news
WikiProject Report: WikiProject Solar System	Features and admins
The Report on Lengthy Litigation

Volume 5, Issue 1	3 January 2009	About the Signpost

From the editor: Getting back on track
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You are receiving this message because you have signed up for the Signpost spamlist. If you wish to stop receiving these messages, simply remove your name from the list.--ragesoss (talk) 21:42, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

SmackBot, DEFAULTSORT, comments

I have been attaching comments to DEFAULTSORTs for names containing diacriticals to let other editors know that I omitted the diacriticals from the DEFAULTSORT entry so it would sort properly. When SmackBot touches such an entry, it removes the comment from the DEFAULTSORT and puts several blank lines between them, making the comment pointless. Is there a way to get around this? Rklear (talk) 07:59, 4 January 2009 (UTC)

Yes, this is an issue I have raised with the AWB developers before. I can't remember if this was fixable or not, I wil try to investigate. Rich Farmbrough, 03:13 6 January 2009 (UTC).

Stub removed?

O Lord of the Smackbot - your servant apparently removed a stub template from my article? I didn't see anything of that sort in its list of tasks but I might have missed something.

I'm a web software engineer and I tend to tinker endlessly with the HTML and wiki code and make it, perhaps, unduly complex, so if this is an error I may be partly to blame... there's a little spacer div above the stub that got removed, I wondered if that might have anything to do with it, maybe some regexes got cross-mojoed.

But anyways let me say in passing that in general everything Smackbot does is wonderful.--❨Ṩtruthious ℬandersnatch❩ 13:19, 4 January 2009 (UTC)

Hi, thanks for your message, SmackBot makes a number of changes that are available to all WP:AWB bots - in general these provide a number of non-controversial minor improvements.

The issue you raise is related to these, and has been discussed in the past. The present arrangement is the result of consensus - this page is too long to be classified as a stub.

Rich Farmbrough, 00:03 6 January 2009 (UTC).

Smackbot removal of deliberate error

In this change Smackbot removed a deliberate error, which was illustrating an incorrect way of writing Celsius temperatures. --Gerry Ashton (talk) 17:59, 4 January 2009 (UTC)

Thanks, I have re-purposed the {{typo}} template to deal with this sort of situation. Rich Farmbrough, 03:10 6 January 2009 (UTC).

I noticed that your use of the typo template uses several fields separated by pipes (|) but the documentation of that template does not describe using it in that matter. Since you know more about that template than I do, can you arrange for the documentation to explain your use of the template? --Gerry Ashton (talk) 14:02, 6 January 2009 (UTC)

smackbot changing math equations

Hi Rich, I noticed SmackBot changing an equation at capacitor. It noticed the braces in a LaTeX expression and mistook them for a template transclusion, and then replaced an underscore with a space to "fix" the "template name." Please exclude <math></math> tags. Potatoswatter (talk) 22:29, 5 January 2009 (UTC)

Done, unfortunately this also excludes Images which I need to fix, so apologies if this ever happens again, please don't hesitate to let me know if it does. Rich Farmbrough, 03:11 6 January 2009 (UTC).

thx! Potatoswatter (talk) 05:09, 6 January 2009 (UTC)

Date in infobox templates

[relisted]

Hi,

Did you get anywhere with the conversion of release/ foundation/ start dates in infoboxes, to use {{Start date}} (see also my earlier note)? If you're not able to oblige, please let me know, so that I can reissue my bot request, Thank you. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 13:44, 11 November 2008 (UTC)

You archived the above without reply. I understand you may be too busy/ not interested, but if so please let me know, so I can re-open the request on WP:BOTREQ. Thank you. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 16:11, 8 December 2008 (UTC)

Hi Andy, the archiving is automatic. I have been busy clearing my late father's house which should be finished tomorrow, I will revisit this over the weekend or early next week. Rgds, Rich Farmbrough, 01:29 12 December 2008 (UTC).

I'm sorry for your loss. It must be a difficult time for you, Thank you for you reply and forbearance with my impatience, Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 12:27, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

Just a gentle nudge. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 00:15, 6 January 2009 (UTC)

Nofootnotes notice followup

On February 7, 2008, SmackBot left a {{Nofootnotes|date=February 2008}} notice at Amahl and the Night Visitors. The article now has 15 citations from seven sources. I think the notice asking for more inline citations can be removed. What is the procedure for following up on such a notice? --Thomprod (talk) 08:07, 7 January 2009 (UTC)

Orphaned non-free image (File:Red balloon leanrer centres logo.gif)

You've uploaded File:Red balloon leanrer centres logo.gif, and indicated that it's used under Wikipedia's rules for non-free images. However, it's not presently used in any articles. Wikipedia policy requires that non-free images be either used or deleted, so if this image isn't used in an article in the next week, it will be deleted.

This is an automated notice by FairuseBot. For assistance on the image use policy, see Wikipedia:Media copyright questions. 11:13, 7 January 2009 (UTC)

{{Current related}} vs. {{Current-related}}

Hey! I saw your bot is changing {{Current related}} to {{Current-related}}, but the latter is a redirect to the first one – so no need to do this, I reckon. --Eivind (t) 08:14, 9 January 2009 (UTC)

Thanks, {{Current related}} is now the canonical one. Rich Farmbrough, 09:30 9 January 2009 (UTC).

TfD nomination of Template:Formatnum

Template:Formatnum 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. –OrangeDog (talk • edits) 01:55, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

Proposed deletion of Extreme quality assurance

A proposed deletion template has been added to the article Extreme quality assurance, suggesting that it be deleted according to the proposed deletion process because of the following concern:

WP:Notability

All contributions are appreciated, but this article may not satisfy Wikipedia's criteria for inclusion, and the deletion notice should explain why (see also "What Wikipedia is not" and Wikipedia's deletion policy). You may prevent the proposed deletion by removing the {{dated prod}} notice, but please explain why you disagree with the proposed deletion in your edit summary or on its talk page.

Please consider improving the article to address the issues raised because, even though removing the deletion notice will prevent deletion through the proposed deletion process, the article may still be deleted if it matches any of the speedy deletion criteria or it can be sent to Articles for Deletion, where it may be deleted if consensus to delete is reached. Ismarc (talk) 03:02, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

Sorry about the delay...

My current access to Wikipedia is slow.

I need to wait until I log on to a better machine in order to look over the list of pages you sent.

The Transhumanist    23:51, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

Improving Smackbot

I think Smackbot could help with page patrol. Can you make it tag the following problems:

• Inline citations
• References
• Autobiographical pages
• Wikification (especially lack of sections titles)
• Stubs

Andrewjlockley (talk) 08:59, 12 January 2009 (UTC)

AWB Stuffs

FYI Wikipedia_talk:AutoWikiBrowser/Feature_requests#Add_a_date_to_some_maintenance_tags - doing some of the stuff smackbot does extra (fact and such)... Just so you know they can be removed from your own scripts if wanted...

And also, whilst im here..

Wikipedia_talk:AutoWikiBrowser/Bugs#.281.29_unicode_substitutions_mangle_Typographic_articles_.282.29_workaround_will_mangle_multi-paragraph_Blockquotes_in_future - What needs doing for this?

Thanks!

—Reedy 13:23, 12 January 2009 (UTC)

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from where did u got information about bulfati or burfat trible let me know

from where did u got information about bulfati or burfat trible let me know...i wat to know more abt it..my e-mail id is naveed_darkside@hotmail.com

Hi, thanks for your message, SmackBot does not generally add tags, but merely dates those that are already there. Regards, Rich Farmbrough, 19:48 12 January 2009 (UTC)

Happiness, etc. article

Hello Rich. Thanks for looking at the Happiness article. I wrote to another party User:Schuminweb as well and he looked into it and dealt with it. Bests. --- (Bob) Wikiklrsc (talk) 15:30, 12 January 2009 (UTC)

Changing redirect capitalization

Things like this make no sense. (1) REDIRECT is generally the preferred style (at least it's the default when you press the little button). (2) REDIRECT == Redirect, so you were essentially bypassing a redirect, but not really 'cause you had zero effect. (3) Colons are optional after "#REDIRECT"; in fact, some projects have quite a lot of redirects with colons after the "#REDIRECT" bit. It doesn't harm anything to keep it there.

I realize you made the edits like three months ago, just wanted to let you know. --MZMcBride (talk) 01:53, 15 January 2009 (UTC)

There are a number of cases where tools have broken because to the colon after the redirect. In particular AWB was tagging these redirects with orphan tags. Now, of course, I spoke to the AWB devs to have that fixed, but I also removed all the ":"s to prevent this from happening again with other tools. The case cahnge was just an irrelevant by-product. Rich Farmbrough, 09:08 15 January 2009 (UTC)

Ahh, thanks for the explanation. Fucking bots. :P --MZMcBride (talk) 01:07, 16 January 2009 (UTC)

Smackbot

I'd really like to see some kind of automation of page patrol. If a page has any of the following:

• No inline citations
• No == tags for top level titles (in longer articles)
• Stub size
• No categories
• No references
• No references section
• No inbound links
• Written by banned user

Then Smackbot should be able to come and tag it up, then mark it as patrolled. It would do this better than a human, as it won't 'forget' things. You could even have the article 'sandboxed' in some way until it had been sorted out by a human after smackbot's had a go at it. Currently, page patrol is a boring, robotic, soul-destroying task. I have no intention to waste my life doing something that Smackbot can do itself! :-)Andrewjlockley (talk) 10:22, 15 January 2009 (UTC)

Dr Karl Shuker article

??? Rich Farmbrough, 19:48 12 January 2009 (UTC)

smackbot list

maybe put them all in a category by itself??

Archive:Rich Farmbrough, 18:21 2 January 2009 (UTC)

what purpose

to input into my bot. thats why i want smackbot's article list. and if possible could you just give me a big category and include the category into the category pages.

heres a list of what i want you to do:

1. get the pages into the category:uncategorised (possibly with a bot taask)
2. put the category name on my talk page
3. i will put it into the category:pages
4. when my bot is approved, i will run a recurrent category scan to get all the pages
5. everyones happy
6. my bot does something wrong/malfunctions
7. admin clicks emergency shutoff
8. gets unblocked
9. i temproarily stop the bot
10. bot returns
11. return to step 4

Archive:Rich Farmbrough, 18:21 2 January 2009 (UTC)

Michael Hochberg

Hi smack bot, I'm curious what you think of my discussion on Michael Hochberg. I'm a first time wikipedia editor and I would appreciate your opinion on my thought process on this article.

Archive:Rich Farmbrough, 18:21 2 January 2009 (UTC)

Headings in the country outlines

Someone has pointed out to me that you've been simplifying the headings in the country outlines by removing the country names from the headings.

The reason we have the country names in the headings and in the list entry items on almost every line is because the country outlines share identical formats. Without the country names prominently displayed, it is very easy to forget which page you are looking at, especially when comparing countries.

Please see the discussion thread on my talk page.

Thank you.

The Transhumanist    01:29, 17 January 2009 (UTC)

Current consensus is to leave the country names in. Please change the headings back to the way they were (with country name) - my access is way too slow to be able to do this in a reasonable amount of time. The Transhumanist    21:50, 18 January 2009 (UTC)

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Delievered by SoxBot II (talk) at 00:54, 18 January 2009 (UTC)

Templates

Thanks. I have a hard time figuring out when to use subst and not. AnyPerson (talk) 04:40, 18 January 2009 (UTC)

Thank you

You've saved a lot of time on the country outline project by inserting the area figures. I appreciate it. Thank you. The Transhumanist    22:07, 18 January 2009 (UTC)

There are still some 20 or so without the area, I will drop you a list at some point. Rich Farmbrough, 02:05 19 January 2009 (UTC)

Cool. Thank you. The Transhumanist    02:15, 19 January 2009 (UTC)

Smackbot on smack?

I went looking for loc. cit. and op. cit. and ibid. in algorithm and didn't find any. So I reverted the banner. However, I do agree with the intent and will avoid such in the future. Bill Wvbailey (talk) 23:28, 18 January 2009 (UTC)

Footnotes

WP:FOOTNOTES says, "Do not use ibid., op. cit. or similar abbreviations in footnotes." However Smackbot is tagging articles that used ibid. in Harvard references that are not footnotes, such as Brouwer-Hilbert controversy‎. While it is true that there is some risk of random cutting and pasting, I don't think the risk is so severe as to warrant tagging every article that includes the word ibid., but particularly, not the ones that don't use it in footnotes. — Carl (CBM · talk) 01:02, 19 January 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for your note, if I do this tagging exercise again I will look at restricting to fotnotes only. Rich Farmbrough, 01:52 19 January 2009 (UTC)

While "ibid" should generally be avoided for various reasons of convenience, the task of tagging articles using this construction seems to require supervision. I suggest that it be added to AWB, if possible. siℓℓy rabbit (talk) 01:47, 19 January 2009 (UTC)

Good idea, there is feature request process on the [WP:AWB]] pages. Rich Farmbrough, 01:52 19 January 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for the reply on my page. I think this would be a very natural task for AWB. And some of the pages the bot found do use ibid. too much – because they have too many inline citations in the first place. But others seemed to be really OK to me. — Carl (CBM · talk) 02:01, 19 January 2009 (UTC)

a shiny

		The Admin's Barnstar
		It's nice to see another admin on Huggle. Thanks for being willing to do this! J.delanoygabsadds 03:08, 19 January 2009 (UTC)

op. cit.

I noticed you plugged a few underscores into my refs.[64] Anything I need to do going forward? I'm kinda on bot tilt over Lightbot de-linking historical years (and WP:OWN on WP:MOSNUM), so you are catching a little "carry over" disappointment. Love your bot though! Most days.... I might be a lonely soul as far as using this style, so just let me know if we can split the difference somehow.... -- Kendrick7^talk 03:27, 19 January 2009 (UTC)

erroneous placement of ibid tag?

Hi Rich. Can you have a look at this diff - I can't see what the grounds are for placing the ibid tag in this article. The only thing I can see which might have misled it is the "cit" in "Tata gets $3 billion loan from Citi" in one of the refs. Cheers -- Timberframe (talk) 20:52, 19 January 2009 (UTC)

re User:70.88.103.253

This appears to be a false positive, the edit summaries are a bit off but both recent edits were removing vandalisms, not making them. I've already unblocked, and wanted to let you know what was up. --Golbez (talk) 21:11, 19 January 2009 (UTC)

date delinking

Hello Rich Farmbrough. I just wanted to make you aware (in case that you missed it) of the decision about dates noted here. Wikipedia:Requests_for_arbitration/Date_delinking/Proposed_decision#Temporary_injunction_against_automated_date_linking_or_delinking. Please don't take this the wrong way because I know that this is a contentious area on WikiP just at this moment. Also, I actually don't care about it one way or the other - I just hope that a decision gets made sometime soon. Bu I did want to let you know about this before someone who it does matter to notices the edits that you are making. Let me also offer my apologies if any of this causes offense. Cheers and happy editing. MarnetteD | Talk 22:01, 19 January 2009 (UTC)

Sorry to interject, but this is mostly on Lightbot, not Smackbot, AFAIK. However, I'm really really glad something is finally being done here though! -- Kendrick7^talk 05:44, 20 January 2009 (UTC)

SmackBot

Dear SmackBot, I have revised the footnotes in the article on Bagha Jatin. You may remove the band now. Thanks for your interest.--BobClive (talk) 09:23, 20 January 2009 (UTC)

 Done Rich Farmbrough, 21:10 24 January 2009 (UTC).

Blue Valley Creamery Company

Smackbot inserted an ibid template in the Blue Valley Creamery Company article. The offending op. cit. was actually a reference in a reference, but I changed it with the change appearing in square brackets. I am not sure what to do about the ibid template. Should I remove it or will Smackbot automatically do so later? (By the way, I had the wrong URL to the reference and the ibid template helped me catch that. Bad cut & paste methods on my part.)--Rpclod (talk) 13:39, 20 January 2009 (UTC)

Untitled

Dear Rich F., Thank you for visiting the article on Bagha Jatin with positive suggestions. As a solitary Wiki user, I appreciate it.--BobClive (talk) 14:08, 20 January 2009 (UTC)

SmackBot

Dear Rich, You may remove the tag on the article on Bhavabhushan Mitra. Thanks.--BobClive (talk) 16:48, 20 January 2009 (UTC)

SmackBot

Hello, Rich! You may undo the tag on Taraknath Das. Thanks.--BobClive (talk) 17:00, 20 January 2009 (UTC)

SmackBot

Hello, Rich! You may remove the tag from Pingle. Thanks.--BobClive (talk) 17:09, 20 January 2009 (UTC)

SmackBot

Dear Rich, Ignorant of the operation, I request you to remove the tag on the article Atulkrishna Ghosh. Thanks.--BobClive (talk) 08:39, 21 January 2009 (UTC)

SmackBot

Hello, Rich! You may undo the tag on the article Yogendra Vidyabhushan; Thanks.--BobClive (talk) 08:48, 21 January 2009 (UTC)

SmackBot

Hello, Rich, the article on Mokshada Samadhyayi can be rid of the tag. Thanks.--BobClive (talk) 09:13, 21 January 2009 (UTC)

SmackBot

Dear Rich, You may remove the tag on Satish Chandra Mukherjee. Thanks.--BobClive (talk) 09:22, 21 January 2009 (UTC)

SmackBot

Hello, Rich ! I have revised the last article of the series, Amarendra Chatterjee. You may remove the tag now. Thanks.--BobClive (talk) 09:38, 21 January 2009 (UTC)

template:ibid

Do you realize that the recently created (nov 08) ibid template is higly controversial, and that several editors argue this template should not be added to mainspace. Nevertheless Smackbot is ruthlessly adding this template to articles, as you may have seen from all recent complaints.

Can you please disable this function of the bot ASAP. Thanks Arnoutf (talk) 22:51, 21 January 2009 (UTC)

As a counterpoint, I appreciated the template and did not realize that the problem existed in an article that I authored. The only change I would suggest is some direction that whoever corrects the problem can unilaterally remove the template once the correction has occurred. Perhaps also link to a page that explains the underlying problem, why it causes problems for readers, and options for resolving.--Rpclod (talk) 13:19, 23 January 2009 (UTC)

Hi Rich,

I dont know you removed the Notability tag on the article on Baburaoji Parkhe. If you did so, thanks for the same.It is my continuous endeavor to improve this artile and few others with notable and reliable information.

Currently it has 2 tags attached, one for Grammer and another for additional citiations. Now I have a lot of credible material on the subject along-with lot of news items in vernacular as well as english newspaper. I would be adding them soon and getting the english language straight.

Please let me know from whom and how to get the tags removed, once I am done with the article.

Regards,

Vin. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 203.99.215.11 (talk) 14:18, 22 January 2009 (UTC)

Geo-stubs

Why do they have to go at the end? Is there a hard-and-fast rule that they have to go at the very end? That would mean that when there is a page-wide template such as the communes template, they would never be seen by anyone. The point of the stub templates is to indicate that we are aware that the article is insufficient. It should go at the end of the text of the article, not under all the frame. Ksnow (talk) 16:42, 22 January 2009 (UTC)Ksnow

No the point is to get the article fixed. The articles are self-evidently stubby when you are on the stub. the navbox is part of the article, the stub tempate isn't; see - Wikipedia:Stub#How_to_mark_an_article_as_a_stub. Rich Farmbrough, 16:48 22 January 2009 (UTC).

Ages in Family Guy Articles

Yea, I don't know how to fix the templates, however, some of the ages DO need citations. I found some without them. Kagome 77 (talk) 16:42, 22 January 2009 (UTC)

I fixed it. Rich Farmbrough, 16:49 22 January 2009 (UTC).

Thanks for the help and advice. You seem like a good person, there's quite a few "rude" people on here that would bite someone's head off for editing something because they find something wrong, but you're not one of them. Kagome 77 (talk) 16:52, 22 January 2009 (UTC)

AIV/edit conflict?

Hi, with this edit [65] you removed another report from AIV. Did you have an edit conflict when reporting? DuncanHill (talk) 16:59, 22 January 2009 (UTC)

I have reported it at the Huggle feedback page. DuncanHill (talk) 17:05, 22 January 2009 (UTC)

Thanks - I got an edit conflict with you there. Rich Farmbrough, 17:10 22 January 2009 (UTC).

Age field in FG template

Was removed a while ago due to constant edit struggles to maintain it. Talk:Brian_Griffin#THAT.22S_IT.21.21.21 for the discussion. But if you want to leave it restored, that's cool too. DP76764 (Talk) 17:23, 22 January 2009 (UTC)

I removed the age field again. Family Guy is very loose with consistency, and there's no clear evidence that age is consistent between episodes, which are subject to constant edit war, original research and in-universe hairsplitting debate. Most characters do not have ages, so this is better handled in the articles. Please discuss on Template talk:Family Guy character or WT:FG if there is a genuine need to restore this field. / edg ☺ ☭ 17:44, 22 January 2009 (UTC)

ibid/loc.cit/op.cit template

Please could you stop smacking big templates at the top of articles just because they might have a couple of op. cits? This is really a small matter for editors and not something we need to alert the general readers to. I've just removed a couple of these templates after reformatting two op.cits/loc. cits from each of the two articles; even though they may be deprecated by the guidelines, in these cases they did not affect the comprehensibility of the notes, since the sources and page numbers were given as well. In my opinion, if an article makes a source clear, it is doing its job. Minor issues of tidying up do not require a template to be smacked on, surely. qp10qp (talk) 17:52, 22 January 2009 (UTC)

SmackBot

As usual the tempest threatens to overwhelm the restraining capabilities of the teaup... Guy (Help!) 20:04, 22 January 2009 (UTC)

Too true. Rich Farmbrough, 20:08 22 January 2009 (UTC).

Veronica Wadley

But she's really about to be sacked, don't you get it? Why are you preventing me from inserting this piece of information in the article?

Lebedev appeared to confirm that the Standard's current editor, Veronica Wadley, would be stood down, saying he would reveal a new editor, widely tipped to be Tatler editor Geordie Grieg, next week. As reported here, Grieg is one of two shareholders in Evening Press Ltd, which now owns the Standard. The Russian oligarch's son, Evgeny Lebedev, is chairman. Lebedev also said he had no immediate plans to buy any other British papers: it had been rumoured he was sniffing around the Independent [66] 62.200.52.25 (talk) 20:26, 22 January 2009 (UTC)

Sorry! 62.200.52.25 (talk) 20:35, 22 January 2009 (UTC)

User:Pionier alert

Hi, When a warning was issued to Special:Contributions/62.200.52.25 I looked at the edit history of because the IP's talk page was on my watch list, and I am over 85% sure that it is User:Pionier in the UK. There is an entire category about this person - he has had over 20 blocked identities. Please be on the look out. His edit signature is very similar to User:Pionier. Please also see: User:History2007/Content_protection (that I still need to finish) that was based on him. Please pay attention to the edit signatures, for he is gradually learning to hide his vandal edits among normal edits. He likes to add and delete categories and usually edits Christian, Russian and Lithuaninan pages. Thanks History2007 (talk) 21:20, 22 January 2009 (UTC)

Thanks. Rich Farmbrough, 21:42 22 January 2009 (UTC).

Problems with House on the Rock

I noticed you added a clean-up template to House on the Rock and was wondering where the problem is? I was going to try to fix the issue, but I couldn't find it (probably because I am not really sure what I am looking for). Could you point the issue out in the article so I can fix it? Thanks Daniel J Simanek (talk) 21:26, 22 January 2009 (UTC)

I fixed the problem. Rich Farmbrough, 21:39 22 January 2009 (UTC).

Thanks!! Daniel J Simanek (talk) 08:56, 23 January 2009 (UTC)

Dates in infobox templates

May I again remind you of Dates in infobox templates? Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 22:22, 22 January 2009 (UTC)

HENRY VI

Hello I woulld like to inform you that charles vii assumed control of the armagnac party and took up the royal title as king of france but was a mere gesture since henry vi was the de jure king and so was theroticlly the soveriegn of both countries.charles vii was a rebel along with the other princes who followed him.charles later came to an official corination in 1429 so he was now the legal king. he was illigially the de facto of the south from 1422 to 1429.--HENRY V OF ENGLAND (talk) 22:34, 22 January 2009 (UTC)

Thanks!

If I have any more questions, do you mind if I ask? Spinach Monster (talk) 17:26, 22 January 2009 (UTC)

To Confirm

Ok, is this what you're talking about? Spinach Monster (talk) 17:32, 22 January 2009 (UTC)

Ah, Ok

Thanks. Spinach Monster (talk) 19:33, 22 January 2009 (UTC)

Question

I asked another guy on my talk page, how does one get "trusted"? This place is kind of cool so far, but i'm wondering if i'm doing it wrong. Spinach Monster (talk) 15:48, 23 January 2009 (UTC)

I See

Thanks. Otherwise, am I doing ok at this? Spinach Monster (talk) 16:16, 23 January 2009 (UTC)

Thanks!

Let me know if there's anything else I should know or talk to. I'd like to meet more of these people on here. Spinach Monster (talk) 14:35, 24 January 2009 (UTC)

P.S - Caught someone committing the formatting error you showed me.

Cool Rich Farmbrough, 21:17 24 January 2009 (UTC).

Ibid question?

Dear Rich, Were you the person who ordered the bot messages discouraging the use of 'ibid' tags for Wikipedia articles? Personally, I was taught at University in the 1990's (in Canada) to use 'ibid' in my essays...but I don't mind if an article has an ibid reference or not. All I care is that people know which book was penned by an author...since some articles here may cite 2 books by a single author. Do you have a response? Thank you sir. --Leoboudv (talk) 06:14, 23 January 2009 (UTC)

The reason we discourage the usage of "ibid" in wikipedia is because of its dynamic nature. A different reference placed in between the "original ref" and the ibid referring to it will make the ibid no longer accurate. However the template is an eyesore and there's better way to go about getting rid of the ibids. Rich, there's still some articles to which your bot added the tag, can you remove? Thanks. –xeno (talk) 16:49, 23 January 2009 (UTC)

• I have responded to the tag in articles I am involved in by removing the op cit references & simply typing: "Dodson & Hilton, p.22" if a book by Dodson & Hilton is well known...or in the case of an article which cites 2 books by the same author: "Tyldesley, Queen Hatchepsut, p.200" and "Tyldesley, Chronicle of the Queens, p.35." Here the book titles are abbreviated but it still resolves confusion over which book Joyce Tyldesley wrote. With kind Regards, --Leoboudv (talk) 20:32, 23 January 2009 (UTC)

pretense or regnal

Hello Farnbrough, I would like ask if I could change Henry VI title from pretence to regnal .as already said Henry VI is de jure or legal king of france from 1422 to 1429 and charles VI orderd in 1421 the french crown should be passed to henry vi( henry v was heir but was suffering from dysentry badly so it looked he would die) SO WAS said from the preddescesor soveriegn himeself i.e charles vi.in the treaty of troyes the crown was to be passed to henry v and charles vii was removed from succesion but took illigial possetion as de facto of the south thus making him a rebel of charles vi and henry vi. In 1421 since henry vi was the heir of henry v upon his birth that made him dauphine legaly. conclusion: henry vi is a legal king of france and not in pretence but regnal however hes still a titular head since hes a baby king of france from 1422 to 1429. he was also a dauphine upon his birth in 1421 untill he became soveriegn of france in 1422 21st of october. please answer to this post thankyou.

Answered on user's talk page. Rich Farmbrough, 19:52 25 January 2009 (UTC).

No content in Category:Pages needing images

Hello, this is a message from an automated bot. A tag has been placed on Category:Pages needing images, by another Wikipedia user, requesting that it be speedily deleted from Wikipedia. The tag claims that it should be speedily deleted because Category:Pages needing images has been empty for at least four days, and its only content has been links to parent categories. (CSD C1).

To contest the tagging and request that administrators wait before possibly deleting Category:Pages needing images, please affix the template {{hangon}} to the page, and put a note on its talk page. If the article has already been deleted, see the advice and instructions at WP:WMD. Feel free to contact the bot operator if you have any questions about this or any problems with this bot, bearing in mind that this bot is only informing you of the nomination for speedy deletion; it does not perform any nominations or deletions itself. To see the user who deleted the page, click here CSDWarnBot (talk) 21:30, 23 January 2009 (UTC)

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SmackBot

Hi SmackBot Thanks for helping me to improve on the article about Jorgen Sigurd Lien It was almost deleted becuase it gave the impression that it's a promotional material, which is not the case. I did a research papaer on eHelp Corporation and the founders and realised the important contributions that they made to the Silicon Valley, and would like others to have these information available to them. The information are not for promotional purposes because the comapny has been bought over by Macromedia. The main intention of the article is to preserve valuable information that would otherwise be lost through time. Thanks again for your help

Cheers, Charmaine —Preceding unsigned comment added by Charmainechen (talk • contribs) 12:38, 25 January 2009 (UTC)

POV tag

This bot turned the {{POV}} tag that I placed at the top of this article into in-line tag. I changed the tag to {{NPOV}} with an "N" so hopefully it should work now. It might be problematic if the bot is programmed to turn all POV tags into in-line tags. Best,--brewcrewer (yada, yada) 14:40, 25 January 2009 (UTC)

Thansk. This is a bug due to the template {{pov?}}.~~

SmackBot removing spaces in headings

Wikipedia:Manual of Style#Section headings says:

• Spaces between the == and the heading text are optional (==H2== versus == H2 ==). These extra spaces will not affect the appearance of the heading, except in the edit window.

Is there a reason Smackbot removes the spaces? Diffs like [67] makes it hard to find the real changes.

Another thing, the only change in [68] was capitalizing the first letter in a template name. It seems unnecessary to clutter up watchlists and page histories for something like that. PrimeHunter (talk) 15:12, 25 January 2009 (UTC)

Yes the reason for the caps change is explained in the FAQ: User:Rich_Farmbrough/FAQ#SmackBot_capitalised_a_tag.2C_and_made_no_other_changes._Why.3F

The spacing shouldn't be changed, probably a side effect of the new way I'm running the bot. Thanks for letting me now.

Rich Farmbrough, 19:01 25 January 2009 (UTC).

Fixed. Rich Farmbrough, 15:53 26 January 2009 (UTC).

More Questions

Hello again, since you're the expert I know, I figured i'd ask you. There's an article where somebody said something I edited wasn't germaine to the article. I think it is. How does one determine that? I don't want to go into an editing back and forth, but I think they're wrong and i'm right, so I don't want to let it go just yet. If the rules say i'm wrong, then i'm wrong and I'll leave it alone, but it's kind of bugging me for now.Spinach Monster (talk) 16:03, 25 January 2009 (UTC)

Kick to kick

There has been a dated call/tag placed near the foot of this article calling for further reference and citation. Please note, however, that fundamentally, kick to kick football - particularly in the older "end to end footy" format, is very much a fundamental informal, spontaneous, play activity - somewhat as in play activities such as marbles, etc. There is no formality to the activity, no clubs or associations which engage it, but it is a well-known, highly popular engagement to southern Australians. There is therefore very little written or other available material on this activity —Preceding unsigned comment added by 124.176.187.1 (talk) 15:58, 25 January 2009 (UTC)

Answered on user's talk page. Rich Farmbrough, 19:04 25 January 2009 (UTC).

Thank you Rich. Eventually found the link at the top. So with reference to 'Kick to Kick', then, how are those tags and dates removed??

Possible SB bug?

Rich/SmackBot: I'm not sure if this has been brought up before, but it appears that certain situations can cause SB to add an extra close bracket when adding dates. See this edit to Greta Salpeter (and this edit shows the change that needed to be made). This was probably caused because some idiot (*cough* it was me) added "date=" to the tag but forgot to actually add a date. Thanks, JazzMan 20:18, 25 January 2009 (UTC)

Thanks, SB is used to that particular error., but has just been re-jigged to work in a different way. Rich Farmbrough, 21:43 25 January 2009 (UTC).

Fixed. Rich Farmbrough, 15:52 26 January 2009 (UTC).

84.59.202.75

84.59.202.75 needs guidance. I have written up just a few of the problems at User talk:84.59.202.75, but I really had more substantive edits in mind when I sat down at my PC today. It is the usual, ethnicity edits without citation, incomplete or undecipherable citations, trashing established Wikipedia usage, etc. I'd appreciate it if you could take a look at some of 84.59.202.75's edits. Thanks. --Bejnar (talk) 22:20, 25 January 2009 (UTC)

Smackbot capitalsation

Sorry to bother you but... Regarding edits such as these (concerning the "dead link" aspect): I've seen the bot capitalise like this many times before. Are there any actual benefits to these kinds of edits? Surely it all links to the same template as initial letters are automatically capitalised? Sillyfolkboy (talk) 19:50, 26 January 2009 (UTC)

Rich, I think you have to adjust this. Check this one. I had added date tags only 5 minutes before you and Smackbot just capitalised Fact. -- Magioladitis (talk) 21:36, 28 January 2009 (UTC)

Yes I probably can, its not a big deal. Rich Farmbrough, 01:26 29 January 2009 (UTC).

SmackBot

Hi Rich. I'm a new user so please forgive any errors on my part. Was wondering if the notability tag was necessary on this page as third party sources have been added. please advise. thanks. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Wordfarmer (talk • contribs) 03:47, 29 January 2009 (UTC)

Answered on user's talk page. Rich Farmbrough, 10:07 29 January 2009 (UTC).

SmackBot "general fix" wrongly(?) removes some self links

On Vimperator, SmackBot recently removed the square brackets around the opening "Vimperator". That caused the conventional opening bold to be removed. I added explicit bold marks around Vimperator as a fix, but it was my impression that Wikification changes self-links to bold on purpose in order to enforce this convention. If that's the case, then SmackBot should at least leave opening self links alone. That is, if there is a self link within the first sentence or two, SmackBot should not make a change. Thanks. —TedPavlic (talk) 02:32, 29 January 2009 (UTC)

Answered on user's talk page. Rich Farmbrough, 04:39 29 January 2009 (UTC).

Thanks. Re-posted to AWB talk page. —TedPavlic (talk) 13:55, 29 January 2009 (UTC)

• Rich please see Rj's post at Wikipedia talk:AutoWikiBrowser#AWB policy on self links in first sentences of page and comment. (i.e. is smackbot using its own logic to delink self-links) –xeno (talk) 18:12, 29 January 2009 (UTC)

no, it;s gen fixes. Rich Farmbrough, 12:27 30 January 2009 (UTC).

cheers, thanks for explaining the bit about the bug. –xeno (talk) 15:25, 30 January 2009 (UTC)

Compiler

Hello Rich. A bit of a mess has been created in the Compiler article. I added some important and still relevant sources, which took me hours to find precisely and cite, and User:Derek farn just removes them saying they are too old and no longer relevant. I have been in this field for decades and know they form the basis of most modern compiler writing technology. I feel my effort has been wasted which is not terribly appealing. Might you have a look? My very best wishes and thanks in advance. --- (Bob) Wikiklrsc (talk) 15:13, 29 January 2009 (UTC)

Thanks, Rich. One is left slightly bewildered by this all. Best. --- (Bob) Wikiklrsc (talk) 20:19, 29 January 2009 (UTC)

Another SmackBot comment

Is there any reason why it put a merge suggestion on National Gold bank Note, and Gold certificate? They are two diffrent things and The Gold Certificate Article lacks any references at all.Knowledgekid87 19:53, 29 January 2009 (UTC)

Hi, thanks for your message, SmackBot does not generally add tags, but merely dates those that are already there. Regards, Rich Farmbrough, 12:27 30 January 2009 (UTC).

Visually indistinguishable special characters and bot conversion

I make frequent use of some special characters to ensure line-end word-wraps look appropriate in all cases. They are the non-breaking hyphen, which has the ISO Latin-1 code ‑, and the non-breaking space, which has the HTML Entity name  .

Pretty much everyone knows what the non-breaking space is for: you can code Then add a 25 kg sack of and it will appear as Then add a 25 kg sack of… without worrying that it will do a line-end word wrap, like this:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Then add a 25
kg bag of enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci back-strainuneum.

Similarly, the non-breaking hyphen, ‑, prevents instances like this:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. The United States’ F-
22 fighter plane enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation kickbuttotis.

My trouble here is with User:SmackBot. It replaces the code with the rendered characters. The trouble with this is that other editors—even myself—can no longer see where these special characters are being used and copy them for use elsewhere in an article. Worse still, it appears that when some users copy swaths of text for editing in a text editor using various Barbarian OS machines, the special nature of the non-breaking characters is lost when they paste back into the article.

Now, at $100 per terabyte, the server cost of leaving these special characters as their code names is an average of about 6×10⁻⁸ ¢ per occurrence. All hundred of these special characters that I might use over a period of several months, still might be a “Greg L overhead” of 6×10⁻⁶ ¢. Multiplied by the 1000 or so like-minded editors who might be inclined to do as I do, we’re still talking 6×10⁻³ ¢. So cost isn’t a factor here; less than a penny.

It would be far easier for other editors—particularly less experienced ones—if they wade into our F-22 Raptor (for instance), if they can actually see F‑22 nearby and take a hint to copy and paste the thing instead of pounding away on the keyboard. And it would be infinitely easier for the editors who put them there in the first place and are still editing the article.

Don’t get me wrong here. I am all for having bots do cleanup where the rendered character is visually distinctive and identifiable and doesn’t have a visually identical cousin that functions differently. For instance, it is just fine if a bot converts the “Identical to” sign ≡ to the easy-to-distinguish ≡ character (enlarged here for detail). You can see, copy, and paste the rendered character just fine. I’m talking about just a very special, small class of characters, where bots should not be changing the non-breaking space and the non-breaking hyphen to their rendered character because they are indistinguishable from their identical-looking regular-functioning counterparts. Greg L (talk) 03:44, 30 January 2009 (UTC)

P.S. Locke Cole created a {{nbhyph}} template. That is in addition to the {{nbsp}} template we’ve long had (but I didn’t know about). I’ve converted over an important article to these templates since there may well be other bots that will be converting ISO code and HTML entity names to rendered characters. I still would appreciate it if you could tweak your bot so it leaves non-breaking spaces, non-breaking hyphens, and something I didn’t mention before: thinspaces (which, though different in appearance from a regular space, it’s not much of a difference). Can you do this? Greg L (talk) 01:21, 31 January 2009 (UTC)

Piteå

Kan ju help me i have write about sport in my home town Piteå in Sweden. Can you se my spelling.Wolfmann (talk) 14:28, 31 January 2009 (UTC)

Wikimania Oxford bid

Some time ago you indicated your support of the Oxford 2010 Wikimania Bid, and it was recieved with much gratitude. I now ask if you could could help support our bid by contributing to the bid page that is located at: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania_2010/Bids/Oxford. Now is the critical period for work to continue on the bid as the official bidding period has now started and the jury has been formed.

I do not ask for huge swathes of time, just enough that with eveyrone working on this, it can be completed in time to the high standard required in a bid. For the bid page, an excellent source of information is the travel wiki article on the City of Oxford which is found at: http://wikitravel.org/en/Oxford. The chance of bringing Wikimania to the UK is the best so far and i expect the best chance for many years. With a fresh and stong UK chapter we have an amazing opportunity to put ourselves on the map. If you have any questions, please mail them to the Wikimedia UK mailing list, email me or post a message on my talk page and i will answer as quickly as possible.

I look forward to working with you on the bid page. Many Thanks. Seddσn ^talk 15:13, 31 January 2009 (UTC)

The Member of the Wedding

I've removed the op.cits .Can you remove the box? Thanks. Ewen B. Maclachlan

Answered on user's talk page. Rich Farmbrough, 21:07 24 January 2009 (UTC).

ANI note

FYI Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents#User:Rich Farmbrough. –xeno (talk)

TY Rich Farmbrough, 21:17 24 January 2009 (UTC).

Sathya Sai Avatar

Dear Sir,

Its always usual that when Godman decends to earth, people deny to accept the reality. its sheer the play of God. Here if again if the very same Jesus comes in flesh and blood, He will certainly be Crusified again. from time immorial its usual that people comit the same mistake...

so only Lucky and chosen ones get the contact of Godman and Realise the truth...

thank you

Jai Sai Ram

Thnk you for teling me. Rich Farmbrough, 20:42 24 January 2009 (UTC).

SmackBot

Heenal Raichura Please check out the following citation for Unique Achievement Award and kindly have the tag removed.

http://srijanfoundation.org/2008/07/13/indian-heenal-raichura-is-uk%e2%80%99s-youngest-doc-at-22-years/#comment-350

Thanks

OK Rich Farmbrough, 21:17 24 January 2009 (UTC).

SmackBot- Cybernetic revolt

On 11:49, 25 January 2009, SmackBot deleted most of the page of Cybernetic revolt. I doubt this was intentional, and might be a bug. However, I'm not savvy enough to figure it out.

Yes it;s a bug. The same page gets treated perfectly in my tests in user space... Thanks for the note. Rich Farmbrough, 22:01 25 January 2009 (UTC).

Fixed . Rich Farmbrough, 15:53 26 January 2009 (UTC).

Nobel Laureates

The reason Laureates is capitalized is because that is how they do it at the website of the Nobel Foundation. [69] I really wish you would have discussed it first. -- Scorpion⁰⁴²² 16:12, 31 January 2009 (UTC)

Regardless of the issue above, shouldn't the name of the prize be capitalized? I think that say "laureate in Physics" is still correct, as the "Physics" part is referring to the prize name, which is capitalized. — sephiroth bcr ^(converse) 06:35, 1 February 2009 (UTC)

Wikipedia Signpost, January 31, 2009

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Photo in Nair

Dear Sir, The Photo album in Nair section is good but all the poeple are already expired except Shashi Tharoor and Mohanlal. Don't we have any more great people living in the Nair Community at present? And what was AK Gopalan's contribution to Nair community? Please add photos of some living legends like Dr.G. Madhavan Nair (ISRO chairman), Lt. Gen Satish Nambiar (UN under secretary), Vijay Nambiar( Foreig secretay GOI) and atleast One living woman like Parvathy Omanakkuttan. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 59.92.244.218 (talk) 06:39, 2 February 2009 (UTC)

SmackBot's edit of Vector space

Hi Rich,

SmackBot removed some “+” signs that it shouldn't have from the vector space article (the edit). It also added a “[” to “the polynomial ring F[x]]” where the correct fix would have been to remove the trailing “]” (but, of course, a bot couldn't be expected to know that).

Alksentrs (talk) 11:12, 2 February 2009 (UTC)

Smackbot and inline templates

Smackbot is (I believe) changing some template names in a way that it shouldn't. You can see an example here. In particular, it's changing {{or}} to {{original research}} and {{syn}} to {{synthesis}}. Those templates aren't equivalent; in each case, the former is inline and the latter isn't. Is this a known bug, a feature, or ? Thanks. Dori (Talk • Contribs) 00:32, 3 February 2009 (UTC)

Smackbot removed the uncat tag I posted

Is this because there was already a stub on the article? --Closedmouth (talk) 12:21, 3 February 2009 (UTC)

No it may have been been a bug with WP:AWB that has now been fixed. I will investigate. Rich Farmbrough, 14:10 3 February 2009 (UTC).

Thank you. (PS. Sorry for swearing at your bot, I really do love him.) --Closedmouth (talk) 15:01, 3 February 2009 (UTC)

Template "Confusing"

The "confusing" template is now putting code out onto the page on some of the pages on which it appears. I can't read wikicode well enough to tell whether your recent edit to the template is the reason for this or if it was like that before. Examples of what I mean: Admiral Kuznetsov class aircraft carrier, Solipsism#Neuroscience, Teletubbies#Overview. Not all pages seem to have the problem and I can't find any pattern which predicts whether it will appear properly or not. Since you recently edited the code near the area where the problem seems to be, I thought that you might know something about. Perhaps your edit fixed it on some pages but not on others. Would you mind looking it over to see if you can find out what's wrong? Soap ^Talk/_{Contributions} 22:45, 3 February 2009 (UTC)

I went ahead and reverted your edit. The problem articles are back to normal now. However I understand what you were trying to do and agree that it would be a good idea. I think that the source code on this page might help. I tried to figure it out myself but it is really beyond my skill level to understand what is going on there and how that kind of code could be applied to the Confusing template. Soap ^Talk/_{Contributions} 22:57, 3 February 2009 (UTC)

That's fine, I'll check it out later. It's what revert is for. Rich Farmbrough, 23:46 3 February 2009 (UTC).

It seems to be working now. Thank you. Soap ^Talk/_{Contributions} 16:53, 4 February 2009 (UTC)

SmackBot

 —Preceding unsigned comment added by Mike6491 (talk • contribs) 13:41, 4 February 2009 (UTC) 

Please review changes to E2m.org. Thank youMike6491 (talk) 13:44, 4 February 2009 (UTC) Michael Garjian

Progress report: Country outlines

Development has been slow but continuous:

Penubag has done a fantastic job on the images for the awards we'll be using for our project's collaborations and contests. We now have 3 awards: a medal, a trophy, and a race ribbon. They all look tight. The trophy needs a small adjustment, but other than that, all 3 award images are complete and ready to use to create awards with.

Spartaz has warned us of (threatened to take) G4 (speedy delete) action if we run a competition that resembles the previously deleted Awards Center page. So whatever we do, any contests we run must differ substantially from the methods used there.

One type of competition I've been exploring is edit racing. I'm in the process of working the bugs out of this concept - the first race didn't work as expected - you see, because we only had an award for first place, the opponent didn't think it worthwhile to continue once it was clear who the winner would be. And since editors are in different time zones and usually need to start the race at different times, we need to base winning on personal start times - he who completes his assigned edits in the least time (rather than first), wins. And last but not least is quality control. What good is winning if your edits are ripe with errors? So I'll be exploring possibilities such as using a referee (whoever is overseeing a particular race), having participants watching each other for errors to knock them back, etc. I'm not sure yet.

Rich Farmbrough has been applying his bot expertise to filling in blanks in the country outlines (the population and area entries). I'm amazed at the number of edits he pumps out each day on a myriad of projects - ours makes up but a small time slice of his activity, and yet he has saved us many hours of manual work. Perhaps we should look into how he gets so much done.  :)

Zlerman has chosen to work on one outline at a time, and is taking on Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. He also has been keen on noticing and reporting design issues pertaining to the whole set of country outlines. Keep up the good work!

Highfields has been filling in the names of capitals, and is our first race winner. Check out the award on his user pages.

As you probably know, this project has expanded to include working on any and all sets of pages that are linked to from the country outlines. Once the set of country outlines go live (in article space), traffic will likely increase for all the links included on them. The quality and usefulness of those pages will reflect heavily on the country outlines (the outlines, which are essentially lists of links, are only as good as the links they present), and therefore we've branched out to solve the biggest problems with those as well. So far, we've taken on:

• The creation of disambiguation pages for country adjectivals ("German", "French", "Taiwanese", etc. About half done.)
• The clean-up of the CIA World Factbook statistics on the "demographics of" country pages. We've been renaming those sections to provide a key string that AWB can use for targetting (for skipping and filtering). Once that's done, we'll be able to break the clean-up down into simple AWB search/replace tasks, because we'll be able to target just those pages that include the CIA stuff.
• Renaming the "Cuisine of" articles to their adjectival forms ("Chinese cuisine", "Italian cuisine", etc.)

Blackadam2 and Thehelpfulone have been helping out with the "demographics of" pages mentioned above.

And we have a couple speed addicts (addicted to wiki-velocity, not drugs)...

Both Robert Skyhawk and Thehelpfulone prefer (and excel at) simple AWB search/replaces. Robert hasn't actually joined our team yet, but he has been helping out quite a bit from the sidelines (via the WP:AWB/Tasks page. Unfortunately, there has recently been a non-AWB chore that has been holding things up on the AWB front - an edit to all the the headings which had to be reverted before too many new edits were made, because any new edits would make the reversion more difficult. The headings have been restored, so now the way is clear for AWB operations, and there are many search/replace tasks in the queue. AWB assignments have started again!

There's a similar bottleneck on the "Demographics of" pages (the "keying" mentioned above), but that's almost cleared too.  :)

With my internet access somewhat crippled, I've been finding it difficult to keep up with you guys. However, I expect to be accessing a Linky-capable workstation on a faster server (I'm on it right now, as you can probably tell from my contributions list for today), and so I should really pick up speed. Feels goooooood.  :)

Recruiting has been a bit slow (but steady), due in part to my crippled access, and because we've been waiting for the images for the awards to be completed. I expect the team to grow more rapidly as the bottlenecks are removed.

Well that's what's been happenin', and here's what's in the pipeline...

I'm about to begin work on a set of lists that corresponds to all the standard links on the country outlines, and these will be presented on the Topic outline of countries which will be organized exactly like the country outlines. Aside from being an extremely useful navigation aid, it will allow editors to easily see the state of country coverage on Wikipedia. I'll provide you with a link once I get up to speed on this.

In the meantime, keep up the good work!

Cheers,

The Transhumanist    05:29, 5 February 2009 (UTC)

OR template error

Hello, 01:37, February 1, 2009, I added the template {{Or}} to the article cortisol. You may notice it under the section titled Effects, sub-section insulin, on the 6th sentence, or just about half way through. In this edit, you automated smack-bot created two mystakes.

1. It changed the template of {{Or}} to the template of {{Original research}}. It also added the date. Because the first template is inline and second one isn't you may notice this creates a formating issue.

2. It changed [[blood]] to [[blood|blood]] adding extra unecessary coding.

Best regards and I hope to hear from you soon. --CyclePat (talk) 23:45, 4 February 2009 (UTC)

1. Yes thanks, known bug already fixed.
2. No, it made the reverse change [[blood|blood]] to [[blood]].

Thanks for your note. Rich Farmbrough, 01:48 5 February 2009 (UTC).

Got your message. You are correct. Thank you. --CyclePat (talk) 14:58, 6 February 2009 (UTC)

Template:Articleissues‎

Hi. Do you know any idea what should add in the code that if someone tries to add Articleissues without any parameters to get an error message? -- Magioladitis (talk) 16:01, 5 February 2009 (UTC)

Answered on user's talk page. Rich Farmbrough, 17:50 6 February 2009 (UTC).

No content in Category:Articles containing Yi language text

Hello, this is a message from an automated bot. A tag has been placed on Category:Articles containing Yi language text, by another Wikipedia user, requesting that it be speedily deleted from Wikipedia. The tag claims that it should be speedily deleted because Category:Articles containing Yi language text has been empty for at least four days, and its only content has been links to parent categories. (CSD C1).

To contest the tagging and request that administrators wait before possibly deleting Category:Articles containing Yi language text, please affix the template {{hangon}} to the page, and put a note on its talk page. If the article has already been deleted, see the advice and instructions at WP:WMD. Feel free to contact the bot operator if you have any questions about this or any problems with this bot, bearing in mind that this bot is only informing you of the nomination for speedy deletion; it does not perform any nominations or deletions itself. To see the user who deleted the page, click here CSDWarnBot (talk) 04:20, 6 February 2009 (UTC)

SmackBot

Your bot usually seems to do a great job but it somehow messed up with dn templates on Submarine. I fixed the damage but thought you should know. Rees11 (talk) 14:00, 6 February 2009 (UTC)

SmackBot (mod_python)

In this edit smackbot changed a reference to "mod_python" to "mod python". The module name, and the article name, actually include the underscore, it's an error to remove it. TJRC (talk) 01:06, 6 February 2009 (UTC)

Thanks, yes this has come up before, I thought it was a resolved (WP:AWB) issue. There's some dozen page names it applies to. Rich Farmbrough, 17:52 6 February 2009 (UTC).

I'm probably misunderstanding your reply; but I don't think this edit was a WP:AWB issue. The edit was made by SmackBot. TJRC (talk) 18:33, 6 February 2009 (UTC)

AWB is the platform for SmackBot. Rich Farmbrough, 03:37 14 February 2009 (UTC).

Smackbot strange date fix?

The bot is removing dates from citation templates. [70] Was this intended? --JonIsaksen (talk) 01:37, 7 February 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for the note. This shouldn't happen I will look into it. Rich Farmbrough, 00:03 9 February 2009 (UTC).

American Society of Theatre Consultants

The page has been rewritten to remove what I believe you were thinking was advertisment type text. Please give another look and if you agree, please remove your notice at the top. Thanks so much. MaddyStephens (talk) 18:58, 7 February 2009 (UTC)

Cap Arcona

The nationalities (24/28) are visible on the memorial (photo : File:Neustad Holstein Cap Arcona.jpg). —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.64.182.240 (talk) 16:44, 7 February 2009 (UTC)

SmackBot just dates the tags. Rich Farmbrough, 17:17 7 February 2009 (UTC).

Category:Articles containing Yi language text

You're not supposed to remove {{db-catempty}} notice from pages that you've created yourself. --Stepheng3 (talk) 18:46, 6 February 2009 (UTC)

• As the creator, you may feel some personal attachment to the page. The instructions say to apply {{hangon}} instead of reverting.

I'm curious: do you intend to contest the claim that the category has been empty for four days? Do you have plans to populate it in the near future? If not, I'll probably mark it for deletion again. - Stepheng3 (talk) 19:03, 6 February 2009 (UTC)

• If you'd followed the instructions, your present fears would not have been realized. Here's why: the admin would see your {{hangon}} and find your rationale on the Category talk page. The complete page history is available for inspection, so the fact that I blanked the page would not prejudice your case to the admin.

I blank pages as an advance warning to interested parties that the category is subject to deletion, which gives you an extra four days to react. If I hadn't blanked it, it might have gotten deleted before you had a chance to object.

Personally, I'm not swayed by your arguments. You say that the category is part of a complex system, but it looks simple to me; I think I could recreate the category using one of its sister categories as a model. You say that there will be articles in the category "soon," but the time-horizon for C1 is 4 days. Do you mean you within that time? The category has existed for over a years and appears to have been empty since at least October. Would you have used the same argument back then?

-Stepheng3 (talk) 03:51, 9 February 2009 (UTC)

A note to the creator would have the same or better effect. In order to recreate the category you would ideally need to know the ISO 639 codes for the language, and link it into the parent category. However you wouldn't know the category was needed because if it doesn't exist the template the transcludes it will not do so, in order to avoid redlinks and breakage in certain other cases. Youwould only find the category was needed by scanning the database, assuming a db dump is ever again successful, and running a custom extraction program, and comparing that to a list of ISO 639 codes, and in turn IO 639 lang templates, and eventually categories. Rich Farmbrough, 03:39 14 February 2009 (UTC).

El Greco

Hi Rich, this edit [71] broke the infobox rendering on the El Greco article. I reverted it. cheers Tom B (talk) 23:51, 8 February 2009 (UTC)

Thanks fixed. Rich Farmbrough, 00:02 9 February 2009 (UTC).

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Delivered by §hepBot (Disable) at 22:48, 9 February 2009 (UTC)

Category:Articles containing Choctaw language text

I notice that this category you created is unpopulated (empty). In other words, no Wikipedia pages belong to it. If it remains unpopulated for four days, it may be deleted, without discussion, in accordance with Wikipedia:Criteria for speedy deletion#C1. I'm notifying you in case you wish to (re-)populate it by adding [[Category:Articles containing Choctaw language text]] to articles/categories that belong in it.

I blanked the category page. This will not, in itself, cause the category to be deleted. It serves to document (in the page history) that the category was empty at the time of blanking and also to alert other watchers that the category is in jeopardy. You are welcome to revert the blanking if you wish. However, doing so will not prevent deletion if the category remains empty.

If you created the category in error, or it is no longer needed, you can speed up the deletion process by tagging it with {{db-author}}.

--Stepheng3 (talk) 21:34, 10 February 2009 (UTC)

Same thing with Category:Articles containing Northern Sami language text. --Stepheng3 (talk) 21:35, 10 February 2009 (UTC)

Smackbot error

Hi, your bot didnt make this edit [72] properly, oddly it moved the wikilinks needing disambiguation out of the correctly location and to the top of the article. Russeasby (talk) 01:19, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

HI, this has happened on another article as well. I have not been able to duplicate this error yet. Rich Farmbrough, 17:51 11 February 2009 (UTC).

Problem is fixed in latest build of WP:AWB. Rich Farmbrough, 08:15 14 February 2009 (UTC).

"dead link" vs "Dead link"

I noticed that Smackbot is changing "dead link" tags to "Dead link" ones. The Wikipedia:Dead_external_links even uses "dead link" for its example usage. Also most Wikipedia tags seem to start with a lowercase letter. Is there a reason why using "Dead link" is worth changing? Jason Quinn (talk) 16:44, 9 February 2009 (UTC)

Answered on user's talk page. Rich Farmbrough, 18:46 9 February 2009 (UTC).

But is there a compelling reason to capitalize these tags at all? Your answer to Jason Quinn (talk) said, tags "should only be changed when a template is being dated or other fixes are being made." However, SmartBot changes case for all tags that it tests when it makes a single fix to an article.

It's true that some template names are capitalized, but the tags in the template descriptions themselves are lower case (or not... arbitrarily?), e.g., {{fact}} in Template:Fact, but {{dead link}} in Template:dead link (note that "dead" is lower case in the template name).

Template descriptions aren't internally consistent. Template:Dubious can't decide which way to go (my emphasis):

Add {{dubious}} after a specific statement or alleged fact that is subject to dispute [...] To refer to a specific talk page section, use {{Dubious|talk page section name}}

I suggest that SmartBot not make arbitrary changes. Instead, SmartBot should be dumb and leave the case of tags as they are. --Mtd2006 (talk) 15:54, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

"Template:dead link (note that "dead" is lower case in the template name). " If you have popups you will see that this is automatically redirected to Template:Dead link.

All pages on WP begin with a cpaital. I have chosen to use, as I must chose one or the other, the captialised version. It's not a big deal either way, lets move on from this one. Rich Farmbrough, 08:25 14 February 2009 (UTC).

MMA Hacks

check out Jason Guida and Mongkhon Wiwasuk and tell me WTF is going on. there are like 40 to 50 other pages with this problem.User:Sepulwiki 23:50, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

There is a show/hide on the infobox? Rich Farmbrough, 00:09 12 February 2009 (UTC).

you dont see where it says headlinnig text over and over and over and it also says youtube sucks next to the dates? please tell me you see that.Sepulwiki 00:16, 12 February 2009 (UTC)

AWB bugs

Hi Rich, I'm working through the backlog of outstanding AWB bugs and was wondering whether you could provide some more information about one you reported a few months ago: link simplification too greedy. I could do with some examples of incorrect edits and related correct ones to understand what the problem is here. Thanks in advance Rjwilmsi 20:08, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

Answered on AWB pages. Rich Farmbrough, 04:30 18 February 2009 (UTC).

SmackBot and articleissues

SmartBot is changing article=y to article=February 2009 in articleissues tags. Is that what it wants to do? See this diff. The date does no harm, so it's not an urgent problem. --Mtd2006 (talk) 21:24, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

Yes, it's stressing the point, it's autoamtable (I build the rules from the template most days), it avoids having an exception, and it can possibly be used in future for the difficult "expert" parameter. Rich Farmbrough, 15:40 16 February 2009 (UTC).

SmackBot bug report

This edit. The {{quotation}} template has a funny tendency to not line-break even in places where text normally would, so when working within a {{quotation}}, you need to manually put in a bunch of <br> tags. In this edit ten days ago, SmackBot removed those necessary <br> tags, leaving incorrect line-breaking in the quotation.

Just FYI. Thanks, and best wishes! --Steve (talk) 05:19, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

Thanks, not sure what to do about this one, I'll discuss witht e AWB people. ~~

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Delivered by §hepBot (Disable) at 07:30, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

Smackbot needs adjustment.

Edits like this one, where no date tag was added, IMHO, should be avoided. Smackbot is now forced to edit every single article. Can you adjust this in order Smackbot is not case sensitive? -- Magioladitis (talk) 00:58, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

"Date" is not a valid parameter name for the template. Rich Farmbrough, 15:18 16 February 2009 (UTC).

Ok thanks. You are right. My mistake. -- Magioladitis (talk) 15:55, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

Minor SmackBot bug

The bot tagged a page as needing to be wikified when it was already tagged as such: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=IberoAmerican_Federation_of_Mutual_Funds&diff=271272186&oldid=271269318 --Sigma 7 (talk) 04:43, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

See below. Rich Farmbrough, 04:31 18 February 2009 (UTC).

SmackBot

Please ask the bot why it removed this orphan tag. — RHaworth (Talk | contribs) 04:57, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

SmackBot removed an orphan tag from Stealth conservative as well. Шизомби (talk) 16:03, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

This seems to be a bug in the AWB tagging I will ask for it to be investigated and meanwhile disable it. Rich Farmbrough, 04:29 18 February 2009 (UTC).

Template:Expert

I think that your (very) recent change to this template has created an error. E.g. the article Hamza Marri shows an "ifexist" beneath this template which seems to be caused by this template. Fram (talk) 13:51, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

Thank you for the message

(moved from User:Mtd2006 User talk:Mtd2006)

SB is explicitly coded to understand other template arameters, even the non-parameter "reason". I will investigate the cause of this bug forthwith. Rich Farmbrough 04:23 18 February 2009 (UTC).

I admit to frustration with some of SmackBot's automatic edits. I make mistakes and it's nice that SmackBot fixes them for me. But we need to get SmackBot under control. I'd like to discuss the problem further. Mtd2006 (talk) 04:45, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

Actually as far as the SmackBot specific components are concerned, I have more or less finished transitioning between a very complex rule-base built up over several years, and one that is built automatically from time to time, and is hence more consistent and flexible. While this has given rise to a few new problems it has already proved far more maintainable than the old system, a good example is that on Monday someone created 60 new cleanup templates, I was able to add these in a matter of minutes on Tuesday. Moreover the system now keeps track of redirects, once a major headache to retrieve and code individually, and individual template parameter lists. The specific removal of a carriage return you mention is, perhaps, not ideal, but it would require another exception for the {{Article issues}} template. The plan is to treat all cleanup templates in as near the same way as possible. Rich Farmbrough, 08:14 18 February 2009 (UTC).

I understand the complexity of the problem -- better now that you've explained the method you're using. I have a concern about SB's return to operation. SB is complex. It needs testing. More than testing, however, SB must fail-safe. When it encounters an unexpected condition, it must do no harm -- as it is, SB fails the harmless test. SB needs to be more bullet-proof before it's restarted.

I placed a message on admin notices. That may be the wrong place. Please look at it. Move it or remove it -- okay by me. I've looked at SB's design spec (its tasks) the history of SB's bug list and I have some suggestions to make SB more bullet-proof. N.B. I'm Perl-savvy. Reply here or by e-mail. Mtd2006 (talk) 09:01, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

• I moved it to Bot Owners noticeboard.
• The bug you mentioned is fixed.
• "Doing no harm" is only possible by doing nothing. However SB is reasonably conservative, more so now than ever, except that it is becoming more liberal in it's interpretation of date mis-speelings.
• My biggest problem is the rump of articles left over when a SB run is completed, which need dating manually (about 5000 when the new templates were introduced above, reduced to 4-500 now). Again the aim is to reduce these, but continuous changes to the wiki have made this hard up 'til now. I generally aim to clear the backlog by month end.
• Unsuprisingly I have a list of improvements in mind already.
• I look forward to hearing your suggestions.

Rich Farmbrough, 09:20 18 February 2009 (UTC).

Okay, I'll start on that right now. It's 3:30 AM here. For full disclosure, I've been seeding test cases for SB to get an idea how the bot works. I've used degenerate cases so that SB finds unexpected conditions.

Doing nothing is necessary when an unexpected event occurs. That's fail-safe. If something unexpected happens, do nothing, and the bot has done no harm.

I've looked at the template space... the ruleset for SB. It's complex and inconsistent -- not ideal for automated processing. The "dummy" parameters must cause havoc. I imagine the exception cases are becoming a maintenance headache. What you've done with SB is quite an accomplishment.

Is SB coded in Perl? I'll use Perl to explain some fail-safe tests if that works for you. My followup in e-mail. Regards, Mtd2006 (talk) 10:38, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

It's Noon here and I've not gone not bed yet...

SB relies on AWB to make the actual changes to the pages, and the way it works is this:

I have a local list of templates, a perl program reads this list, invokes wget to recover the source of the page and redirects, analyses the html to extract the redirect lists and parameters, then builds the rule base from a bunch of XML fragment files plus some ancillary lists (plausible mis-spellings of January, for example). This rulebase is loaded into AWB and run against a 1 level recursive category listing of the dated cleanup categories category. Rich Farmbrough, 12:14 18 February 2009 (UTC).

My suggestions for changes to SmackBot are irrelevant. I didn't understand SmackBot's design or how AWB works. That's more clear now. The bot owners noticeboard is the best place to continue. Thank you for your explanation. Mtd2006 (talk) 22:58, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

SmackBot and templates

Is it necessary that your bot makes edits like this? It appears that the only thing changed was one space after the template name. It seems like a pointless edit. It worked fine with the space there.--Rockfang (talk) 16:50, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

I have raised the same concern at the WP:BON thread. Are you not able to instruct the bot not to make insignificant changes? –xeno (talk) 19:46, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

Actually it was a testing edit, I was hand testing some functionality, the bot won't genreally save white-space only changes. Rich Farmbrough, 19:48 18 February 2009 (UTC).

And caps changing? {{deadlink}} to {{Deadlink}} ? –xeno (talk) 19:50, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

That is more subtle, AWB has a feature to avoid saving case changing only, but sometimes the fix is to change the case of a parameter name. See the FAQ for why this should be rare, and a dozen reasons it can happen. Rich Farmbrough, 19:54 18 February 2009 (UTC).

Or a parameter value, for example "may 2008" => "May 2008". Rich Farmbrough, 19:55 18 February 2009 (UTC).

k, cool. thanks for your time. –xeno (talk) 19:57, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for the info.--Rockfang (talk) 20:05, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

Hello, Rich Farmbrough. You have new messages at Debresser's talk page.
You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{Talkback}} or {{Tb}} template.

Information for Country Outlines--How?

Hello there! User:The Transhumanist tells me that you have used a bot in the past to pull data from websites and put them in country outlines. Well, I'm currently running a bot for this project, and I'm wondering, do you think you could tell me how you did that? And if you're the open-source kind of guy, maybe give me the source codes? I understand that you are probably very busy, but if you could enable me to do this work that you once did, our project would greatly appreciate it. Hope to hear from you soon! Robert Skyhawk ^{So sue me!} (You'll lose) 21:44, 22 February 2009 (UTC)

Rich pulled data from one page on Wikipedia, to fill in blank entries on the country outlines on Wikipedia (for population and then for area). Rich, I too am very interested in how you did it. It's a mystery to me. I've been scratching my head ever since. The Transhumanist    21:56, 22 February 2009 (UTC)

SmackBot

I have noticed a Strange edit by the bot. Please check Alex Bakharev (talk) 23:49, 23 February 2009 (UTC)

Thanks, fixed.Rich Farmbrough, 05:22 24 February 2009 (UTC).

Hi. Possibly related to the above is this edit. Not sure what the bot was trying to do... GDallimore (Talk) 10:10, 24 February 2009 (UTC)

Please! Help with the CNN article

Hi, I am fairly new to Wikipedia. However, in looking at the CNN article, I noticed that in the beginning (fourth paragraph down) the following statement appears: "Among the general public, CNN has a more centrist perception.” The source for this proposition is FAIR, FAIR being a “progressive media criticism organization” whose “target invariably is bias on the right” [73]. Needless to say, FAIR is not a reliable source. On the other hand, the academic literature (i.e., peer-reviewed, scholarly journals) is full of articles addressing CNN's bias. They have concluded that the public perceives CNN to have a liberal bias:

-->Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, Harvard University, & Project for Excellence in Journalism, “The Invisible Primary – Invisible No Longer: A First Look at Coverage of the 2008 Presidential Campaign,” p. 32 [74] (noting that “The CNN programming studied tended to cast a negative light on Republican candidates—by a margin of three-to-one. Four-in-ten stories (41%) were clearly negative while just 14% were positive and 46% were neutral. The network provided negative coverage of all three main candidates with McCain fairing the worst (63% negative) and Romney fairing a little better than the others only because a majority of his coverage was neutral.”)

-->Jeffrey N. Weatherly, et al, “Perceptions of Political Bias in the Headlines of Two Major News Organizations,” Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics (2007) (12), 91 at p. 97 (finding that “Overall, participants . . . rated the headlines from CNN as significantly more liberal than those from FOX News. . . . CNN tilted more to the left than did FOX News. The conclusion that CNN’s headlines were perceived as more liberal than FOX News’, rather than FOX News’ headlines’ being perceived as more conservative than CNN’s, is supported by the finding that overall, the headlines from FOX News were rated slightly on the liberal side of neutral. If FOX News’ headlines had been perceived as biased toward the conservative viewpoint, then the overall ratings should have exceeded 50 percent.”)

The administrator who semi-protected this article knew, or was reckless in not knowing, that (1) FAIR is a blatently unreliable source, and - equally important - (2) actual,peer-reviewed studies suggest precisely the opposite of the proposition that CNN is perceived as "centrist." Would you please help in removing the unreliably-sourced, and inconsistent-with-real-literature statement concerning CNN's perceived "centrist" position (it's semi-protected)? I would also like some help in getting the aforementioned articles detailing CNN's perceived liberal bias included in the CNN article. Thank you so much for your time. Jm131284 (talk) 04:33, 24 February 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for your note:

1. Protection and semi-protection do not imply approval of the version protected.
2. semi protected articles are still editable by registered users of more than a few days standing.
3. The best place to discuss your concerns is on the talk page of the article involved. I have little knowledge of the subject, the regular editors of the page will be better informed.

Rich Farmbrough, 05:42 24 February 2009 (UTC).

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Delivered by §hepBot (Disable) at 21:40, 24 February 2009 (UTC)

OR>original research?

I noticed on the meme page that your bot swapped out the Template:Or to Template:Original research with this edit (while adding the date like usual). As you can see from the template pages they are not the same thing, so that might be a problem. Vicarious (talk) 22:30, 25 February 2009 (UTC)

Yes thanks. this was because OR and Or were different I have fixed them up since then. Rich Farmbrough, 06:36 26 February 2009 (UTC).

Featured article review

I have nominated British African-Caribbean community 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. Cordless Larry (talk) 07:52, 26 February 2009 (UTC)

Why did you delete my Pop Culture reference?

(SmackBot)

Hello, I added a Simpsons reference to the Pop culture reference part of the page - why did you delete it? What is more pop culture than the Simpsons?

Judy

What page would that be? Rich Farmbrough, 05:46 5 February 2009 (UTC).

Backlog Tag on Category:Biography articles without listas parameter

Really? I have been dropping hints all over the place in the hope that some folks might jump into the fray. I hope your tag does some good.

Just so we don't bump into each other you should know that I am working from the back. I have cleared all the articles after Z and have started on the Z articles. I believe that there is a bot that is going through the articles and copying the DEFAULTSORT value from the article into the listas parameter on the Talk page but I do not know the scheme.

Glad to have you aboard!

JimCubb (talk) 06:27, 27 February 2009 (UTC)

Smackbot having some trouble with ISO dates

See [75], [76], and [77]; Smackbot seems to have grabbed the wrong number for the year. I glanced at his other edits and didn't see that happening to anyone else's files, so I assume I just had my dates formatted in a way the bot wasn't programmed to handle? rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 05:00, 28 February 2009 (UTC)

Yes, thanks. Sorted. Rich Farmbrough, 08:25 28 February 2009 (UTC).

There are still issues: Jan 2006 instead of Jan 2007 (not sure this is wrong, as it is the creation date; the other edits don’t seem to have any real source for the date), Oct 2006 instead of Oct 2005, Oct 2006 instead of Feb 2006. --AVRS (talk) 18:11, 28 February 2009 (UTC)

Yes the first one simply goes from the date on the page. The other two go from the date the page was added to the category: this is recovered from the meta-data using the API. There is a substantial "bulge" in October 2006, I assume that is when the category was added to the template. Rich Farmbrough, 18:21 28 February 2009 (UTC).

SmackBot file date

Hi Rich! SmackBot has dated File:WikiProject_Remembrance_Logo.png as October 2006 here. Why? The file was created and uploaded in May 2006, the page was only edited once, in August 2008, so I can't see where it got October 2006 from. Thanks! ➲ redvers ^{see my arsenal} 11:52, 1 March 2009 (UTC)

Or I could just scroll up, that's fine too :o) I'll correct the date myself. ➲ redvers ^{see my arsenal} 11:54, 1 March 2009 (UTC)

Grin. Rich Farmbrough, 11:54 1 March 2009 (UTC).

Stub tag underneath templates

Hi Rich. I've noticed your bot has been tampering with a lot of my articles where I've tidely tacked the templates onto the bottom of the articles and nestled the stub templates on top. I'm not the only one who has complained about your bot making the bottom template untidy. I gather that the stub template always goes at the bottom of articles but in my view it should go at the bottom of the text NOT foot plates. PLease can you do something about this. Dr. Blofeld ^{White cat} 19:13, 1 March 2009 (UTC)

Yes it places them right at the end, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Stub#How_to_mark_an_article_as_a_stub applies, "By convention this is placed at the end of the article, after the External links section, any navigation templates, and the category tags, so that the stub category will appear last" this is historically how it has been done and the position is coded as part of WP:AWB's general fixes. By all means look for a change in the guidelines or take it up at WP:AWB. Rich Farmbrough, 19:55 1 March 2009 (UTC).

Mmm I'm not happy with that one, especially in stub articles it makes the article look a mess if there is a one liner and then a templates stuck half way in the articles and a big gap underneath because of the stub tag. For instance see Thoại Sơn District. Now compare it with Càng Long District. Dr. Blofeld ^{White cat} 19:57, 1 March 2009 (UTC)

The big gap is partly due to the layout of the stub template, partly to the nav-box and partly to the usual 2 blank lines above the stub-stack. See how it looks now, especially with the navbox open. Also remember that the navbox is part of the apparatus of the article, the stub template is supposed to be transient. Rich Farmbrough, 20:16 1 March 2009 (UTC).

I guess. It wouldn't look so bad if the articles were fleshed out a little bit but when the gap is bigger than the length of the article it is not a good sight. A shame that few arr developing these articles. SOmebody has to do it. Dr. Blofeld ^{White cat} 20:31, 1 March 2009 (UTC) Best thing is to keep the template open at least for the time being. Looks better if the template is open not closed. Dr. Blofeld ^{White cat} 20:39, 1 March 2009 (UTC)

Question (re listas)

Hi! (It's been quite a while since our last interaction.)
Of no great importance, but regarding this edit, if my understanding of "listas" is correct, (and it's entirely possible that my understanding is NOT correct), its main use is to treat the page (in certain circumstances) as though its name is as specified in the "listas". If that is indeed the case, then what's the advantage achieved by "listas" with the same name as the page?
Signed: Easily confused from Adelaide. (Cheers, Pdfpdf (talk) 01:11, 2 March 2009 (UTC))

There is a category of biography articles without "listas" - this is meant to be used to patrol, clearly nearly all biography articles need a listas, adding it to those which strictly speaking could do without (maybe 2%) will help make maintenance feasible. Rich Farmbrough, 10:05 2 March 2009 (UTC).

How simple and sensible! (aka "What a good idea!") Thanks, Pdfpdf (talk) 10:35, 2 March 2009 (UTC)

Wikipedia Signpost — 2 March 2009

This week, the Wikipedia Signpost published volume 5, issue 9, which includes these articles:

• Books extension enabled
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Delievered by SoxBot II (talk) at 08:36, 2 March 2009 (UTC)

No content in Category:Uncategorized stubs from February 2009

Hello, this is a message from an automated bot. A tag has been placed on Category:Uncategorized stubs from February 2009, by another Wikipedia user, requesting that it be speedily deleted from Wikipedia. The tag claims that it should be speedily deleted because Category:Uncategorized stubs from February 2009 has been empty for at least four days, and its only content has been links to parent categories. (CSD C1).

To contest the tagging and request that administrators wait before possibly deleting Category:Uncategorized stubs from February 2009, please affix the template {{hangon}} to the page, and put a note on its talk page. If the article has already been deleted, see the advice and instructions at WP:WMD. Feel free to contact the bot operator if you have any questions about this or any problems with this bot, bearing in mind that this bot is only informing you of the nomination for speedy deletion; it does not perform any nominations or deletions itself. To see the user who deleted the page, click here CSDWarnBot (talk) 20:30, 2 March 2009 (UTC)

SmackBot

Hello, Why have you edited the ChoiceOdds article as the site looks terrible. The layout has completed changed and the font is a different size from the original. What was the purpose behind your changes? What was you hoping to achieve?

Can you amend the changes? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 193.178.217.17 (talk) 11:18, 3 March 2009 (UTC)

The page was laid out with html instead of wikimarkup, fixed. Rich Farmbrough, 15:18 4 March 2009 (UTC).

Consider quoting listas

Hi,

I often see your Add listas parameter in my watchlist. Can you please put listas in quotes: Add "listas" parameter? It will make it more readable.

Thanks in advance. --Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 14:57, 3 March 2009 (UTC)

DoneRich Farmbrough, 15:17 4 March 2009 (UTC).

CfD nomination of Category:Articles containing English language text

I have nominated Category:Articles containing English language text (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs) for deletion. Your opinions on the matter are welcome; please participate in the discussion by adding your comments at the discussion page. Thank you. –Dream out loud (talk) 15:16, 3 March 2009 (UTC)

Pause date bot?

Hi Rich Farmbrough, could you pause your bot until Commonshelper is fixed? A lot of images end up wrong at Commons because you're bot added a date to the template. Which templates do you plan on changing btw? multichill (talk) 22:02, 2 March 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for your note. SmackBot was dating PD-user Pd-Self and PD-user-retouched based on information from the content of the page, or the current month, but I've now switched over to use purely metadata from the API indicating when it was categorised. Tell me how this may be causing a problem and what commonshelper is. Rich Farmbrough, 22:45 2 March 2009 (UTC).

Commonshelper is a tool for moving images from Wikipedia to Wikimedia Commons. The takes the original info/licence and uses this to construct the new info. See for example this category for images moved from enwp to Commons. The bot converts "{{Self||GFDL|cc-by-sa-3.0}}" to "{{Self|author=[[:en:User:<uploader>|<uploader>]] at [http://en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia]|GFDL|cc-by-sa-3.0}}" and "{{PD-Self}}" to "{{PD-user-w|en|wikipedia|<uploader>}}". The {{PD-self}} conversion doesn't work (yet) when you add a date. I asked the guy who runs the tool if he could fix it, but didn't get a response yet. multichill (talk) 17:44, 3 March 2009 (UTC)

SmackBot repeated edits replacing "unreferenced section" templates

In "Jesus wept", SmackBot took out a pipe, changing {{unreferenced|section|date=December 2008}} to {{Unreferencedsection|date=December 2008}} and then came back again two days later to insert a space, {{Unreferenced section|date=December 2008}}. Can you set it to skip one edit? You may of course have fixed this already. RSVP here. - Fayenatic (talk) 13:57, 4 March 2009 (UTC)

Yes, this is an "order effect" and easily fixed. Thanks. Rich Farmbrough, 14:20 4 March 2009 (UTC).

SmackBot

Hello, I'm a Belgian from Liège, I was reading the page of Wikipédia about belgium, and I'm surprided because I don't see "Pierre Marcolini" and "Galler" the better Belgian Chocolat in the liste of belgian chocolat, the problem is that I can't change, could you do it please?

Thanks —Preceding unsigned comment added by Ozalittle (talk • contribs) 14:45, 5 March 2009 (UTC)

SmackBot

Hi, your bot removed the orphan tag from the article JEDMICS. Only one page links to this article - is this behaviour intended? --Pgallert (talk) 17:58, 5 March 2009 (UTC)

Probably not, I am turning off tagging for now for a number of reasons. Rich Farmbrough, 15:17 8 March 2009 (UTC).

Lamit Company

I saw your comment and I rewrote the article. Can you please remove the discussion box? Regards, Vasile Crist —Preceding unsigned comment added by 92.85.57.219 (talk) 00:39, 7 March 2009 (UTC)

vandalism help

A user called Ellipi is vandalising Turkish related articles. This can be seen clearly in Turkmeneli article. The article is suppose to be about the area where Iraqi Turkmen are concentrated, but the user keep refuse them as a race, and label Turkmeneli something nationalists have made up, and other unsources propaganda. Now I try to revert but I get this error: The edit could not be undone due to conflicting intermediate edits. I have sources that can improve the article, but I need the article to be the way it was, that is :(cur) (prev) 01:33, 1 March 2009 Eeekster (talk | contribs) m (775 bytes) (remove blogspot link) (undo)

I have come to know the user Ellipi is very stubborn and keep having revert wars, that's why I'm cautious. Please help. --Bunifa88 (talk) 23:02, 6 March 2009 (UTC)

Edits

Do you ever worry that your large number of edits may crash the server? TeH nOmInAtOr (talk) 13:02, 7 March 2009 (UTC)

Answered on user's talk page. Rich Farmbrough, 15:16 8 March 2009 (UTC).

Jersey's Talking

Greetings, Rich Farmbrough,

I am writing to you request your insights regarding how to provide additional validation of "Jersey's Talking," a TV program that was broadcast for years on News 12 New Jersey. The challenges: 1. Though a primetime program for years, "Jersey's Talking" was eventually canceled (as is common with all TV shows), and News 12 New Jersey subsequently removed any mention of it from their website or elsewhere. 2. In addition, at this point in history, the program is cited/mentioned only sparsely on the websites of former guests

However ... this program exists in the minds of many people who followed the program [in New Jersey, New York, and California (namely, Los Angeles)], and I continue to receive requests from viewers who ask that the show be noted on Wikipedia. My qualifications to present this entry are: 1. I am a former print journalism student 2. I spent several years as a paid, full-time journalist for news organizations in New Jersey 3. I personally produced the program from the beginning to the middle of its run, and am therefore a primary resource regarding it's inception, development, and previous guests).

Those who require a cultural footnote regarding this TV show (whether they be viewers, publicists, former guests, or current television programmers) will be corrected my knowledge of: 1. The proper name of the program 2. Former guests 3. The host 4. The program's duration in time

Please let me know what more I can provide to maintain the existence of this article, since Wikipedia is the last bastion of such entries.

Sincerely, --Notablenews (talk) 03:39, 8 March 2009 (UTC)

Answered on user's talk page. Rich Farmbrough, 21:48 8 March 2009 (UTC).

AfD: Cristina Schultz

I'm hoping to get more discussion about a proposal to delete Cristina Schultz. I'm giving this message to all registered users who have contributed to Cristina Schultz or its talk page, except for some with no WP contributions in the last four months, and one WP:SPA with no talk page. Johnuniq (talk) 07:29, 9 March 2009 (UTC)

Template talk:Unreferenced section

Hi, would you mind expanding a little on your comment on Template talk:Unreferenced section? We had quite a long discussion on that page which resulted in the change. Reverting it without even an edit summary doesn't help us to understand what was wrong. Thanks, — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 15:02, 9 March 2009 (UTC)

Answered on user's talk page. Rich Farmbrough, 15:08 9 March 2009 (UTC).

Wikipedia Signpost — 9 March 2009

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Delivered by §hepBot (Disable) at 00:35, 10 March 2009 (UTC)

Remainder/Modulus

Sorry to butt in on this (gosh I am getting popular) isn't % pretty much undefined behavior for negative numbers? Well not undefined-- I think it has to be well-defined but the definition need not be the same on every platform (and sheesh programming against four platforms is a PITA). I was just looking at the new IEEE-754 spec for floating point today, lucky me, makes me feel old I remember the 1985 one, but of course that is FP and doesn't cover it as such.

SimonTrew (talk) 01:42, 10 March 2009 (UTC)

What?

Sorry about the dup. there I knew you would catch it so left it. I dunno either. I have been editing rather esoteric articles on computing and your name cropped up. Sorry about that. I am still just getting used to this business, not sure how one goes about chatting out of band.

No worries (I hope) I am confused too. But hopefully my confusion is making Wikipedia better!

SimonTrew (talk) 02:09, 10 March 2009 (UTC)

Smackbot mistake Austin E. Knowlton Foundation

It deleted the orphan tag with only one real item linking in. Austin E. Knowlton Foundation

Please fix, as it must look for 3 items that link there, not 3 non-list articles. speednat (talk) 22:11, 11 March 2009 (UTC)

Tagger turned of until fixed. Rich Farmbrough, 17:35 18 March 2009 (UTC).

Page created by SmackBot up for deletion

It looks like SmackBot created 1984 (album) (disambiguation) , which has been nominated for deletion. Deletion seems correct in this case as having two parenthetical disambiguators is ugly and confusing in my opinion. Is SmackBot creating pages like these deliberately or was this an error? Note as a separate line of enquiry on this issue, I've put a note at WT:WPDAB#Strange page created by SmackBot to determine what members of the DAB project think about such pages, as I may very well be out-of-step with consensus in my views. Thanks, --Rogerb67 (talk) 23:07, 11 March 2009 (UTC)

The articleissues template

Hi, on the Integrated business planning I used the wrong tag {{articleissues}} in stead of {{article issues}}.

Now SmackBot removed the tag, see here, instead of correction it.

Maybe this was your intention, maybe not. I just wanted to let you know. -- Marcel Douwe Dekker (talk) 23:43, 11 March 2009 (UTC)

TY investigating. Rich Farmbrough, 10:33 12 March 2009 (UTC).

OK tested (User:Rich Farmbrough/temp12) and currently working. Rich Farmbrough, 04:19 14 March 2009 (UTC).

Smackbot omitted brace

I just noticed an edit that made a change and removed one of the template closing braces (twice). Changes were (result has '}' rather than '}}'):

• {{Advert|date=2009-02-15}} → {{Advert|date=February 2009}
• {{fact|date=2009-02-15}} → {{Fact|date=February 2009}

An anon editor fixed one, and I fixed the other. This is just FYI. Johnuniq (talk) 06:50, 12 March 2009 (UTC)

TY investigatign. Rich Farmbrough, 10:33 12 March 2009 (UTC).

OK I tested this at User:Rich Farmbrough/temp11 and it seems to be fixed. Rich Farmbrough, 04:15 14 March 2009 (UTC).

SmackBot issue

Dodgy diff: [78]. Fixed some things properly but also broke some wikilinks. It appears to have been trying to remove links pointing to the page it's already at, which is right, but didn't quite do it right. Cheers! AllynJ (talk | contribs) 15:10, 12 March 2009 (UTC)

Hi, thanks for your message, SmackBot makes a number of changes that are available to all WP:AWB bots - in general these provide a number of non-controversial minor improvements.

The issue you raise is related to these, I have left, or will leave, a message about your concerns on the WP:AWB pages.

Regards, Rich Farmbrough, 12:34 13 March 2009 (UTC).

Small query re: SmackBot edit

Hello Rich. If you have a moment, could you look at (or explain) why SmackBot removed {{uncat}} here? Doesn't make sense to me. Thanks. CIreland (talk) 13:05, 14 March 2009 (UTC)

There is a bug in the WP:AWB tagger, I've turned it off. Rich Farmbrough, 13:56 14 March 2009 (UTC).

Stub Category

I was not aware about that. Shall take care in future edits. Paalappoo (talk) 13:57, 14 March 2009 (UTC)

Expand tags

Hi, I just noticed this edit. Does SmackBot still does this job? If not, could it be turned on again. :) Garion96 (talk) 23:28, 14 March 2009 (UTC)

Just done a run of these. Rich Farmbrough, 17:36 18 March 2009 (UTC).

JEDMICS again

Hi, your bot removed the orphan tag from the article JEDMICS. Only one page links to this article - is this behaviour intended? --Pgallert (talk) 17:58, 5 March 2009 (UTC)

Probably not, I am turning off tagging for now for a number of reasons. Rich Farmbrough, 15:17 8 March 2009 (UTC).

Does "probably" mean you don't know what exactly the bot is supposed to be doing? 8-) Anyway, it did it again. Just to let you know. --Pgallert (talk) 13:58, 16 March 2009 (UTC)

Çukurova State Symphony Orchestra

Why is SmackBot removing {{expand}} from stub articles? They obviously need to be expanded, especially this one... - CobaltBlueTony™ _talk 18:09, 16 March 2009 (UTC)

SmackBot capitalization

This edit by SmackBot seems kind of silly. Even more so when you realize SmackBot came back and removed the tag entirely an hour and a half later. --Pascal⁶⁶⁶ 19:05, 16 March 2009 (UTC)

Answered on user's talk page. Rich Farmbrough, 17:36 18 March 2009 (UTC).

Changes to a "cite book" date

I have a {{cite book}} here where among other things the bot changed

< | date = 01-01-05

-

> | date = January 01-05

1. I don't think there's a reliable way for a machine to determine what the date is for 01-01-05 as we don't know if it's Y-M-D or D-M-Y and don't know if it's 1901, 1905, 2001, or 2005. Thus it seems better for the bot to add a comment "Unable to parse this date" and perhaps a link to how to better enter the date. An alternative would be to correct the date using a "best guess" but to also add a commenting that SmackBot saw "01-01-05" and decoded this as "January 01-05" so that someone looking at this far down the line will know why there's a "January 01-05" in the article.
2. The help for the date cit book field says Full date of publication edition being referenced, in the same format as the main text of the article. Must not be wikilinked. How does SmackBot determine the format of the date for the main text? The article itself has no dates though there's a template that includes "|date=January 2009".

--Marc Kupper|talk 23:06, 16 March 2009 (UTC)

In general SB should leave cite-books alone so the questions shouldn't arise. As you say dates of this format are generally indecipherable anyway. I will look into the reason it wanted to change the date and try to persuade it not to. It is probably a bit of generic code that fixes spelling errors in month names - and has included 01 as a "spelling error" for January. Rich Farmbrough, 09:24 17 March 2009 (UTC).

Wikipedia Signpost — 16 March 2009

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  — 16 March 2009

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Delivered by §hepBot (Disable) at 23:43, 16 March 2009 (UTC)

Out of band chatting/Smackbot

Thanks for the advice about referring to articles or pages rather than assuming the other person knows-- it is kinda bleeding obvious in a way, but when you are on an article or whatever and have seen that someone else has made a recent edit etc I kinda assume they would link it up.

This assumption is quite patently false, but I am sure it will reoccur from time to time in the future, so let me apologise in advance if it happens to be you! We seem to have overlapping interests but not excessively: a couple of others I wonder sometimes if they are stalking me :) seems every time I make a change they are there.

Best wishes and keep up the good work! SimonTrew (talk) 18:59, 17 March 2009 (UTC)

BTW I like Smackbot saves a lot of gruesome work. "Let the machine do the work" I forget what article that is in, but my grandfather used to say "Let the tool do the job" which is much the same thing. I often put just and stuff in articles and let Smacbot fill them in-- is that considered OK? I don't know what its schedule is or whatever, I tend to edit when I think no-one is watching (i.e. cos it is very geographically specific and they'll all be asleep, or just because the article is incredibly dull and has had no discussion etc) SimonTrew (talk) 19:04, 17 March 2009 (UTC)

Interest in Web 3.0

I saw on its deletion log that you had restored the Web 3.0 article back in 2006 (which keeps getting deleted). In my user space I am leisurely brainstorming ways to get the article to stick around. If you are interested in helping, or know anyone who might be interested in helping...the help would be greatly appreciated. --...but what do you think? ~B F^izz _(talk) 07:45, 18 March 2009 (UTC)

I cannot remeber why I restored the article, though I must have had a good reason. However the article was quite extensive and has been useryfied here. Rich Farmbrough, 09:51 18 March 2009 (UTC).

Thanks for the tip! --...but what do you think? ~B F^izz _(talk) 16:53, 18 March 2009 (UTC)

Solarmer Energy, Inc.

I have referenced the information on the Solarmer article. Please verify. Solarmer (talk) 16:55, 18 March 2009 (UTC)

Moving {{redirect}} out of section

Smackbot is moving said template to the very top of the page. In this case I don't think that's desireable because the redirect leads to that section. Is there a guideline that says the template should be at the top? If not, could you make the bot stop that particular action? (Maybe you could let it check if the redirect wears a {{R to list entry}} tag?) Regards, -- Goodraise (talk) 00:26, 19 March 2009 (UTC)

Adding listas= that repeats article title

Out of curiosity, what is the reason for adding "|listas = Philitas of Cos" to Talk:Philitas of Cos? I had thought that when the article title was already sorted properly, there was no need for listas=. Eubulides (talk) 00:30, 19 March 2009 (UTC)

There is a category of biography articles without "listas" - this is meant to be used to patrol, clearly nearly all biography articles need a listas, adding it to those which strictly speaking could do without (maybe 2%) will help make maintenance feasible. Rich Farmbrough, 10:05 2 March 2009 (UTC).

Table

Smackbot made the first line ({| border="0" cellpadding="4") of a table within an image at Time zone#Skewing of zones a continuation of the caption without a break. Apparently all tables must begin on a new line or the wiki software doesn't recognize it as a valid table. I've fixed this but be forewarned. — Joe Kress (talk) 03:38, 19 March 2009 (UTC)

Why does smackbot reorder references?

E.g. here. At times, the order might not matter, but in general, I find ordering useful. For example, if one sentence contains two facts that should be sourced, the first reference should source the first fact. There might also be other cases in which one does want the order preserved (order by date or relevance). Having a bot order all these by, what I guess, is alphabetic, messes all that up. --Xeeron (talk) 10:39, 21 March 2009 (UTC)

Hi, thanks for your message, SmackBot makes a number of changes that are available to all WP:AWB bots - in general these provide a number of non-controversial minor improvements.

The issue you raise is related to these, I have left, or will leave, a message about your concerns on the WP:AWB pages. I would think it would make sense to numerically order the footnotes, if another order is relevant they should probably be dispersed through the sentence.

Regards, Rich Farmbrough, 15:15 21 March 2009 (UTC).

Sharai parda

Can you create this article, mark it as patrolled, and delete it immediately? There is a bug with the newpage patrol backlog listing that prevents anyone from marking it as patrolled, yet it populates the list of articles to patrol.

Normally, the procedure in such a situation would be to create the article with a {{g6}} tag, but in this case the article has been protected against recreation. -- Blanchardb -^{Me•MyEars•MyMouth}- timed 00:35, 22 March 2009 (UTC)

Done. Rich Farmbrough, 14:41 23 March 2009 (UTC).

{{Recently revised}}

Could you somehow implement a "date=" parameter in this template so Smackbot can do its magic?Headbomb {^ταλκ_{κοντριβς} – WP Physics} 13:35, 22 March 2009 (UTC)

Done. Rich Farmbrough, 18:17 23 March 2009 (UTC).

Biography articles without living parameter

Hi. Can you please exclude talk pages of non-articles from Category:Biography articles without living parameter in WPBiography template as you did with listas? -- Magioladitis (talk) 22:22, 23 March 2009 (UTC)

 Done Rich Farmbrough, 16:44 25 March 2009 (UTC).

Wikipedia Signpost: 23 March 2009

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Delievered by SoxBot II (talk) at 04:29, 24 March 2009 (UTC)

Historic smackbot problem

Rather late now, but I've just found this. You may wish to investigate the bots actions - I'll attempt to fix the problem with the article itself. —  Tivedshambo  (t/c) 15:52, 25 March 2009 (UTC)

Hi, thanks for your message, SmackBot makes a number of changes that are available to all WP:AWB bots - in general these provide a number of non-controversial minor improvements.

The issue you raise is related to these, and has already been fixed by the developers of WP:AWB.

Regards, Rich Farmbrough, 16:43 25 March 2009 (UTC).

Ok - thanks. —  Tivedshambo  (t/c) 17:07, 25 March 2009 (UTC)

SmackBot and maintenance tags with nested templates

SmackBot's recent edit to HD 80606 broke the maintenance tag. Seems to have incorrectly inserted the date in a nested template. [79] Icalanise (talk) 19:02, 26 March 2009 (UTC)

SmackBot bug

Hi Rich. Please see this edit by SmackBot. I think there is some kind of bug related to the fixing of references' date, because the date 2006-01-03 for this reference was correct and March 2009 is not. Beagel (talk) 16:57, 27 March 2009 (UTC)

• Please ask the bot to justify this edit. At the time there were zero useful incoming links and just one outgoing link. — RHaworth (Talk | contribs) 07:57, 28 March 2009 (UTC)

SmackBot bug

This edit was not helpful; it changed a template instead of adding a piped date field. -LtNOWIS (talk) 07:59, 29 March 2009 (UTC)

Thanks fixed . Rich Farmbrough, 17:09 29 March 2009 (UTC).

Tag in articles

• This article does not cite any references or sources. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources (ideally, using inline citations). Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (March 2008)

When the a tag like this is placed on article and it says that unsourced material may be challenged and removed by such a date, who decides to delete it or to keep it. I have seen many articles with a date a year old. --Juliaaltagracia (talk) 00:42, 30 March 2009 (UTC)

It is not "by" that date, the date is when the tag was added (roughly and in general) - and any editor can remove unsourced material if they think its the right thing to do. There are categories by date (preferences, Misc, show hidden categories) to help clear these up - ideally by sourcing the data, but if necessary by removing it. See WP:BACKLOG for more details. Rich Farmbrough, 01:44 30 March 2009 (UTC).

• Thank you.--Juliaaltagracia (talk) 01:50, 30 March 2009 (UTC)

Queen of Swords

• I have been the main editor of QoS since about September last year when this show was first shown in the UK seven years after cancellation. As for the cancellation section, I only wrote the last line from a youtube note. This show's only info comes from Anthony de Longis website, archives of the defunct QoS website and the French DVD compared with the broadcast american version. For any show to be cancelled is probably poor ratings to costs and this was a very expensive show to produce compared to other Fireworks productions ie La Femme Nikita, Adventure Inc etc. I think this Cancelled section could be removed as I do not think we will ever get a definitve answer. I have looked but to no avail.
• As for Trivia sections, I know some editors are not so keen and I could move my entries re the horses to "production notes" and the bit about "Avenging Angel to the opening statement( I never wrote that piece). Let me know, I have complied with other editors requests to keep this article going as they want itREVUpminster (talk) 07:13, 30 March 2009 (UTC)

Answered on user's talk page. Rich Farmbrough, 09:48 30 March 2009 (UTC).

I have removed the cancellation section because of the above and items in the trivia section moved elsewhere in articleREVUpminster (talk) 10:33, 31 March 2009 (UTC)

Help

Appreciate your help in the past on Lichtenstein Medal. Can you help columnate American Philatelic Society Hall of Fame - I tried to copy what you did and failed miserably.Wikited (talk) 00:14, 31 March 2009 (UTC)

Thanks. You're a great help and appreciated.Wikited (talk) 11:33, 31 March 2009 (UTC)

By whom broken

See Template talk:By whom.Headbomb {^ταλκ_{κοντριβς} – WP Physics} 08:15, 31 March 2009 (UTC)

Casablanca directive

This edit altered date formats which were part of a name of a book. --PBS (talk) 13:58, 31 March 2009 (UTC)

Template:By whom

It looked as if you logged out after doing this, so I went to ANI first to get a quick reaction from an admin. See Talk:List of common misconceptions#Weasel Tags and WP:ANI#Important template broken and protected. --Hans Adler (talk) 15:55, 31 March 2009 (UTC)

I've simply reverted the edit, to get back to the unbroken state. I haven't a hope in hell of fixing your fix, as templates are a total black art to me. Hope that's OK! Tonywalton ^Talk 16:09, 31 March 2009 (UTC)

Of course. Revert first then worry later is the order of the day with templates. Rich Farmbrough, 16:30 31 March 2009 (UTC).

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Delievered by SoxBot II (talk) at 20:28, 31 March 2009 (UTC)

TOC help question

Rich, I'm ask this here because you seem to know about template coding from our interactions in the past. I have a question regarding Template:TOClimit: Would it be possible to add a toggle to the TOClimit template itself that turns the limit off? (Or is there another TOC template that does both?) I use the TOC primarily to see the organization of an article I am editing, especially a longer one, at a glance. A set limit prevents that, but a toggle to show the full TOC would be a nice option. Another editor has been adding the TOClimit to many aircraft articles, and it's use is a bone of contention between us. WIth a toggle, I'd have no objection to its use at all, but as of now, there's no way to see full TOC when the limiter is used. If you aren't able to help me directly, do you know of someone who can? (I asked on the Template talk:TOClimit page, but got no response from anyone who could make the changes.) Thanks. - Thanks. - BillCJ (talk) 10:05, 11 March 2009 (UTC)

Bubble tea!

-download | sign! has given you a bubble tea! Bubble teas promote WikiLove and hopefully this one has made your day better. Spread the WikiLove by giving someone else a bubble tea, whether it be someone you have had disagreements with in the past or a good friend. Happy drinking!

Spread the bubbliness of bubble teas by adding {{subst:bubble tea}} to someone's talk page with a friendly message!

Thank you. Rich Farmbrough, 09:47 30 March 2009 (UTC).

Quick question

Hi, Rich! Recently, I've seen an influx of edits such as this one by you. Could you, please, explain its purpose? Thanks!—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); 14:21, March 23, 2009 (UTC)

There is a category of biography articles without "listas" - this is meant to be used to patrol, clearly nearly all biography articles need a listas, adding it to those which strictly speaking could do without (maybe 2%) will help make maintenance feasible. Rich Farmbrough, 16:45 25 March 2009 (UTC).

Problems with article for Antonio Munoz

Hi! I am totally lost! I don't know how to wikify my article and then submit it for publishing. Here is the link: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Antonio_Mu%C3%B1oz_(actor)&oldid=280330011

Thanks for your help!

I have done some work on it. Rich Farmbrough, 17:17 29 March 2009 (UTC).

citations needed Fact template

Hi Rich,

After adding the Fact template to a couple of articles I noticed your Smackbot added the date to it. I was under the impression I should just add the Fact part of the template and leave the bot to add the date - is this correct or should I be adding the date part straight away? (apologies, I am still at 'steep learning curve' stage.) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Hudson702 (talk • contribs) 21:32, 31 March 2009 (UTC)

It's perfectly ok to do either, but personally I prefer people not to date as SmackBot will pretty much get it right whereas us poor humans often mistype month names etc.. SB does correct a lot of these errors too. Rich Farmbrough, 00:04 1 April 2009 (UTC).

Great, thanks for the advice.Hudson702 (talk) 08:02, 1 April 2009 (UTC)

SmackBot changing dates in templates

Some of the recent edits by SmackBot have changed dates from April 2009 to March 2009, for example this edit. —Snigbrook 01:29, 2 April 2009 (UTC)

Answered on user's talk page. Rich Farmbrough, 12:23 2 April 2009 (UTC).

And this one[80], and others indeed.

Can you please fix this? Fram (talk) 07:13, 2 April 2009 (UTC)

 Fixed thanks. Rich Farmbrough, 12:23 2 April 2009 (UTC).

CfD nomination of Category:Current events ongoing

Category:Current events ongoing, which you created, has been nominated for deletion, merging, or renaming. If you would like to participate in the discussion, you are invited to add your comments at the category's entry on the Categories for discussion page. Thank you. Cgingold (talk) 06:30, 2 April 2009 (UTC)

BLP reference templates

Hey Rich, could you get SmackBot to replace {{Unreferenced}} with {{BLP unsourced}} and {{Refimprove}} with {{BLP sources}} on articles with Category:Living people? - kollision (talk) 01:16, 29 March 2009 (UTC)

Yes/ Rich Farmbrough, 18:40 29 March 2009 (UTC).

I just saw this in action, and it's a ridiculously good change. Thanks for doing it. — Gavia immer (talk) 04:28, 5 April 2009 (UTC)

Smackbot/Wikiproject unref switch

Maybe this is an old hat already, but just in case: In this edit smackbot expanded the unrefswitch in WikiProject Germany template with the date and thereby made it useless. unref=yes was the correct entry. Agathoclea (talk) 12:43, 4 April 2009 (UTC)

thank you that is useful information. Rich Farmbrough, 14:38 4 April 2009 (UTC).

Trivial edit by smackbot

Smackbot is doing some trivial and unnecessary edits.

In this edit, Smackbot replaced {{morefootnotes|date=March 2009}} with {{More footnotes|date=March 2009}}.

What's the purpose of that? Bypassing a redirect makes no difference to the reader or the maintenance categories, and there's much more server load from an edit that from a redirect. So why not just skip that page?

In any case, the tag was added using Friendly. Is the bot going to run around trivially reformatting the results of a widely-used script? --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 16:05, 5 April 2009 (UTC)

Gosh you are on the ball. The run was about 2-300 items which were in an undated category but SB could not fix, yet had an edit "available" against them, however trivial. Most of those items were fixed by the near-null edit, which meant could concentrate on the rest. Rich Farmbrough, 16:10 7 April 2009 (UTC).

Template:Nofootnotes

I think you removed a parenthesis or something in this edit. See, for example, the redlinked category it put at the bottom of Manchu given name. rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 07:00, 6 April 2009 (UTC)

Yep, looks like {{#if:{{{date|}}}|from ({{{date}}}}} just needs to be replaced with {{#if:{{{date|}}}|from ({{{date}}})}} . rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 07:05, 6 April 2009 (UTC)

Never mind, it's been fixed. rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 13:42, 6 April 2009 (UTC)

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Delievered by SoxBot II (talk) at 19:36, 6 April 2009 (UTC)

Possibly unfree File:BishopStopfordsSchoolLogo.png

A file that you uploaded or altered, File:BishopStopfordsSchoolLogo.png, has been listed at Wikipedia:Possibly unfree files because its copyright status is unclear or disputed. If the file's copyright status cannot be verified, it may be deleted. You may find more information on the file description page. You are welcome to add comments to its entry at the discussion if you are interested in it not being deleted. Thank you. Skier Dude (talk) 04:21, 7 April 2009 (UTC) --Skier Dude (talk) 04:21, 7 April 2009 (UTC)

JEDMICS

Hi Rich, after the third consecutive unconstructive edit to this article I have marked my undo as vandalism revert. Do you actually care about error notifications from other users? Next time (sure this won't take long) I'll attempt to switch SmackBot off. --Pgallert (talk) 10:16, 7 April 2009 (UTC)

I replied to you explaining the situation. Note that simply reverting a bot is often a waste of time, I have fixed the article so that it won't attract SB - while I wouldn't suggest that the onus is on you to do that, it is what works and I would in your place. In extremis you can mark the article with the nobots template. Having said that its really rather a trivial matter. Where do you think JEDMICS should be linked from? Rich Farmbrough, 01:06 9 April 2009 (UTC).

Honestly, if you explained it I didn't get it. I was just worried the bot repeatedly removes a template that clearly belongs there; the article has only one main space link to it (and that comes from a list which doesn't count). And honestly, I felt you should worry if SB makes unconstructive edits. I still feel that way. Maybe I'm naive, but wouldn't the "proper" way be to look into the source code and eliminate the error? I mean, who's checking bot edits, and how many times has SB done something like this? --Pgallert (talk) 09:29, 9 April 2009 (UTC)

Tagging Question

Hi, quick question on Smack Bot's algorithim here. The article has sources, except for one section, which is really just a list of his books that we haven't been able to verify due to language issues. All things about the man are sourced, so is he really an unsourced BLP? Just curious, thanks! StarM 12:09, 7 April 2009 (UTC)

Hm, I see your point. Remember category:BLP articles lacking sources only means more sources are needed not that it's unsourced. Rich Farmbrough, 15:14 7 April 2009 (UTC).

Got it. I interpreted "lacking" as "not having" rather than "not having enough". Makes sense now. Thanks. StarM 01:23, 8 April 2009 (UTC)

Diane Webber

Diane Webber You changed this to listing to say it is the biography of a living person. Diane passed away in 2008Katsand (talk) 18:27, 8 April 2009 (UTC)

No I didn't. The category ((Living People) was there and needed removing. I have fixed it. Rich Farmbrough, 01:02 9 April 2009 (UTC).

Edit Summary

What's your opinion on correct protocol? - At present, any changes obvious by using 'diff' I do not mention, ie I leave the Edit Summary section blank. I would, however, use it to describe an edit that merits further explanation, eg unbiasing, etc. Is this correct?Hudson702 (talk) 09:01, 9 April 2009 (UTC))

Well for a few keystrokes you can put "ced" for copy-edit -"sp" for spelling, "layout", "simplify" etc. I often leave it blank, but there is value to someone being able to look at the history instead of the diffs. Rich Farmbrough, 13:59 9 April 2009 (UTC).

OK thanks Hudson702 (talk) 14:32, 9 April 2009 (UTC)

Have a look at this recent edit...

...of Süper Lig 2008–09. For some odd reason, SmackBot inserted dates in each end every scoreline, thus bloating the code by nearly 5 kB. Since a general source for all results must be given in the footer of this set of templates, the bot seems to be misjudging. Could you please fix it? :-) --Soccer-holic^{I hear voices in my head...} 21:13, 9 April 2009 (UTC)

Yes Fb R shouldn't be dated. maybe because the template page itself transcludes tl:fact.. fixed anyway. Rich Farmbrough, 03:14 10 April 2009 (UTC).

Sorry to disturb you once more, but 45 minutes after your answer above, he did it again. o.O Let's see if he does once more, but nevertheless, Nevermind. The old "time zone conversion brain malfunction". XD Thanks a lot for your effort! :-) --Soccer-holic^{I hear voices in my head...} 09:53, 10 April 2009 (UTC)

Smackbot demoted header comment

At Annie Oakley (diff) Smackbot moved a disambiguation subhead above a hidden header comment. This page is frequently mis-edited by young students, so it's important to have "READ THIS" be the first thing they see. Please fix Smackbot so that it ignores the position of hidden comments in making item move decisions. Thanks. (Please reply here if desired)Milo 06:38, 10 April 2009 (UTC)

Eric Bibb

A quick question. What sort of source is needed to verify the birth date? This date was confirmed to me by Eric Bibb's manager, but I suppose you need "durably archived". Cheers. -- ALGRIF talk 12:23, 10 April 2009 (UTC)

Wikimania 2010 Oxford bid

Thank you for supporting the Oxford bid to hold Wikimania 2010! We're currently in the final stages of the bid process - the jury will be announcing their decision by the 16th April. We're currently putting together the local team for the bid (who will do what if the bid wins); if you're able to be on the local team, please put your name in the appropriate place on m:Wikimania 2010/Bids/Oxford/Team. We'd also welcome anything you can do to help refine the bid in these last few days. If you have any questions, please let me or User:Seddon know. Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 21:45, 10 April 2009 (UTC)

Template:BLP unsourced section

I've left a comment at the talkpage of that template you may be interested in. Thank you. --Pixelface (talk) 05:58, 11 April 2009 (UTC)

'Scotch whisky' smackbot edits

Hi, I'm not sure what went wrong but something clearly did when SmackBot tried to edit the Scotch whisky article - http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Scotch_whisky&diff=282798520&oldid=282736457 I thought this should be brought to your attention. Richard Jackson (talk) 23:17, 11 April 2009 (UTC)

Oddly, I can't find any record of the article how I saw it when I reported this to you; the bottom of the page seemed to be a copy of the article on alcoholic drinks. Not sure what happened but it's gone now. Sorry to waste your time. Richard Jackson (talk) 20:08, 12 April 2009 (UTC)

No problem. Rich Farmbrough, 01:16 13 April 2009 (UTC).

Area bombing directive

See bottom of the diff the bot altered the dates within quotes which make up part of a book title. --PBS (talk) 15:54, 12 April 2009 (UTC)

Hi, thanks for your message, SmackBot makes a number of changes that are available to all WP:AWB bots - in general these provide a number of non-controversial minor improvements.

The issue you raise is related to these, I have left, or will leave, a message about your concerns on the WP:AWB pages.

Regards, Rich Farmbrough, 01:17 13 April 2009 (UTC).

Disambiguation of sections.

Please reply on my talk page Homebum (talk) 22:15, 12 April 2009 (UTC)

{{help me}}

I am not sure if Smack Bot is making a mistake here or not. I have a section in my article Classical_Hamiltonian_quaternions#Tensor that used to be part of an article tensor of a quaternion until they decided against my objections to roll both articles into one article.

So now there needs to be disambiguation for this section, because the word tensor has different meanings.

Smackbot may have found an error in the way I am doing these tags? What is the right way?

Homebum (talk) 18:25, 12 April 2009 (UTC)

You are asking a question of Rich as the bot's operator. The helpme template calls general users who monitor the helpme request category and is not useful for getting Rich's attention. Rather, he will get the message as soon as he logs on since he will get the bright orange "you have new messages" bar that a user sees whenever another editor edits his or her talk page. Note that the {{helpme}} template is normally for placement on your talk page only.--68.237.225.44 (talk) 19:05, 12 April 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for explaining that about the help me tag! I will put this question on my talk page!Homebum (talk) 22:15, 12 April 2009 (UTC)

TfD nomination of Template:Linked-title

Template:Linked-title 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. —Remember the dot ^(talk) 19:29, 12 April 2009 (UTC)

SmackBot Peter Kennedy (priest)

Thanks. :)--Thecurran (talk) 00:58, 13 April 2009 (UTC)

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Delievered by SoxBot II (talk) at 16:47, 13 April 2009 (UTC)

SmackBot

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Russian_apartment_bombings&diff=283658052&oldid=283589486

I think the non-breaking spaces nbsp; your bot inserts are premature optimization. It may prevent from searching for exact titles, too. Thanks for the other fixes.--ilgiz (talk) 22:30, 13 April 2009 (UTC)

SmackBot years on PD-self categories

This edit is one of over a hundred in which SmackBot dropped two or three digits off the year. I've been correcting these by hand, but maybe the bot could do this quicker. --Stepheng3 (talk) 18:34, 14 April 2009 (UTC)

Just wondering

Hi - cleaning up some double redirects and I noticed User:Rich_Farmbrough/dabpages - just wondering, can you tell me what this page is used for? Thanks.     JCutter  ^{{ talk to me }}     23:00, 16 April 2009 (UTC)

Answered on user's talk page. Rich Farmbrough, 00:35 18 April 2009 (UTC).

{{Chemformula}}

I recently created this. Could this be made Smackbot-friendly?Headbomb {^ταλκ_{κοντριβς} – WP Physics} 23:27, 16 April 2009 (UTC)

Should all be done. Rich Farmbrough, 23:33 18 April 2009 (UTC).

Thanks.Headbomb {^ταλκ_{κοντριβς} – WP Physics} 09:24, 19 April 2009 (UTC)

Question

Does your SmackBot fix image files also? See Category:Articles with invalid date parameter in template that we have some 246 of them. Debresser (talk) 11:04, 17 April 2009 (UTC)

Yes sortof. I am aware of those images. Rich Farmbrough, 00:33 18 April 2009 (UTC).

I fixed the last 61 manually. I prefer fixing manually (when I have time) because then I can also fix a redlinked category, improve layout, recognise vandalism, etc.

BTW, do you know which bot fixes pages in Category:Wikipedia pages with incorrect protection templates. I've been told User:DumbBOT. And that there is another one. You know which one? Debresser (talk) 23:04, 18 April 2009 (UTC)

I don't know. Most of the ones I fixed up were actually done semi-manually. Rich Farmbrough, 00:36 19 April 2009 (UTC).

Tony Hollingsworth entry

Hi. Re the Tony Hollingsworth piece, I have radically cut and altered this, removing aspects that could make it read like an advertisement. Do you think the "advertisement" and "neutrality" notices at the top could now be removed? Peter Elman (talk) 08:23, 19 April 2009 (UTC)

SmackBot

This edit to Spinal Tap by SmackBot replaced a zero-width space HTML entity (&#8203;) with the actual Unicode character, which is invisible in the edit box. (The purpose of the zero-width space is to allow for a line break in long sequences which contain no characters that normally indicate where a line break may be inserted.) If the entity doesn't belong, it should be removed, but I don't see any guideline or policy that prohibits or recommends against it. —Danorton (talk) 18:27, 19 April 2009 (UTC)

Generally AWB replaces HTML and similar entities with their Unicode representation - spaces are normally not included in this replacement. I will raise it with the AWB team. Rich Farmbrough, 00:09 20 April 2009 (UTC).

You might also consider the issue of combining diacritics, which will also "disappear" when converted to Unicode (e.g. n-diaeresis). —Danorton (talk) 01:08, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

Another Backlog Tag Please

Would you apply the Backlog tag to Category:Biography articles without living parameter? There are only 51,548 pages there but those pages have been used as a rationale for a change to the the WP Biog banner that was applied inappropriately in the interest of applying to the pages that need it. Thank you.

JimCubb (talk) 01:36, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

Collect RFC

Hi, there's an ongoing RFC on User:Collect [81]. You've been an editor on Joe the Plumber so your perspective might be helpful.Mattnad (talk) 15:15, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

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Delivered by SoxBot II (talk) at 19:08, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

Your Inputs

Dear Editor,

Before i make an entry live in article space, i would like a few editors to take a look at it and give their opinions. The entry is that of an online collaboration company and can be seen at http://en.wikipedia.org/User:Pankajunk/HyperOffice. The entries i referenced are http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebEx, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Box.net, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoho, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zimbra

Looking forward to your opinions. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Pankajunk (talk • contribs) 15:21, 23 April 2009 (UTC)

SmackBot still adding spaces to cartridge designations

SmackBot is still adding non-breaking spaces to cartridge designations.[82] As I've explained before, these are more designations than actual measurements. It also seems to be doing this more often now, which is extremely annoying because it usually fixes other things in the same edit, which means the spaces have to be taken out manually. — DP5 20:12, 23 April 2009 (UTC)

Answered on user's talk page. Rich Farmbrough, 12:40 2 May 2009 (UTC).

SmackBot edits of the page Stefan Th. Gries

Your bot flags the page for Stefan Th. Gries as lacking in terms of notability. I had already before added the following information in the discussion section that shows that the article meets notability criteria for academic researchers

Stefan Th. Gries meets the following criteria from the notability of academics page:

One criterion is: "The person's research has made significant impact in their scholarly discipline, broadly construed, as demonstrated by independent reliable sources." Stefan Th. Gries has widely published in books (cf. the links at the bottom of the page) and peer-reviewed journals of his fields and performs editorial functions for several different journals in his fields.

Another criterion is "The person is or has been an editor-in-chief of a major well-established journal in their subject area." Stefan Th. Gries has been editor-in-chief of the journal Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory for the past five years, which has been ranked by the European Science Foundation and awarded the highest journal ranking class by the Norwegian Science Foundation.

Thus, plz let me know in what way you think the page violates notability in spite of the above or plz leave the page alone. Thx. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 201.6.107.124 (talk) 15:09, 24 April 2009 (UTC)

Hi, thanks for your message, SmackBot does not generally add tags, but merely dates those that are already there. Regards, Rich Farmbrough, 22:07 25 April 2009 (UTC).

Re: Article: John Serry, Sr. Tagging

Dear Mr. Farmbrough: Just a quick note regarding the posting of tagging banners upon the article John Serry, Sr. (requesting the removal of Peacock terms and General cleanup). As the primary author of the article I apologize for the limitations of the biography which I attribute to my lack of experience in submitting material to Wikipedia. I have attempted to remove language which might be construed as promotional or subjective while also deleting links to names of musicians who are not mentioned in Wikipedia. It is my hope that these actions result in an article which is more balanced for encyclopedic purposes. In light of these edits, kindly reconsider the use of these tags on the article and remove them if possible. As always I welcome any suggestions which you might have to improve the quality of the work. Thanks for your consideration. Respectfully, --Pjs012915 (talk) 20:17, 24 April 2009 (UTC)User:pjs012915

Hi, thanks for your message, SmackBot does not generally add tags, but merely dates those that are already there. Regards, Rich Farmbrough, 22:08 25 April 2009 (UTC).

Thank you SmackBot

Thank you SmackBot my friend, you always are forgiving and unobtrusive, and have quite good timing too you seem not to come in too quickly nor too late. Nothing worse than an eager bot who disrupts an edit in process.

(And why SmackBot? You give a smack to editors, or you're high on smack?).

You're a good bot. Go tell you transwiki bot friends, who keep replacing good links with bad ones, that I told them so.

Also please give my regards to SignBot, poor thing must be getting lonely now I have got the habit of signing (always do sign, but I had styles from other places). SimonTrew (talk) 21:15, 25 April 2009 (UTC)

Sorry

I have no idea why I just got the message? SatuSuro 03:49, 26 April 2009 (UTC)

OK got it - one of the sundanese nightmares of the past - cheers and thanks - SatuSuro 03:52, 26 April 2009 (UTC)

SmackBot

Problematic edit by SmackBot

FYI. I noticed this edit by SmackBot that effectively blanked an article. Looks like there may be a new test case for your quality assurance efforts along with a new bug to track down and resolve. --Allen3 ^talk 11:34, 26 April 2009 (UTC)

It's a tricky one. Basically AWB moves the cats to the end. IF one cat is the end part of a wrongly subst'd template it takes the delimiting comment with it. So if someone wrongly subst's a template, then someone AWB's the article SB will do that. Rich Farmbrough, 08:00 27 April 2009 (UTC).

SmackBot

Rich, in this edit, SmackBot changed (among other things) the template inclusion {{3LW}} to {{3CC}}. Problem: Template:3CC has been deleted, and Template:3LW is a navbox for some preteen-girl singing group. This "fix" should be removed from the bot. Thanks. --R'n'B (call me Russ) 09:33, 23 April 2009 (UTC)

Thanks! Funnily enough I deleted it. Rich Farmbrough, 09:39 23 April 2009 (UTC).

This is very odd. 3LW was three letter words and redirected to 3CC for three character combinations, but they were both deleted in 2007. SmackBOt has no explicit rule for replacing them, and AWB seems not to either. Rich Farmbrough, 10:01 23 April 2009 (UTC).

Yes it is AWB gen fxes. Rich Farmbrough, 10:06 23 April 2009 (UTC).

<groan> How does stuff like this stay unnoticed for so long? :( Thanks for researching it. R'n'B (call me Russ) 17:52, 23 April 2009 (UTC)

Because all the templates were removed, so the problem didn't express itself until the new 3LW was used on a page hit by an AWB bot with gen fixes. Rich Farmbrough, 18:31 23 April 2009 (UTC).

Hi, Rich. Your bot modified a I put in Roma minority of Hungary. I'm fairly new at editing Wikipedia. When I put a in an article, would it be beneficial to include the date, as your bot did? Bloody Viking (talk) 16:39, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

Good to leave it to the bot because it avoids typos. Rich Farmbrough, 06:02 29 April 2009 (UTC).

Wikipedia:List of missing monthly maintenance categories

Unfortunately Wikipedia:List of missing monthly maintenance categories is not working due to too many expensive parser function calls. I just modified {{DeletedMonths}} to use Category:Wikipedia maintenance categories with missing months. Hopefully this will accomplish your goal. --Pascal⁶⁶⁶ 21:30, 27 April 2009 (UTC)

Yes I know. thanks for the new category. Can you do the same with {{EmptyMonths}}? Rich Farmbrough, 11:12 28 April 2009 (UTC).

Most of them should show up at Wikipedia:Database_reports/Empty categories, but that is a bit of a mess right now, so I created Category:Wikipedia monthly maintenance categories that are empty for you. --Pascal⁶⁶⁶ 21:55, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

Smackbot messes up Major Depressive Disorder Article

Your bot moves the seealso comment from the Treatment chapter of the Major depressive disorder article to the article title. (see [83][84]) Major depressive disorder is a featured article. Please stop your bot from messing it up. The Sceptical Chymist (talk) 10:14, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

Fixed. Rich Farmbrough, 07:00 29 April 2009 (UTC).

SmackBot

Hello. I've noticed a batch of edits similar to the one made on the Willy Semmelrogge article that just moved the lifetime template to the foot of the categories. Lifetime acts as a replacement to defaultsort with added parameters, so I'm a bit puzzled to why this edit is being made. Thanks. Lugnuts (talk) 17:15, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

OK reason the articles were edited was probably an attempt to pick up new articles, the reason the template is moved pasththe other cats as part of AWB gen fixes is to put the less important cats at the end. The location of the DEFAULTSORT is not functionally important. Rich Farmbrough, 06:57 29 April 2009 (UTC).

Inclusive Capitalism

Hello Rich, I saw your comment about "in line" citations and I would be grateful if you can give me an example or two of a sentence you think merits an actual page number citation outside of the ones that are provided on the inclusive capitalism page. Thank you, Ambassadorial.

Hi, thanks for your message, SmackBot does not generally add tags, but merely dates those that are already there. Regards, Rich Farmbrough, 06:19 29 April 2009 (UTC).

need help deleting images

I need to delete a number of images I uploaded due to possible copyright issues can you please tell me how? I cant seem to figure out what to do. One of the images is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SANY0704.JPG Thank you. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Filmnerd (talk • contribs) 03:42, 29 April 2009 (UTC)

Give me a list and I wwill delete them Rich Farmbrough, 06:02 29 April 2009 (UTC).

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Delivered by SoxBot II (talk) at 04:43, 29 April 2009 (UTC)

SmackBot@Pura Ulun Danu Bratan

Hi. Your bot just made this edit and I undid a bit of it here. The commons cat bit was fine and I'll try and do that myself going forward. Moving the stub templates to after the categories seems quite wrong to me. The trailing templates of an article should all come after the usual prose but before categories; iwlinks should come very-last. Isn't this all quite standard? Edits such as the one the bot just did are introducing funny extra whitespace into pages. Such things should not be in the pages themselves, but in the templates and css rules per separation of presentation and content. Cheers, Jack Merridew 08:12, 29 April 2009 (UTC)

Stubs go at the end so that the stub categories are at the end of the category list. The problem with the 2 blank lines before the stubs which stop them merging into infoboxes is that the only ways to generate them automatically create more problems and complexity. Most stub taggers know about them and AWB does, if they are missed it's not big deal (stub tags are meant to be ephemeral) so we live with this. Rich Farmbrough, 16:09 29 April 2009 (UTC).

I do put stub templates last for that reason; final categories. My primary irk was that the templates were moved to after the categories, which I've seen as fundamentally not part of the content (which the stubs are); and the iwlinks are not 'content' either, so I've felt that they should be at the end, too; and convention is cats, then iwlinks. The only exceptions I've been making re stubs last are things like coord templates, which I see as metadata, not content. If the missing-coord template's cat should be before the stub-cats, I may need to tweak my approach.

You've obviously been doing a whole lot of this and I'm sure there's a plan, so I'm going to go read up on stuff. I now see that placing the stub templates after the explicit categories gets those cats all the way to the end, so I've just restored that. The two newlines are not unreasonable as setting the stub blurb apart is good. I have been adding top-bot margins to stub templates, which is a better approach.

Another thing I've been doing (example: {{Rivers of Kenya}}) is including a category in a navigation template. This, too, effects cat-order. I've just made a tweak to one to nudge this issue in the right direction. I expect it would be tough to get a bot to reliably do this sort of thing.

Cheers, Jack Merridew 05:16, 30 April 2009 (UTC)

SmackBot

Hi, About my page "List of films based on war books", some process keeps coming along and blowing away a
that I am using to create two paragraphs in a footnote.

What is wrong with paragraphs in a footnote?

Sincerely, Varlaam (talk) 04:29, 30 April 2009 (UTC) (in Toronto)

Sorry, I meant <br /> . I didn't encapsulate this control code in the 1st paragraph.

Sorry, i think i accidentally shut you off. Nothing is wrong. It was a mistake.

I think I accidentally shut you off. Sorry about that. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Nappyrootslistener (talk • contribs) 22:47, 30 April 2009 (UTC)

No problem,. Rich Farmbrough, 08:32 1 May 2009 (UTC).

Article PodUniversal

You have posted the following message in the discussion page of article PodUniversal "Is the section Some exclusive Podcasts necessary? It consists only of external links to individual podcasts from the site. --bonadea contributions talk 18:01, 25 April 2009 (UTC)"

My response

Since the podcasts relate to different categories of public interest, i have classified them properly and given external link. They would be useful for the public. Please advise. --Varsha1990 (talk) 04:09, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

Answered on user's talk page. Rich Farmbrough, 12:39 2 May 2009 (UTC).

Étienne Poulin

User:SmackBot appears to have moved an existing {{Lifetime}} entry from one spot to another here[85]. I'm not sure why. The description of the edit was (Date maintenance tags and general fixes). Maybe it was confused by the accent in the article name? --Big_iron (talk) 08:29, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

Becasue the cats generated by Lifetime belong at the end of the list, but before stub cats. Rich Farmbrough, 08:33 1 May 2009 (UTC).

Template:ISO 639 name pl and co.

Hi, I have been working on a single template to replace all these language name templates. This should make for easier maintenance. Just thought I'd get your response on this, as I think you're the one who created most of them! — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 13:34, 30 April 2009 (UTC)

I'm wondering whether "Esimbi" is a real language. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 16:10, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

Discussion in advance

Isn't it common practice to discuss things with the editor of a page before slashing and burning your way through it?

Why is it that a page that has done things a certain way for THREE or FOUR YEARS all of a sudden doesn't meet with the approval of a certain "Mr. Rich Farmbrough", whoever the hell that is, so he is simply free to do as he pleases?

Varlaam (talk) 17:15, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

So it's been agasin WP:MoS for three for four years? Is that good?

You seem to have a lot of interest in a page you have NEVER CONTRIBUTED a bloody thing to.

You drew my attention to it above.

How come your totally arbitrary personal opinion is more consequential than those of people who actually put CONTENT INTO WIKIPEDIA?

It's not. That is it is neither arbitrary nor personal.

Eh?

In my years of contributing to Wikipedia, I've managed NEVER to blow away anybody else's good faith content EVER. Vandalism I've blown away 50 or 100 times. But content, never.

So who are you exactly?

I think you are a little over excited here. I moved a chunk of comment to the talk page and changed USA to US. This hardly constitutes "blowing away" the article. Rich Farmbrough, 20:00 1 May 2009 (UTC).

P.S.it helps to mention the page you mean. Rich Farmbrough, 12:11 2 May 2009 (UTC).

deleting help

Thank you for your help.

Yes I do need all the Sany images deleted but here's a list:

• File:SANY0638.JPG
• File:SANY0626.JPG
• File:SANY0623.JPG
• File:SANY0593.JPG
• File:SANY0587.JPG
• File:SANY0578.JPG
• File:SANY0577.JPG
• File:SANY0573.JPG
• File:SANY0570.JPG
• File:SANY0556.JPG
• File:SANY0554.JPG

---

• http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:SANY0111.JPG
• http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:SANY0250.JPG
• http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:SANY0214.jpg
• http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:SANY0222.JPG
• http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:SANY0236.jpg
• http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:SANY0265.JPG
• http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:SANY0279.jpg
• http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:SANY0304.JPG
• http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:SANY0309.jpg
• http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:SANY0452.JPG
• http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:SANY0464.JPG
• http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:SANY1647.JPG
• http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:SANY1634.JPG
• http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:SANY1633.JPG
• http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:SANY1628.JPG
• http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:SANY1623.JPG
• http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:SANY1590.JPG
• http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:SANY1586.JPG
• http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:SANY1580.JPG
• http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:SANY1452.JPG
• http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:SANY1445.JPG
• http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:SANY1412.JPG
• http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:SANY1410.JPG
• http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:SANY1402.JPG
• http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:SANY1395.JPG
• http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:SANY1392.JPG
• http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:SANY1390.JPG

Thank you again. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Filmnerd (talk • contribs) 00:49, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

SmackBot stub removal

Yesterday I did some touchup editing on Gerald Brashear that included adding a {{refimprove}} tag and a stub template. I notice that SmackBot has since removed the stub. I won't say that's a bad choice, but out of curiosity, what criteria does SmackBot use for stub removal? Rklear (talk) 01:18, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

It is an wp:AWB general fix. So I don't know the exact criteria. Rich Farmbrough, 11:25 2 May 2009 (UTC).

Herbie, once a car, now a living person

SmackBot appears to have been confused by the anthropomorphic nature of Herbie, Disney's Volkswagen from a string of movies. It tagged that article as a biography of a living person...here's the diff. (To be fair, it looks like someone tagged the article as a BLP, and SmackBot was just converting a {{refimprove}}.) TheFeds 02:27, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

Yes robots do have trouble telling the difference... Rich Farmbrough, 12:06 2 May 2009 (UTC).

It's USA not bloody U.S.

"U.S." is an adjective. The nationality column contains NOUNS, not ADJECTIVES. Do you know the difference between a noun and a adjective? The nationality column now says "Germany" and "Belgium". You're going to be changing those to "German" and "Belgian" to keep it consistent, are you?

The guy who created that page years ago, an American, used "USA". I, a Canadian who lived in the USA as a boy, where I attended a Bobby Kennedy campaign rally, someone who still has traces of his Illinois accent, used "USA".

The Internet Movie Database, maybe you've heard of it, uses "USA":

Gone with the Wind (1939)

Thomas Mitchell ... Gerald O'Hara

Barbara O'Neil ... Ellen O'Hara - His Wife (as Barbara O'Neill)

Vivien Leigh ... Scarlett O'Hara - Their Daughter

Country:USA

Language:English

So why do you need to be different from the entire rest of the world?

Why don't you find something worthwhile to do with your time INSTEAD OF WASTING MINE?

Varlaam (talk) 15:57, 2 May 2009 (UTC) (in Toronto)

Such ranting and incivility are unlikely to get you very far. I suggest you calm down and be reasonable. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 16:06, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

I've deleted the contents of my page

Since, hey, it's my data. Or "original research" as you probably prefer to call it.

Varlaam (talk) 16:12, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

You need to read WP:OWN. I've restored the page. (Sorry for butting in here Rich.) — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 16:18, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

That's fine, you said it all. Rich Farmbrough, 16:26 2 May 2009 (UTC).

SmackBot: Template bug

Howdy, SmackBot messed up a template by moving one of its arguments to the end of the file.

• Template argument moved

Thanks, JackSchmidt (talk) 18:38, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

This is AWB trying to move interwikis to the end. I have fixed up the article. Rich Farmbrough, 05:18 8 May 2009 (UTC).

Template:Lang

This edit of yours broke Ancient Greek grammar (tables), List of Greek place names, and List of Greek words with English derivatives such that they now trip Category:Pages with too many expensive parser function calls. --Pascal⁶⁶⁶ 20:10, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

I have fixed this I believe. Rich, excuse me for interrupting again (I'll have to stop watching your page :D) but I hope my edit to {{lang}} goes some way to showing why this approach using {{ISO 639 name}} is the best approach. (Sorry I haven't answered your questions on my talk page yet.) — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 20:47, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

Thank you. BTW, your statement {{#iferror:{{ISO 639 name|{{{1|}}}}}|non-English|{{ISO 639 name|{{{1|}}}}} is needlessly complex. #iferror will return the result of the input if no error. ie {{#iferror:{{ISO 639 name|{{{1|}}}}}|non-English}} is all you need. --Pascal⁶⁶⁶ 21:31, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

Wow, I didn't know that. Template duly simplified. Thanks, — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 21:48, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

Can't do that. en and eng have non-canonical values. Rich Farmbrough, 22:30 2 May 2009 (UTC).

OK this was because the correct value was "Ancitnt Greek" not "Non English". Rich Farmbrough, 22:30 2 May 2009 (UTC).

We can simply write something like {{#if:{{ISO 639 name {{{1|}}}}}|{{ISO 639 name {{{1|}}}}}|non English}} . Rich Farmbrough, 22:34 2 May 2009 (UTC).

The code that I put on {{lang}} was fine. I think you were too quick to revert. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 22:43, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

I can certainly see the logic of not coding the exception for English into Template:ISO 639 name, although it's a pity that it will make the code more complicated. Can we talk about this in a central place (Template talk:Lang?) because I can't stand the disjointed conversations on our talk pages?! About the page User:Rich Farmbrough/another user page, is there any chance you could put the two systems side by side for comparison? You might like to look at User talk:MSGJ/Sandbox3 where I did something similar. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 06:47, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

Hi, thanks for doing all that analysis. I feel a little stupid, to be honest, about my certainty about the right way to code that template! I still find it hard to accept the results, but I guess I have to believe it. Cheers, — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 22:44, 4 May 2009 (UTC)

Why did SmackBot change Pokémon to Pokemon?

Hello Rich Farmbrough. This edit by SmackBot seemed all fine and dandy, except that it changed one instance of "Pokémon" to "Pokemon". Why'd it do that? It's incorrect to spell it without the é. Cheers. -sesuPRIME ^{talk • contribs} 14:16, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

Hi, thanks for your message. SmackBot and other WP:AWB robots and users change the diacritics in category sorting (including "DEFAULTSORT") to non-diacritics. This does not affect the name shown in the category, just the sort order. This is the accepted way to sort items in Wikipedia. Regards, Rich Farmbrough, 17:54 3 May 2009 (UTC).

Oh okay, I understand now. I thought it might be for some technical reason, which is why I didn't revert it. Cheers. -sesuPRIME ^{talk • contribs} 23:42, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

Template:Confusing section

Hi there, your changes to Template:Confusing section template to add the category for the proper date wasn't working. I first thought it was because the CDMA template that you added didn't exist so I changed it back, but that didn't fix it either. I changed the template back to the category addition that was there before you moved it. I didn't want to change the template anymore because I didn't want to make a mess. Can you recheck the change that you made and make it work? -- Gogo Dodo (talk) 05:10, 4 May 2009 (UTC)

Thanks,fixed. Rich Farmbrough, 09:21 4 May 2009 (UTC).

hi man

hi man please help me to complete cheshme3vom

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheshme3vom

i dont know what am i doing ? olease help —Preceding unsigned comment added by 89.165.15.39 (talk) 13:48, 4 May 2009 (UTC)

I tidied it a bit. Rich Farmbrough, 22:01 4 May 2009 (UTC).

SmackBot "Fact" tag bug?

Hi. I've noticed a couple of times recently that SmackBot changed a fact tag from the incorrect format

{{fact|May 2009}}

to the equally incorrect

{{fact|May 2009|date=May 2009}}

instead of to the correct

{{fact|date=May 2009}}.

This is the one I just came across. Ed Fitzgerald _{t / c} 13:55, 4 May 2009 (UTC)

This is a balancing act. Should SmackBot interfere with the default parameters? In the case of Fact it is probable that a default parameter is mistake, but the nature of the mistake is not clear, for example "In May 2008 {{Fact|May 2008}}". And indeed some templates are very complex, such as the fb_footer family. So the way it works now, it is not "equally incorrect" it is functional and possibly has some parameter cruft in it. However it may be worth looking at this again. Rich Farmbrough, 21:55 4 May 2009 (UTC).

I understand. Thanks for the response. Ed Fitzgerald _{t / c} 00:52, 5 May 2009 (UTC)

SmackBot

Nice hack job!!! Wiki is not about sour fans leaving garbage under the name of an article. Pull this. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 168.177.206.57 (talk) 20:57, 5 May 2009 (UTC)

Thanks: For your note but I have no idea which of our 2 million plus articles you refer to. Rich Farmbrough, 21:20 5 May 2009 (UTC).

Colorado Time Systems

Rich,

Could you please take a look at the Colorado Time Systems page you tagged with the {{nn}} tag that it didn't meet general notability guidelines? I have added references to relevant material. I am new to wikipedia and also have a few questions:

1. For references that are not inline citations, how do I determine whether I should put them under references or see also? 2. How many links to relevant articles is too many - too few?

Rich,

Thanks for the help. Can you please review the page again and remove the {{nn}} tag if it looks ok. If not, please explain.

Thanks Again, --Ebgundy (talk) 22:49, 7 May 2009 (UTC)

List of Speakers of the National Assembly of Botswana

I have a couple of questions concerning your tags. You have written that List of Speakers of the National Assembly of Botswana belongs to a trivia section. In fact, legislative speakers is a subcategory in English Wikipedia. There are several separate articles containing names with legislative speakers of the world.

You have also added that the article might contain inappropriate or misinterpreted citations that do not verify the text. I can, however, inform you that my source is the Parliament of Botswana: http://www.parliament.gov.bw/pgcontent.php?UID=707.

Best wishes! Mbakkel2 (talk) 15:59, 8 May 2009 (UTC)

Smackbot question

This may be an ignorant question, because I do not understand the workings of, or how to program, a bot. Would it be possible to add the following to Smackbot's fixes:

• Add a non-breaking space where there is no space between p. or pp. and the page number(s)?
• Replace a space that follows p. or pp. with a non-breaking space?
• Where a list of numbers is separated by commas without spaces, insert spaces? For example:
  • Change 22,27,143 to 22, 27, 143
• Conform page or number ranges to the rule that drops repeating numerals prior to the 2 final numerals? For example:
  • Change 296–299 to 296–99
  • Change 1296–1302 to 1296–302

Finell (Talk) 08:18, 9 May 2009 (UTC) (To preserve the continuity of the conversation, I will watch for your reply here on your Talk page.)

Yes, but best added as WP:AWB general fixes, for a number of reasons. Personally I "page" and "pages" in WP. Rich Farmbrough, 08:25 9 May 2009 (UTC).

Thanks for the quick reply. I requested these for Smackbot because I see it doing general fixes much more often than I see any other tool. As long as Smackbot is changing those hyphens to en-dashes ... Also, pardon me, but I don't understand what you mean by "Personally I 'page' and 'pages' in WP." Finell (Talk) 08:43, 9 May 2009 (UTC) (To preserve the continuity of the conversation, I will watch for your reply here on your Talk page.)

Personally I prefer "page" and "pages" (to p. and pp.)in WP. Rich Farmbrough, 09:38 9 May 2009 (UTC).

Thanks for explaining. To the best of my knowledge, there is no widely used citation system that spells out page or pages, nor does any of Wikipedia's citation templates; some citation systems use bare page numbers with no abbreviation. Finell (Talk) 11:54, 9 May 2009 (UTC)

Smackbot problem: Changing p. and pp. to pages

SmackBot is now changing "p." and "pp.", which is accepted citation form, to "pages" (example diff), which is not. This leads to inconsistent, and incorrect, citations throughout the article. Also, saying "pages" before a singular page number is an incorrect use of the word. Finell (Talk) 12:43, 9 May 2009 (UTC)

Hi. In my opinion this edit to the Nicolaus Copernicus page is unacceptable. The abbreviations "p." for "page" and "pp." for "pages" are absolutely standard in citations in scholarly works —the only common alternative being to omit the abbreviations altogether. Nor can I find anything in the Wikipedia manual of style which either requires, or even encourages, the entire word "pages" to be used instead. Moreover, the use of the word "pages" in a citation to a single page is illogical. Could you please fix the bot so that it does not make edits like this.

—David Wilson (talk · cont) 13:39, 9 May 2009 (UTC)

Apologies for not checking the talk page before posting the above message. Nevertheless, rather than refactor it entirely, I'll simply leave it here as support for Finell's complaint.

—David Wilson (talk · cont) 13:49, 9 May 2009 (UTC)

I've also noticed the bot edit in the Copernicus article, and I do agree with the concerns voiced by Finell and David.-- Matthead  Discuß   13:52, 9 May 2009 (UTC)

No problem - just a little testing. Rich Farmbrough, 14:44 9 May 2009 (UTC).

Articles with invalid date parameter in template

I just found Category:Articles to be expanded since Feb 2009. How hard would it be to get {{Expand-section}} to use Category:Articles with invalid date parameter in template so your bot can fix this kind of thing?

Also, thank you for your kind words at Template talk:DeletedMonths. --Pascal⁶⁶⁶ 07:11, 27 April 2009 (UTC)

Just found a couple more templates that could benefit from the same treatment:

• Category:Articles to be merged since JApril 2009
• Category:Articles lacking in-text citations from Feb 2009
• Category:Articles lacking in-text citations from 17 May 2008

--Pascal⁶⁶⁶ 07:48, 27 April 2009 (UTC)

I creatd {{DMC}} and {{DMCA}} to simplify/unify the dated logic of some 394 templates (less the in-line ones). It's live in {{Expand section}}, and I'll retrofit it to the others as I come across them. Rich Farmbrough, 11:12 28 April 2009 (UTC).

Thank you. I would appreciate it if you could update {{More footnotes}} and {{No footnotes}}. --Pascal⁶⁶⁶ 21:55, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

DOne BTW. Rich Farmbrough, 23:48 2 May 2009 (UTC).

Thank you. It's a shame most of these templates are fully protected so I can't just do it myself. --Pascal⁶⁶⁶ 06:05, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

I just realized you said you would not be updating the in-line templates. Mind if I ask why? It looks like you could update the majority of them by just editing {{fix}}.

I also wonder how hard it would be to create something like {{fix}} for the non-inline templates. --Pascal⁶⁶⁶ 06:37, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

The inline ones already hacve it. Rich Farmbrough, 16:03 9 May 2009 (UTC).

Sorry, blind as a bat. --Pascal⁶⁶⁶ 18:52, 9 May 2009 (UTC)

SmackBot and the {{Article issues}} template

With this edit, why was there a |date=May 2009 added to the end of the {{Article issues}} template?--Rockfang (talk) 23:36, 7 May 2009 (UTC)

So why add the date if those parameters aren't present?--Rockfang (talk) 23:14, 8 May 2009 (UTC)

Would you be willing to change the bot to only add the extra date if certain fields are present? The reason I ask is because it seems only useful if someone puts "expert" (for example) in the article issues template during the same month smackbot added the date. Otherwise, if someone added the expert parameter later down the road, the date would be incorrect. I think it would be safe to say that a decent number of people don't even know that the "expert" parameter can take a date. I don't see it on the doc for the article issues template.--Rockfang (talk) 03:08, 9 May 2009 (UTC)

I'm not sure what you mean with this edit.--Rockfang (talk) 22:13, 9 May 2009 (UTC)

Article issues template

In this edit Smackbot added a date parameter to {{Article issues}}. This template only uses a date parameter if the expert parameter is also specified. As feature requests, it would also have been nice if Smackbot would have merged the {{notability}} into {{Article issues}} and dated {{copypaste}}. Thanks! --Pascal⁶⁶⁶ 18:52, 9 May 2009 (UTC)

1. See above convo with Rockfang
2. Merging templates: AWB now does this as a GF -
3. Dating copypaste, np.

SmackBot appears to have major issues with {{Article issues}}: [86] [87] [88] --Pascal⁶⁶⁶ 23:57, 9 May 2009 (UTC)

This is an AWB bug, by the looks of it. Rich Farmbrough, 03:57 10 May 2009 (UTC).

Any idea which version of AWB you were using at the time? --Pascal⁶⁶⁶ 08:37, 10 May 2009 (UTC)

User:Rjwilmsi states that these bugs are fixed in AWB rev 4303. Your upgrading would be appreciated. Thanks! --Pascal⁶⁶⁶ 09:47, 10 May 2009 (UTC)

SmackBot capitalization

Your fix to keep SmackBot from making no changes other than capilalizing a template does not appear to have worked: [89] --Pascal⁶⁶⁶ 19:20, 9 May 2009 (UTC)

Yes, I had to revert because it is simply a setting to skip case change only edits. This means that stuff like date=april 2009 gets left unfixed. Rich Farmbrough, 03:44 10 May 2009 (UTC).

Given the choice I would agree with your decision. --Pascal⁶⁶⁶ 08:37, 10 May 2009 (UTC)

Your changes to Wikipedia maintenance templates

You have made mistakes in Template:Cleanup-rewrite, Template:Recently revised and Template:Needs table as of late. Each time with repercussions for many articles. Would you please be carefull next time. Debresser (talk) 19:46, 9 May 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for letting me know. Rich Farmbrough, 03:42 10 May 2009 (UTC).

It happens. But since the templates are maintenance templates, used in many articles, you should make sure it works. Debresser (talk) 11:04, 10 May 2009 (UTC)

Speedy deletion of Deletemenow

A tag has been placed on Deletemenow, requesting that it be speedily deleted from Wikipedia. This has been done under section G1 of the criteria for speedy deletion, because the page appears to have no meaningful content or history, and the text is unsalvageably incoherent. If the page you created was a test, please use the sandbox for any other experiments you would like to do. Feel free to leave a message on my talk page if you have any questions about this.

If you think that this notice was placed here in error, you may contest the deletion by adding {{hangon}} to the top of the page that has been nominated for deletion (just below the existing speedy deletion or "db" tag), coupled with adding a note on the talk page explaining your position, but be aware that once tagged for speedy deletion, if the page meets the criterion it may be deleted without delay. Please do not remove the speedy deletion tag yourself, but don't hesitate to add information to the page that would render it more in conformance with Wikipedia's policies and guidelines. Lastly, please note that if the page does get deleted, you can contact one of these admins to request that they userfy the page or have a copy emailed to you. Beeblebrox (talk) 03:53, 10 May 2009 (UTC)

• Why, why would you do that? Are you drunk or something or has your account been compromised? Beeblebrox (talk) 03:54, 10 May 2009 (UTC)

No I need occasionally to test in articlespace. In this case there is a bug in AWB that doesn't express in user space. Typically I only need the page to exist for about 30 seconds. Rich Farmbrough, 03:59 10 May 2009 (UTC).

I figured there must be some sort of explanation... Beeblebrox (talk) 04:04, 10 May 2009 (UTC)

SmackBot - Added two date parameters to Copypaste template

In the article R. H. King Academy, Smackbot seems to have created two identical parameters date= May 2009 while attempting to correct a {{copypaste}} template. One replaced a full YYYY-MM-DD date, the other was added. Refer to the edit log. When I added template to the article, I followed the example on how to use it from the template documentation, which shows a full date rather than date= May 2009. If the Smackbot correction is the WP standard, perhaps the documentation for Copypaste should be changed. Cheers. --papageno (talk) 17:17, 10 May 2009 (UTC)

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Read this Signpost in full · Single-page · Unsubscribe

Delivered by SoxBot (talk) at 22:17, 11 May 2009 (UTC)

{{or}} is different than {{original research}}

Rich, SmackBot is replacing "or", an inline template, with "original research" a section-oriented template.[90] I assume this is an error. ✤ JonHarder ^talk 21:26, 12 May 2009 (UTC)

Thanks, someone had redirected "OR" back to "original research". Rich Farmbrough, 05:06 13 May 2009 (UTC).

Erotic spanking

I cannot help being childishly amused to see that Erotic spanking has been edited by SmackBot! See here. Keep up the good work. Gaius Cornelius (talk) 16:02, 13 May 2009 (UTC)

Chuckle. Rich Farmbrough, 16:09 13 May 2009 (UTC).

Thanks

Thank you for correcting the the "et. al." typo that is in some of the dermatology stubs I created. I apologize for that mistake. ---kilbad (talk) 23:21, 13 May 2009 (UTC)

You are welcome, that is why it is a wiki.Rich Farmbrough, 07:27 14 May 2009 (UTC).

removing stub cats

SmackBot

Hi, In this edit the bot removed two categorised stub tags. OK, the article was probably not really a stub (a previous editor had added an uncategorised stub tag), but the two stub tags I'd added gave it categories within parent categories. Removing them left it totally uncategorised. If the bot is removing such tags, could it add categories based on the parent categories? These may be broader than the ideal categories but will certainly be better than nothing. Here we could have had Category:American academics and Category:Archaeologists, if the bot was instructed to add any parent categories not including the word "stub". I do a lot of stub-sorting, but don't usually add them to my watchlist - because I'd moved this page, it came up on the list. I don't know how common it is for the bot to remove categorisation in this way! PamD (talk) 11:46, 14 May 2009 (UTC)

Well as you know, the stub cat tree doesn't correspond to the main category tree. So therefore a little extra smarts would be required. I will float the matter at WP:AWB if I find the time. Rich Farmbrough, 12:01 14 May 2009 (UTC).

Default formats

Hi Rich. I just noticed this edit which changed the default formats around headings. Now this isn't some earthshaking matter, but I just wanted to share some observations with you. The Wikipedia defaults are that there are spaces in the heading between the text and the equals signs, and a blank line between the heading and the first line of text. You can check this by making a test edit here. Just click the "new section" tab, put in some letters in the "subject/headline" box and also in the body. Save it and then edit it. You'll see what I mean. I don't know why those are the default settings, but I find it easier to edit when they are left it place. It makes it easier for my old eyes to spot heading breaks, among other things. If you're going to make such changes, you're working against default settings and can keep going forever. It's futile effort, and it makes editing more difficult for me and probably others. I'm sure there are more important things to do. Thanks. -- Brangifer (talk) 13:39, 14 May 2009 (UTC)

Hermance (river)

Please see the result of this edit do you really think it is an improvement? --PBS (talk) 14:57, 14 May 2009 (UTC)

Minor point

Not really very important, but why does SmackBot convert {{Infobox Settlement}} to the redirect {{Infobox settlement}}, as here? --Kotniski (talk) 17:14, 14 May 2009 (UTC)

AS you say, minor, but the infobox guideline says it should be a lowercase s. While that infobox hasn't yet moved I'm picking up a few instances now, since they won't be changed in the articles unless they are being edited for some other reason. Rich Farmbrough, 17:50 14 May 2009 (UTC).

Sorry, without wishing this to become a bigger thing than it needs to be, but the guideline seems to say that only because you recently changed it. Where is the consensus supposed to be for this change?--Kotniski (talk) 18:05, 14 May 2009 (UTC)

On the talk page. And the change was made in February [91] here - I made the examples better match the guideline, removed a historical "now" and made some unconnected changes relating to the old VfD. Rgds, Rich Farmbrough, 18:14 14 May 2009 (UTC).

OK, I don't want to spend time arguing about it, as I don't care much one way or another, but that seems to be the wrong diff, I can't find any such agreement on the talk page, and even if there was, I think there may be resistance at the talk pages of popular Infoboxes (like Settlement) to the implementation of such a change without them being notified of the discussion.--Kotniski (talk) 18:25, 14 May 2009 (UTC)

SmackBot bug

On longevity myths, bot changed template "or" to "Original research" repeatedly. The former is inline, the latter is a big graphic. If anything it should just change "or" to "Or". Thanks. JJB 20:09, 14 May 2009 (UTC)

Thanks. OR was pointing to Original research, hence the problem. Rich Farmbrough, 20:12 14 May 2009 (UTC).

AfD nomination of University of Atlanta

An editor has nominated University of Atlanta, an article which you have created or worked on, for deletion. We appreciate your contributions, but the nominator doesn't believe that the article satisfies Wikipedia's criteria for inclusion and has explained why in his/her nomination (see also "What Wikipedia is not").

Your opinions on whether the article meets inclusion criteria and what should be done with the article are welcome; please participate in the discussion by adding your comments at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/University of Atlanta and please be sure to sign your comments with four tildes (~~~~).

You may also edit the article during the discussion to improve it but should not remove the articles for deletion template from the top of the article; such removal will not end the deletion debate. Thank you. A. B. ^{(talk • contribs)} 22:53, 14 May 2009 (UTC)

Headings format

This discussion is centered on an edit made by you. You'll probably want to enter the discussion. Debresser (talk) 14:34, 15 May 2009 (UTC)

Editing Barnstar

		100,000 Edits
		I, Bugboy52.4, award you for reaching 100,000 edits according to the List of Wikipedians by number of edits generated 11:45 pm, 24 February 2009. Keep up the good work!________________________________________________________________

Thanks Rich Farmbrough, 16:50 13 May 2009 (UTC).

Effectrode Wikipedia Article

Rich,

I would be grateful if you would examine the Effectrode article again and see if it meets Wikipedia's requirements.

Thanks in advance

Sam

I looked..Rich Farmbrough, 18:46 23 May 2009 (UTC).

links

More links are added to the person in the captioned subject/headline. Quite a lot of articles about her personal profile indeed.

??Rich Farmbrough, 18:46 23 May 2009 (UTC).

Saigon South International School

(SmackBot)

Hello, I just made some edits to the page of our school, following the style of similar pages for other schools. I didn't want to remove the tags for the problems of the original version, in case this is considered rude or inappropriate. Can you take a look? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saigon_South_International_School Thanks.

 Done Rich Farmbrough, 04:38 12 May 2009 (UTC).

Dr. Heenal Raichura

SmackBot

Dr. Heenal Raichura

"However the title of youngest doctor in the UK ever now belongs to a student from the University of Birmingham in 2009 having just turned 22 a week before graduation."

Again this seems to be some type of vandalism and vendetta as there is no basis of this claim to be added on this web page.

The information is neither backed with the name of the person or any factual information and even if this is a fact, there are no citations.

Tomorrow you will mention that someone from the University of Timbuktu had become youngest doctor at the age of 5!

Hence you are requested to stop vandalising this page and immediately delete the above entry which has no relevance to facts about Dr. Heenal Raichura.

Well neither I nor SB have made such a change. Rich Farmbrough, 07:23 14 May 2009 (UTC).

Et al. or et al..

Hello;

I think you may be getting a superfluous period in some of your et al. changes when a comma is involved, for example in this change to Aerosteon. It looks like the AWB is trying to get the period inside of the italics, but the period outside of the italics is still there, so it ends up as "et al..," instead. J. Spencer (talk) 03:16, 15 May 2009 (UTC)

Thanks, I'm scanning for this now. Seems to be rare, luckily. Rich Farmbrough, 07:10 15 May 2009 (UTC).

or "et alia"?

Howdy! For reasons I don't fully understand, I find the idea that you are adding "." to the end of "et al" ... "interesting". As a matter of academic interest and idle speculation, may I ask why you chose "et al." over "et alia"? Cheers, Pdfpdf (talk) 14:31, 15 May 2009 (UTC)

Standard abbreviation would be et. al. alia is "others", so "and others". but I find it better to write "and others". I rarely use "et cetera" or whatever for same reason. SimonTrew (talk) 02:15, 17 May 2009 (UTC)

Indeed et al., e.g., i.e., loc. cit. and ibid. are all better known than their fully spelled out equivalents. et of course is "and" , so takes no punctuation. Rich Farmbrough, 08:31 17 May 2009 (UTC).

Yes, et alia would be inconsistent with general use. Thanks. --Pdfpdf (talk) 08:50, 17 May 2009 (UTC)

SmackBot nearing its two millionth edit

I thought this was a neat milestone. And no, I don't know why I pulled that up :P I don't suppose there's any way to know what its two millionth edit is, when it comes? Should be about two weeks, by the numbers. Anyway, just thought this was cool, thought I'd share if you hadn't checked it out. Nosleep ^{break my slumber} 10:20, 15 May 2009 (UTC)

Thank you. According to "my prefernces" Number of edits: 2,099,991 - this includes deleted edits. Rich Farmbrough, 11:25 15 May 2009 (UTC).

• SmackBot gets a SmackBiscuit good little bot (mostly) SimonTrew (talk) 02:18, 17 May 2009 (UTC)

I have three questions

I made an edit today--one edit--to the article Carrie Prejean and have not made an edit to the article in days, but yet another editor reversed my ONE edit and then reported me on the 3RR notice board. I find this to be a clear use of Wikipedia to win a debate about article content and direction. Prejean was called a series of negative things by Perez Hilton, most of the words are contemptuous and vile, such as the b-word and c-word. There are editors that believe that each and every one of Hilton's use of those words MUST be included in the article about Prejean. Now, I don't see the need to have an article about Prejean dominated by the words and comments of ONE individual (highly negative words at that) dominate the life story of Prejean. It is tantamount to having the words of Saddam Hussein concerning George W Bush dominate the Wikipedia article about Bush. It violates Wikipedia avowed goal of NPOV and it violates BLP. Now, I know that consensus in Wikipedia editing is one of the goals, but consensus does NOT override other valid Wikipedia ideals such as BLP. There can be a compromise made where the gist of Hilton's highly negative opinion is included in the article, but at the same time it does NOT dominate the life story of Prejean. Prejean is notable for many, many reasons, not just her public fight with Hilton. She is notable for being a successful model; she is notable for participating in Deal or No Deal; she is notable for being the current Miss California USA; and she is now notable for being a TV personality. My first question is: Can you at least review the article and see if the second, third, fourth, and fifth repetitions of the b-word and c-word violates BLP? I believe that it does. And my second question is: Is it appropriate to make a report on an editor for violating 3RR even though that editor has only made one edit? And my third question is: Is misusing 3RR to win a debate on the proper interpretation of BLP appropriate? I don't think so.--InaMaka (talk) 15:59, 15 May 2009 (UTC)

OK. Looks like this one is old news. Rich Farmbrough, 17:32 15 May 2009 (UTC).

et al.

Hi Rich,

Some of your AWB edits are adding duplicate periods. See for example here. Can you fix this? Firsfron of Ronchester 18:14, 17 May 2009 (UTC)

(yes)

Answered on user's talk page. Rich Farmbrough, 20:26 17 May 2009 (UTC).

Don't rename {{who?}} {{what?}} {{why?}}} {{how?}}, {where?}}, etc

these templates get changed to things like {{clarify me}}. while these may redirect there, the problem pointed out by the tag should not be changed. (still put in dates)Scientus (talk) 09:15, 18 May 2009 (UTC)

Yes I understand your point. You are saying these are "Redirects with possibilities" I think.

• SmackBot currently deals with about 1800 templates of which about 1400 are redirects. It is able to automatically pick up new redirects, otherwise I would be adding and removing them daily. It would also be dificult when (as has happened in the past) someone changes the target of a redirect.
• Renaming, as well as in general making the articles more readable in wikicode, reduces the number and complexity of the rules vastly. Bearing in mind that some regexes have had to be re-written in order to terminate.
• Solutions:
  1. Do nothing. If the reason for clarity being requested isn't clear, the editor reading is probably not the person to supply it.
  2. Supply the reason explicitly. SB allows for a "reason=" parameter in all its templates, or an HTML comment could be used (outside the template please), better and edit summary, or (best) a talk page comment.
  3. Change the specific redirects to either a.) be normal templates or b) call their target rather than redirecting.

Rgds,

Rich Farmbrough, 10:45 18 May 2009 (UTC).

Reordering citations

Why did your recent edit to Bicycle and motorcycle dynamics, which is described as fixing the spelling of et al., and appears to have been made with AWB, change the order of several citations. -AndrewDressel (talk) 21:41, 18 May 2009 (UTC)

It is indeed AWB, and I have added the legend "and gen fixes" to the edit summary. AWB re-arranges the footnotes into numerical order thus insteat of ^[18][8] we have ^[8][18].Rich Farmbrough, 00:21 19 May 2009 (UTC).

Cool. Thanks. I didn't notice that in the diff view. -AndrewDressel (talk) 02:55, 19 May 2009 (UTC)

Claygate Beds

Hi there, Your recent change of 'claygate beds' to a link currently redirects to the same section within London Clay. Were you intending to add an article? Pterre (talk) 15:16, 19 May 2009 (UTC)

Ah no. I recently saw several hundred {{Infobox rockunit}} being used so I made a tentative link, and when it came up blue...

Rich Farmbrough, 15:45 19 May 2009 (UTC).

OK, I'll revert - I can't see there ever being an article. Pterre (talk) 08:18, 21 May 2009 (UTC)

Analytic Hierarchy Process

You made some recent changes there. I don't object, but I'm wondering about the rationale. I suspect that you know some things about references that I do not. If you could share a little of it, I'd be grateful. Lou Sander (talk) 19:16, 20 May 2009 (UTC)

There are four changes, two are punctuating "et al.", one is removing the (duplicated) text of a named reference and one is putting references in numerical order. Rich Farmbrough, 19:18 20 May 2009 (UTC).

Porbeagle

Hey Rich

Thanks for your cleanup at PORBEAGLE.

I could swear I added a little note saying it is an anagram of BARGEPOLE. I know in a way that's not notable but is kinda funny (and useful if you play Scrabble). I know we have to be an encylopaedia but small little things like that can "accidentally" slip in, can't they?

I am up to a thousandth of your edits now!

Best wishes SimonTrew (talk) 22:54, 20 May 2009 (UTC)

Well it's vaguely notable because "Bargepole" was a contributor to Punch (magazine) under that pseudonym, and nobody quite knew he was. One (obviously ludicrious) suggestion was that he was a porbeagle. Can't believe Bargepole is a redlink. One more on the TODO list. SimonTrew (talk) 22:57, 20 May 2009 (UTC)

It is interesting, becasue longer single word anagrams are I think reasonably rare. Rich Farmbrough, 23:15 20 May 2009 (UTC).

Mark Howard Producer

hi i see you did some edits on my page... not sure what you did but thanks i guess. did you take 2 of my notes/sources off. i had 16 now only 14. could you please tell me which ones and why? cheers--Charliedylan (talk) 00:02, 21 May 2009 (UTC)

Answered on user's talk page. Rich Farmbrough, 08:23 21 May 2009 (UTC).

SmackBot

===Reference shuffling===Seemingly random swapping around of references[92]. The {{fact}} and endash fix were fine, but for the moment I've done a rollback until I understand what the bot was attempting to do. —Sladen (talk) 01:17, 21 May 2009 (UTC)

PS. I tried to stop the BOT, but the page to do that is protected ... which perhaps defeats the point of having the stop page option in the first place.

Thanks it is only meant to be semi protected. The references were " media;^[15][13][8] " post edit " media;^[8][13][15] " . Rich Farmbrough, 08:19 21 May 2009 (UTC).

Ta, thanks for the quick; I'll know what it's doing if I see a similar edit in the future. Would it be possible to replace the generic summary message with one that relates to the test/regexs changes actually made. Eg.

"endash(1) order-refs-by-number(1) rm-blank-lines-in-cats(3) spelling(th1s/this, th4t/that, 07h3r/other)"

This would then give an exact idea of what actions the bot was taking and also an overview of the extent of the actions in this edit (how many rules have been acted upon and the total number of corrections)? —Sladen (talk) 13:26, 21 May 2009 (UTC)

SmackBot uses the WP:AWB platform, these general fixes are coded there. There is a string generated, which is available as a mouse-over to the user - but the options for edit summary are to show the replacements after a general comment or not. With the Typo Fix plugin I use that option, in other cases it is not really helpful. Your suggestion would make a good feature request - see the WP:AWB pages to propose it. Having said that the ref re-ordering one is one of the few general fixes I get asked about - maybe that would be worth a specific summary extension - it took me a while to work out what it was doing. Rich Farmbrough, 13:33 21 May 2009 (UTC).

CfD_categories_renamed

Please visit Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard/Incidents#CfD_categories_renamed

Hello, Rich Farmbrough. You have new messages at Debresser's talk page.
You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{Talkback}} or {{Tb}} template.

Rm uncategorized

Hi Rich, at Council_for_European_Studies, there is still just the stub category, {{uncat}} shouldn't be removed. -- User:Docu

Thanks, looks like an AWB bug, I have logged it. Rich Farmbrough, 22:48 21 May 2009 (UTC).

We revisited the uncat tagging question a couple of weeks ago, it seemed to work. Apparently the tag is not applied if there is any other template than a stub one. This can be reasonable for infoboxes or navigation boxes, but if there is any other maintenance templates applied before, it wont get the tag. -- User:Docu

problematic bot

Hi Rich, your bot did a bit of too much [93] changing names into months and rewriting links... --Olaf Simons (talk) 08:49, 22 May 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for the catch. This is manual and quite painstaking - obviously I goofed on this one. Rich Farmbrough, 09:57 22 May 2009 (UTC).

Infobox code capitalization question

This is a very minor question, but is there any reason you are changing the name of infoboxes to lowercase such as Infobox Settlement to Infobox settlement in this diff (which I changed back to uppercase). The page is currently at Template:Infobox Settlement (capitalized), so why change this? Browsing your edits I noticed you doing this to other infoboxes like Template:Infobox Disease. I'm just curious why you are doing this. You can reply here. Thanks. LonelyMarble (talk) 21:01, 22 May 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for the reply, I was mainly just curious. I've thought for awhile now that the infobox titles should be in lowercase, which would be in line with all the other naming conventions. So changing it preemptively in articles seems fine to me since it doesn't matter either way. Cheers. LonelyMarble (talk) 21:30, 22 May 2009 (UTC)

SDSM Template

Sorry, what I have done? Where is the problem for the template of Social Democratic Union of Macedonia?-- MacedonianBoy  ^Oui? 22:47, 22 May 2009 (UTC)

OK, I think I solved the problem.-- MacedonianBoy  ^Oui? 22:59, 22 May 2009 (UTC)

Can't shalln't won't!

Rich, please could you consider changing the word "can't" at the top of this talk page (referring to replying preferences). Perhaps "won't" or "am unlikely to [watch your talk page]" would be more accurate. "Can't" (particularly in bold) implies a technical impossibility, whereas this appears to be a situation that is one of choice. Cordially, —Sladen (talk) 23:19, 22 May 2009 (UTC)

No it is not possible . I have 25000+ pages on my watchlist I believe. It is not possible that I will watch your talk page in any meaningful sense in the near future. Rich Farmbrough, 23:43 22 May 2009 (UTC).

Possible, is different to not useful, or not practical. I would hope that it is possible to convey this aspect—perhaps even by stating it as succinctly as including "I have 25,000+ pages on my watchlist ... it is not possible that I will watch your talk page in any meaningful sense" at the top. Would that be a better wording? —Sladen (talk) 23:53, 22 May 2009 (UTC)

Review

Based on Olaf's expressed concern above, I did a quick review of the last fifty edits on this account. I hope that any comments are useful or can help in refining any macros/expressions being used. These edits took place over a period of 25 minutes (an average of two edits per minute, and a highest rate of five edits per minute). Side-note: This speed of editing is probably verging on WP:BOTPOL territory, based on being faster than a human can carefully review. Within those 50 edits, I noted the following and like to highlight them in the hope that they can be useful:

• [94] replacement of a working {{reflist}} with a broken, capitalised, <References/> tag

  Human error [95] gives a better view

• [96], I believe the full title of the rôle is "Deputy Prime Minister for European Affairs" and (I think) there is only one of them. Probably this was down to 'a' being used instead of 'the'. WP:MOSCAP

  In general we don't capitalise job titles, Rich Farmbrough, 11:41 23 May 2009 (UTC).

• [97][98] some of these values are used as adjectives and thus the separator between the value and unit should a hyphen ('-') rather than a non-breaking space ( ). This type of edit is harder to automate as each number requires checking the context. WP:MOSNUM

  There is a discussion on ordinance - I raised this as a possible AWB change. The gun folk do not look for a hyphen, those that have said anything look for no space at all. Rich Farmbrough, 11:41 23 May 2009 (UTC).

• [99][100] changing case of template; {{pp-semi-vandalism}}→{{Pp-semi-vandalism}} looks quite strange; and iso probably a loosing battle because of the automated methods used to add it. (It might be worth considering not altering template capitalisation en masse (either Upcase, or downcase) unless it is actually causing a problem).

  In general most template casing I leave alone, with the exception of about four infoboxen and the cleanup templates which are strongly canonicalised. Rich Farmbrough, 11:41 23 May 2009 (UTC).

Overall the quantity of your automated, manual and semi-automated edits are substantive and valuable to Wikipedia—I found no serious issues and as such I would like to thank you for your continuing contributions, —Sladen (talk) 00:33, 23 May 2009 (UTC)

Thank you for the review. It is useful feedback. Rich Farmbrough, 11:41 23 May 2009 (UTC).

Confused

Just curious, what was the point of changing "Infobox Settlement" to "Infobox settlement" in this edit? Not complaining, since obviously it didn't hurt the page, but I don't understand how it helped. Nyttend (talk) 00:57, 23 May 2009 (UTC)

Answered on user's talk page. Rich Farmbrough, 00:59 23 May 2009 (UTC).

Thanks for the explanation; I wasn't aware of this guideline, since the only templates I work with much are county templates that consist exclusively of names. And thanks for your I-will-reply-on-your-talk-page preference — I'm always forgetting to check back at talk pages of users who reply on their own pages :-) Nyttend (talk) 01:31, 23 May 2009 (UTC)

Cleaning up al those "et al"s.....

I'm sure that your zeal is appreciated, but you should be aware that in doing this in every case (specifically, where a file name uses "et al", with our without the final full stop) means that sometimes (as in Un ballo in maschera), you actually fail to make the link work.

If you look at the Ballo article under "Selected recordings" you'll see that it now works, but only because I have removed that final "full stop / period". A link with the missing "dot" works; by adding it, it doesn't. A simple test is to see if the link turns from blue to red.

So, BOTs are all very well, but they can be too literal for everyone's own good. Viva-Verdi (talk) 01:30, 23 May 2009 (UTC)

Yes you are quite right. Generally AWB will avoid such things and I will spot those it doesn't. This (re-)raises the interesting question as to whether templates should perhaps take such arguments in the form [[File:blah blah.ogg]]. Rich Farmbrough, 01:43 23 May 2009 (UTC).

Since it's been brought up, I'd like to say that I appreciate your zeal, but only because there's one source I cited in a few dozen places that uses "et al" whereas I've since learned how to cite all the authors and I've been following your edits with my own. Couldn't someone alter the templates to allow the period or to be neutral to periods? — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]} 01:51, 23 May 2009 (UTC)

Verify credibility

Your last change to this template is making articles show up in "Articles blah blah blah from (month year)", which are all red linked categories. Why did you switch it to from just to make hundreds of red links? Ten Pound Hammer, his otters and a clue-bat • ^{(Many otters • One bat • One hammer)} 01:48, 23 May 2009 (UTC)

• Oh, I see, I caught you mid process. Ten Pound Hammer, his otters and a clue-bat • ^{(Many otters • One bat • One hammer)} 02:30, 23 May 2009 (UTC)

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Dermatology

Lately you have been making minor edits and cleanups to dermatology-related pages, and given that activity, and your overall experience as a longstanding editor, from what you have seen, do you have any general comments regarding the dermatology related content on Wikipedia? Any feedback on how I and WP:DERM can work to make it better? Any thoughts on the current categorization scheme, etc? Regardless, thanks again for all your help! ---kilbad (talk) 13:52, 20 May 2009 (UTC)

90482 Orcus page error by AWB

Your recent contribution to [Orcus] has a page error generated by AWB. Please consider upgrading to a newer version of AWB. HumphreyW (talk) 20:04, 21 May 2009 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Manual of Style (icons)

Hi, I saw you edited Wikipedia:Manual of Style (icons) heavily recently. Could you perhaps give an opinion on the use of the template {{POV-section}} there. The last time John tried to remove this tag but was inserted again by User:Oicumayberight, see also the discussion here and here. Since the RFC there was now really over I removed it but was obviously reverted again by User:Oicumayberight who seems to think there is a problem if only one user thinks there is a problem. Garion96 (talk) 00:31, 23 May 2009 (UTC)

Things that stayed too long

Troublefield Cemetery was added on May 26, 2008 to the list of cemeteries in Wedgefield, South Carolina. It remained until I reverted it May 22, 2009. clariosophic (talk) 12:33, 23 May 2009 (UTC)

Speedy deletion nomination of Template:Infobox book series

A tag has been placed on Template:Infobox book series, requesting that it be speedily deleted from Wikipedia. This has been done under section G4 of the criteria for speedy deletion, because the article appears to be a repost of material that was previously deleted following a deletion debate, such as at articles for deletion. Under the specified criteria, where an article has substantially identical content to that of an article deleted after debate, and any changes in the content do not address the reasons for which the material was previously deleted, it may be deleted at any time.

If you think that this notice was placed here in error, you may contest the deletion by adding {{hangon}} to the top of the page that has been nominated for deletion (just below the existing speedy deletion or "db" tag), coupled with adding a note on the talk page explaining your position, but be aware that once tagged for speedy deletion, if the page meets the criterion it may be deleted without delay. Please do not remove the speedy deletion tag yourself, but don't hesitate to add information to the page that would render it more in conformance with Wikipedia's policies and guidelines. Lastly, please note that if the page does get deleted, you can contact one of these admins to request that they userfy the page or have a copy emailed to you. -- AnmaFinotera (talk · contribs) 03:21, 25 May 2009 (UTC)

Dude, you've been here long enough to know better than to try to do a copy/paste move of anything, and especially not of a template that has a TfD action pending! Whats up with that? -- AnmaFinotera (talk · contribs) 03:24, 25 May 2009 (UTC)

Archaic tags

Yeah, I did a few, manually looking at the histories to determine when the tag had been placed; realised tis was going to redlink categories, and unilaterally pushed all the dates forward to the latest point when they could have been thus subst'ed: January 2007 (still very much bluelinked). It's off little consequence of course - I think unreferenced was the only tag subst'ed in this way now appear on the CW error list. But I diverge. - Jarry1250 ^{(t, c)} 08:48, 25 May 2009 (UTC)

Merge templates

Your change to the templates have incorrect grammar, whether or not they meet Wikipedia guidelines. Please move any appropriate categories back to where they were. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 09:14, 25 May 2009 (UTC)

Why not just correct the grammar? And could you be a little more specific, like which templates and what problems with grammar? Debresser (talk) 11:51, 25 May 2009 (UTC)

Why not just correct the grammar? Because I don't know what other changes you made. Please change "from" to "since" in all the templates. "Since" should be in the template names. As for redlinks, it's your fault, making template name changes not discussed at XfD. It probably would have be simpler to revert all your edits on May 22-25, but that would still probably leave a few loose ends. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 14:35, 25 May 2009 (UTC)

Actually, changing all "from" to "since" would be easy after we finished. Not when people meddle in the middle of a process. Debresser (talk) 15:18, 25 May 2009 (UTC)

Di-no source

I've reverted your edit to {{Di-no source}}. There are two reasons for keeping the old category name: first, all the other deletion templates use the "as of" category names, and second, automated tools for dealing with unsourced images expect the category names to be in the "as of" format. --Carnildo (talk) 20:22, 23 May 2009 (UTC)

The second reason is more significant, but please discuss with User:Debresser who has spoken (?) to DumbBot and MizerBot already. Rich Farmbrough, 20:26 23 May 2009 (UTC).

I contacted User:DumbBOT and User:MiszaBot and they were invited to report and I do not expect big problems. If needed User:SmackBot could do some updating, I guess. Please restore Rich' version. Debresser (talk) 20:41, 23 May 2009 (UTC)

BTW, which other deletion templates? We have over 80% at "from" now, with none at "as of" that I know about. If there are any more, we'll work on them too. Debresser (talk) 20:43, 23 May 2009 (UTC)

Deletion is a separate hierarchy from the article maintenance templates. Which is not to say it can't become cromulent. Rich Farmbrough, 20:52 23 May 2009 (UTC).

Of the deletion tags I checked, {{Di-no license}}, {{Di-no permission}}, {{Di-no fair use rationale}}, {{Di-orphaned fair use}}, {{Di-replaceable fair use}}, {{no copyright holder}}, {{no copyright information}}, {{Di-missing article links}}, {{Di-no source no license}}, {{No license needing editor assistance}} and User:ST47/notagr used the "as of" wording, while {{Di-no source}} used the "from" wording. A side effect of this very partial changeover is that unsourced images may be in either of two categories, depending on who tagged them. --Carnildo (talk) 22:00, 23 May 2009 (UTC)

Or rather when? But that is easily dealt with if it's a problem, alternatively the displaced style can wither on the vine. Rich Farmbrough, 22:06 23 May 2009 (UTC).

Does this present OrphanBot with any difficulties? Rich Farmbrough, 22:07 23 May 2009 (UTC).

See Wikipedia:List of monthly maintenance categories given month that where articles are concerned we are almost finished. What do you say, shall we do the same for files then? We are willing to do all the work as far as categories and templates are concerned. See User:Debresser/My_work_on_Wikipedia#Files that I did some background research. We just weren't ready for the difference between files and articles. Debresser (talk) 22:10, 23 May 2009 (UTC)

BTW, you missed my edits to Category:Wikipedia files with unknown source and Category:All Wikipedia files with unknown source, so I reverted them.

I have a suggestion. We could simply leave things the way they were. It will be "from" in article namespace and "as of" in files namespace. Or we could go on with the change. I don't mean to say it's a bad idea. I just mean to say that leaving things the way they were is not going to be a large inconsistency in Wikipedia's housestyle. What are your opinions? Debresser (talk) 00:07, 24 May 2009 (UTC)

OrphanBot gets the list of images to work on from the "all files" category, but it uses the "as of" category to figure out when the images were tagged. If the name of the category changes without me updating the bot, it'll assume that the images were tagged a long time ago and will start removing them from articles immediately, rather than waiting the standard five days. Changing the name of the categories is fine, but I need to know about it in advance. --Carnildo (talk) 04:49, 24 May 2009 (UTC)

That we can promise. But at the moment we is tinkin (Jar Jar speech) that perhaps things are good the way they are. Let's await the opinions of User:DumbBOT and User:MiszaBot as well. Debresser (talk) 14:14, 24 May 2009 (UTC)

No problem for DumbBOT. The bot will probably end up creating some old categories for a couple of days, but I can delete them afterwards. As far as I can remember, category creation is the only affected function. 151.100.59.194 (talk) 12:44, 28 May 2009 (UTC)

You're at WP:ANI

Your edits are being discussed at ANI. Thanks, weburiedoursecretsinthegarden 09:21, 25 May 2009 (UTC)

The above discussion has been moved to the archive, and on Wikipedia talk:Categories for discussion the discussion was officially closed. Debresser (talk) 04:24, 28 May 2009 (UTC)

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Delivered by SoxBot (talk) at 04:03, 26 May 2009 (UTC)

Your signature

FYI. Do mind if I put commas in your signature in this section of my talk page? :) Rockfang (talk) 01:14, 28 May 2009 (UTC)

This quirk of the bot is worth remembering. Sometimes I'd like to put a 'Resolved' banner on a thread, properly signed, without delaying the archiving of it. All I'd need to do is type out a manual signature and leave out the comma after the time of day. EdJohnston (talk) 04:08, 28 May 2009 (UTC)

SmackBot - close, but could get closer!

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=IBM_3270&diff=292941693&oldid=292886041 - picked up that I'd missed a date= parameter but could it be taught to recognise that I'd already added the correct date, just missed the date= bit? --ClickRick (talk) 00:16, 29 May 2009 (UTC)

Yes it used to do that. There is a risk of something like " The Queen intends to abdicate in favour of her corgi Jaqumunda in May 2009{{Fact|May 2009}}. and I rather think one or more of the merge templates has a default date parameter. Rich Farmbrough, 08:54, 29 May 2009 (UTC).

Ah, fair enough. --ClickRick (talk) 09:38, 29 May 2009 (UTC)

English vs. english in Billiards related articles

Hi Rich. You do a great deal of cleaning up which I appreciate but please be aware of the capitalization issue noted above, resulting from this diff. English is not capitalized when used as as a term for sidespin in billiards disciplines, just as the "french" in french fries and is not capitalized. Cheers.--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 14:28, 30 May 2009 (UTC)

You're right that there isn't a great deal of consistency when the term is used generally. This is not surprising when an exception exists to what is a normal rule of construction. Even dedicated books on the subject (and I own about 60) are not consistent. Note though, Dictionary.com states: "also english 1. The spin given to a propelled ball by striking it on one side..." The same singling out of it as lowercase is seen in the American Heritage Dictionary[101]. In any event, those of us who work on billiards-related articles employ it consistently in this way. Thanks for the quick response earlier.--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 15:58, 30 May 2009 (UTC)

Your input

I'd appreciate your imput here. I feel you might be the expert on the subject. Debresser (talk) 18:42, 16 May 2009 (UTC)

Are you the admin I'm looking for over there? Or is there such a thing as making me an admin for the completion this project only? Or do you have other suggestions? Debresser (talk) 02:00, 17 May 2009 (UTC)

Debresser (talk) 15:41, 18 May 2009 (UTC)

Thanks. Great. In that case I'll start making a list of what categories to create and which editprotected changes to make. You'll probably agree with me that the right time to do this is Sunday, May 31. There'll be mistakes, no doubt, so we'd have to stay around for a while afterwards.

The problem with {{editprotected}} is that it sometimes takes only a few minutes but at times a few hours for an admin to find the request and feel sure enough about what he is doing to go on with it. Especially in this case, where the changes will not be trivial. Would you like to centralise discusion, or we'll just write on each others talk pages? Debresser (talk) 16:17, 18 May 2009 (UTC)

Part of the work can be done already. Where templates are not involved. I feel we can take our chances. Don't like pigs. That is ethnically determined in my case. :) Debresser (talk) 16:26, 18 May 2009 (UTC)

I've done {{Dead link}} and all its category pages (22). All should be well, but please keep an eye on it. Debresser (talk) 00:04, 19 May 2009 (UTC)

I have two questions.

• Why is {{Dead link}} only semi-protected?
• Why do some categories have an "all articles" category (like Category:All articles with dead external links on Category:Articles with dead external links) and others don't (see Category:Articles with disputed statements)? I understand how it is done, but not why. Debresser (talk) 00:12, 19 May 2009 (UTC)

I see. Thanks. I would be happy to see them go also. The first point holds only for very small categories, of up to perhaps 50 pages at most. More than that will demotivate any single user to take up with it. The second point, and what can or can not be done with that parser function, is above my comprehension.

What do you say? This transition went well? Debresser (talk) 00:35, 19 May 2009 (UTC)

Could you please change "as of" to "from" in Template:Current and Template:Recent death. I've created the categories. Debresser (talk) 14:27, 19 May 2009 (UTC) And Template:Current related. Debresser (talk) 16:16, 19 May 2009 (UTC)

Please delete Category:Current events as of February 2009, Category:Current events as of March 2009, Category:Current events as of April 2009, Category:Current events as of May 2009.

FYI, I make a list of all templates I find connected to a specific category for future reference at User:Debresser/My_work_on_Wikipedia#Since.2Ffrom.

Please consider having a look at Wikipedia:Requests_for_page_protection#Current_requests_for_unprotection, where I propose to lower the protection level of all three templates mentioned above. Debresser (talk) 17:11, 19 May 2009 (UTC)

Could you please repeat this edit in Template:Cfd, Template:Cfm, and Template:Cfr. Debresser (talk) 22:08, 19 May 2009 (UTC)

Thanks. But with this one there is a complication. These templates are usually substituted. Which means that our change will not affect any category that was tagged already. BTW, for this reason I think you can delete not only Category:CfD 2009-07, Category:CfD 2009-09, Category:CfD 2009-08, Category:CfD 2009-06, but also my Category:Categories for deletion from April 2009. Unless I change those 9 categories there manually. What do you say?

Something else, why didn't you remove whitespaces in those three templates? I checked Template:Cfr (not to check upon you, but because I updated Template:Cfr/doc) and there are 3 whitespaces to remove. Debresser (talk) 22:59, 19 May 2009 (UTC)

A related question. Template:Cfd adds categories both to the specific monthly cat as well as to te general Category:Categories for deletion (see there). IMHO there is no reason not to deleted that line. Debresser (talk) 23:07, 19 May 2009 (UTC)

The whitespaces are around cats, which are anyway invisible. So no reason not to remove them. Especially in front of <noinclude> there should not be a whitespace as it translates into a whiteline. Not that in this case that would be a big problem, but it is sloppy programming. I'm a matematician, after all. :)Debresser (talk) 23:11, 19 May 2009 (UTC)

All these CfD, AfD, TfD, MfD are substituted. Don't know why, but in this case I feel sure there is a good reason. Debresser (talk) 23:13, 19 May 2009 (UTC)

Ok, it's visible if you look at the code. But not in the template as it shows. Compare Template:Cfr/doc which I condensed and Template:Cfr which you didn't. The only visible difference will be if you remove the whitespace in front of <noinclude>. The rest is just a matter of principle. So what do you say, shall I use AWB to transfer those cats that are already tagged? Debresser (talk) 23:19, 19 May 2009 (UTC)

Well... I just tested it on the sandbox, but there is no difference whatsoever. Perhaps that is because of the substitution, because I have upon occasion witnessed the disarranging consequences of that whitespace.

I'm waiting for two answers. About manually moving cats with a CfD to our newly created categories. About deleting the line in Template:Cfd adding Category:Categories for deletion as well. And I hope you'll delete those superfluous cats.

If you are going to do something to Template:Cfd, consider removing the break in |
| {{error:not substituted|cfd}} and change it to | | {{error:not substituted|Cfd}}, and consider changing "cfd" and "cfd2" to "Cfd" and "Cfd2" as well. Debresser (talk) 00:45, 20 May 2009 (UTC)

We have the first category newly tagged. And it seems to work. Debresser (talk) 00:51, 20 May 2009 (UTC)

Don't delete Category:Categories for deletion from April 2009. I moved the pages there. Want to put a bot on moving the 438 or so pages from Category:CfD 2009-05 to Category:Categories for deletion from May 2009? Debresser (talk) 01:03, 20 May 2009 (UTC)

I see you moved them and deleted the old cats. Thanks. What about updating Template:Cfd with removing Category:Categories for deletion, changing "cfd", "cfd2" and |
| {{error:not substituted|cfd}} to "Cfd" and "Cfd2" and | | {{error:not substituted|Cfd}}? Debresser (talk) 13:08, 20 May 2009 (UTC)

There's a LOT of noice about this last one on Wikipedia_talk:Categories_for_discussion#CfD_categories_renamed. Debresser (talk) 20:53, 20 May 2009 (UTC)

I noticed that from his style. Then I had a look at User talk:William Allen Simpson. I was just about to drop you a note that we have an agressive editor here, when I saw your last post. Just hope he is one of those who make more noice than actual trouble. Debresser (talk) 21:29, 20 May 2009 (UTC)

Does that discussion mean we have to have more discussion before we continue or since all the eight categories left are just from "since" to "from" is that trivial enough?

I was ready to propose changing Category:Templates deprecated since to Category:Deprecated templates from (sic!, as it was before the last edit) in Template:Tdeprecated. Just take care to drop me a note right away if you make the change. Debresser (talk) 22:51, 20 May 2009 (UTC)

I had a real good look at it yesterday and didn't see anything out of the ordinary. A regular transcluded template, used within noinclude tags for obvious reasons, bestowing a simple datecategory like all others. And there's only 11 or so of them. Would you care to mention what is special about it? Debresser (talk) 10:59, 21 May 2009 (UTC)

I know it isn't article namespace, and the regular queue will update it. I don't see the problem. I choose it because it is small and can be done with a single simple edit. Whatever you say. Debresser (talk) 11:12, 21 May 2009 (UTC)

Please add |from=yes to {{Verify source}} and {{Verify credibility}}. All is ready.

And perhaps delete a few {{db-g6}} I left from my mistakes (see Special:Contributions/Debresser for all 8 or so of them together). Debresser (talk) 13:39, 22 May 2009 (UTC) Done by some admin. Debresser (talk) 15:15, 22 May 2009 (UTC)

Did you notice the articles with dead links from after 2007 don't disappear. (The categories from 2007 are empty and can be deleted.) A long queue? Debresser (talk) 13:54, 22 May 2009 (UTC)

I checked a few of them for additional templates, but found none. I you say it happens, then it's ok with me. There is Category:All articles with dead external links but null editing all of them is not very sensible. Debresser (talk) 15:24, 22 May 2009 (UTC)

Are you going to make a nomination for renaming CfD, or do you want to wait till things quit down and till we finish all other categories? Debresser (talk) 15:25, 22 May 2009 (UTC)

If you'll be around in another 26 or so hours, we'll tackle {{Original research}} with three editprotected templates. I'm going on my weekly wikibreak now. :) Debresser (talk) 16:10, 22 May 2009 (UTC)

I found another template connected with Category:Wikipedia articles needing factual verification: {{Expert-verify}}. Would you please change it. Pay head: only change the second instance of the word "since", connected with this category, at this time. Debresser (talk) 18:45, 23 May 2009 (UTC)

No I didn't. What and where? Debresser (talk) 18:57, 23 May 2009 (UTC)

You want to tell me it wasn't in Category:Wikipedia articles needing factual verification at all? Debresser (talk) 19:02, 23 May 2009 (UTC)

Good I am not an admin. I make too many mistakes.

Please add |from=yes to {{Fact}} and change "since" to "from" in {{Citations missing}}. Debresser (talk) 19:20, 23 May 2009 (UTC)

Please chnage "as of" to "from" in {{Di-no source}} and afterwards null-edit {{Nsd}}. Debresser (talk) 19:35, 23 May 2009 (UTC)

I know {{Nsd}} is substituted. I warned User:DumbBOT and User:MiszaBot. Since the oldest category there is 11 May, the troubles should be over within two weeks and will consist in some files showing up "as of" and others (with transclusion rather than substitution) in "from". Debresser (talk) 19:46, 23 May 2009 (UTC)

Please see [102]. Will you talk with him, or me? He probably wasn't aware I made all categories (which was a LOT harder than I thought. (see e.g. all my edits to Category:Wikipedia files with unknown source from 11 May 2009 ‎) Debresser (talk) 20:34, 23 May 2009 (UTC)

I see he wrote you at the bottom of this page. I answered there and left him a talkback. Debresser (talk) 20:50, 23 May 2009 (UTC)

Please have a look at this diff. It seemed to me like a mistake, since {{Citations missing}} didn't do that for over a year (if ever). Do you agree? Debresser (talk) 21:16, 23 May 2009 (UTC)

See this diff that I have found the categories you created for {{Verify credibility}}. Debresser (talk) 21:24, 23 May 2009 (UTC)

Perhaps re-revert him? We have tried to contact him, but he doesn't seem to be around. Debresser (talk) 21:45, 23 May 2009 (UTC)

Ok. I saw User:OrphanBot on those files. Didn't think he had to be contacted, so I wrote just to the other 2 bots. I think he can work it out though.

What I meant about the missing citations documentation is that it used to say "Adding this sorts the article into subcategories of Category:Articles lacking sources" which I think was a mistake, wasn't it? Especially since later on it says (correctly) "This template will categorise tagged articles into Category:All articles with unsourced statements and either Category:Articles with unsourced statements or a monthly category like Category:Articles with unsourced statements from May 2009, if a date is supplied."

Please add |from=yes to {{Failed verification}}. That should be the last template for this category. Debresser (talk) 22:06, 23 May 2009 (UTC)

Please add |from=yes to {{Or}} and change "since" to "from" in {{Original research}}. Also afterwards null-edit {{Section OR}}. Debresser (talk) 22:40, 23 May 2009 (UTC)

I have no idea what "tiffing" and "bedding in " is. I'm from the continent. :) But that's fine. Would you care to give a third party opinion here? BTW, I found an extra non-protected template in this cat and two templates in the or cat were also non-protected, as well as two templates in Category:Articles with unsourced statements. See User:Debresser/My_work_on_Wikipedia#Articles. Debresser (talk) 00:22, 24 May 2009 (UTC)

I just found another template in Category:Wikipedia articles needing factual verification. But the thing that made me say "wow" was {{Article issues}}. There are a lot of "since" there. If you feel like combing them, go ahead, but perhaps just boldly change all of them, because we've done most of them and will do the other two there tonight, God willing and you helping. Debresser (talk) 19:41, 24 May 2009 (UTC)

I have a question. I'd liketo create a cat Category:Articles needing expert attention by month to be a subcat of Category:Articles needing expert attention, just like we have Category:Articles to be expanded by month as a subcat of Category:Articles to be expanded. That would clean up the page a little. My question is, this won't interfere with the sorting mentioned on Category:Articles needing expert attention through {{Expert-subject}}? Debresser (talk) 19:55, 24 May 2009 (UTC) No problem here, so that's what I will do. Debresser (talk) 20:26, 24 May 2009 (UTC)

Could you please change "since" to "from" in {{Expand}} and {{Expand-section}}. Debresser (talk) 20:22, 24 May 2009 (UTC)

I thought of that. Check it after my next post to you, please, just to make sure. Debresser (talk) 21:03, 24 May 2009 (UTC)

I think you missed one "since" in {{Article issues}}. Debresser (talk) 21:27, 24 May 2009 (UTC) Now you got it.

I now understand what you meant in this message to me. Of course. I would start making them an hour or so before the first place on the globe changes to the new month.

Please change "since" to "from" in {{Expert-subject}} and {{Expert-verify}}, {{Mergefrom}} and {{Mergeto}}. Debresser (talk) 21:42, 24 May 2009 (UTC)

Please have a look at Category:Deprecated templates by month ("per month" and not "per date"). You can change "since" to "from" in {{Tdeprecated}}. BTW, I wanted to change "Templates deprecated from" to "Deprecated templates from", but forgot about that. Debresser (talk) 22:39, 24 May 2009 (UTC)

20 of what? Merge templates? Debresser (talk) 22:44, 24 May 2009 (UTC) Ok, I saw them on your contributions. Debresser (talk) 22:46, 24 May 2009 (UTC) I found the cat. Only 21 of the 33 templates used a dated category, it turnes out. If you didn't miss any. I'll check. Debresser (talk) 22:50, 24 May 2009 (UTC)

About that includeonly tag on {{Tdeprecated}}. I liked it better the way it was, when you could see what the template would loook like. Just seeing that yellow template will be already more than half of the answer for somebody who saw it instead of the template he expected. Debresser (talk) 22:53, 24 May 2009 (UTC)

I did {{User:Ajcfreak/Template:Mergetomultiple-with}} as well. It's in userspace, but better be bold than leaving him with a malfunctioning template. Debresser (talk) 23:04, 24 May 2009 (UTC)

I take it you disagree with me about {{Tdeprecated}}? Did you check if SmackBot can work with Category:Articles to be expanded by month and Category:Articles needing expert attention by month? Debresser (talk) 23:08, 24 May 2009 (UTC)

I understood that. That's why the doc stated clearly that it was not deprecated. You should perhaps update the doc now. Debresser (talk) 23:18, 24 May 2009 (UTC)

The last category: please take care of {{Weasel-inline}}, {{Who}} and {{By whom}}. Does Smackbot update {{Which}} => {{Which?}} ?

One more thing. Many templates use {{Fix}}. Do we want to change {{Fix}} from a default of "since" to a default of "from"? And then delete the line |from=yes from those templates? I would like that. Just that if yes, we had better wait a while, so that if there are any templates we missed, they will show up. Debresser (talk) 00:22, 25 May 2009 (UTC) I dont know the {{DMC}}/{{DMCA}} templates, although I thought about them. My conclusion was that they are probably used not only for "from". But for {{Fix}} I have an idea: replace "since" by {{FULLPAGENAME}} and any case we forgot should show up as a template loop soon enough. Which I check every day anyway. Debresser (talk) 00:47, 25 May 2009 (UTC) Another bold idea is to delete all "since" categories and let SmackBot null-edit all pages that show up with invalid date parameters. Debresser (talk) 00:50, 25 May 2009 (UTC) BTW, the second "since" in {{Fix}} can already be changed. Debresser (talk) 00:51, 25 May 2009 (UTC)

I had a look at {{DMC}} and {{DMCA}}. They are obvious. {{DMCA}} is {{DMC}} for articles only, therefore the "A". Why didn't you use {{#if:{{NAMESPACE}}||{{DMC}}}}? Wanted it to be able to stand on its own? Debresser (talk) 00:59, 25 May 2009 (UTC)

The trick is to change {{{2}}} to "from", or to make it default to "from" ({{{2|from}}}) (or sth like that). Debresser (talk) 01:01, 25 May 2009 (UTC) On the other hand: the charm of {{DMC}} is that it can take any variable. It would be a shame to limit such a potent template. Debresser (talk) 01:09, 25 May 2009 (UTC)

You can delete Category:Deprecated templates by date and all its subcategories. Debresser (talk) 01:20, 25 May 2009 (UTC)

You missed this and this. Do you have more such suprises for me? :) Debresser (talk) 11:12, 25 May 2009 (UTC)

You have said nothing about my ideas for {{Fix}}. Debresser (talk) 11:33, 25 May 2009 (UTC)

This one was a lot more polite. And he reverted his edits. As to my previous questions and remarks about {{DMC}}/{{DMCA}} and {{Fix}}:

When nudging I meant as to my wild ideas of boldly adding a template loop or deleting categories. I'd like to restate my opinion that it would be a shame to change {{DMC}}. It has an appealing forcefull generality to it. Might I suggest changing only {{DMCA}} for this purpose (which, it seems, is indeed the one used). Debresser (talk) 16:45, 25 May 2009 (UTC)

I'll take my proposals are rejected. Now, as to finishing nicely with {{Fix}} and {{DMCA}}. On the list of all categories and templates we worked on, which I keep at User:Debresser/My_work_on_Wikipedia#Articles I added small notes indicating which templates are editprotected, which use {{Fix}} and which {{DMCA}}. Then, to make your live a little easier, I copied those without either and placed them in a special list at User:Debresser/My_work_on_Wikipedia#Waiting_for_DMCA_template. Hint: it would be very usefull if you could work {{DMCA}} into those ten templates in the next few days. I'd do it without problem, but I would probably get it wrong. And two of them are editprotected. Debresser (talk) 18:16, 25 May 2009 (UTC)

I added {{DMCA}} to 8 of them. Could you please check I didn't make any mistakes?

• {{Current person}}
• {{Current spaceflight}}
• {{Ongoing weather}}
• {{Synthesis}}
• {{Empty section}}
• {{Expert}}
• {{Technical (expert)}}
• {{Expert-subject-multiple}}

That leaves just two editprotected templates: {{Tdeprecated}} and {{Article issues}} (about which last I forgot before). Debresser (talk) 21:29, 25 May 2009 (UTC)

Do you have any idea why these last two categories are done in one day and others are waiting almost a week now?

You're right about {{Tdeprecated}} and I wouldn't use {{DMC}} for it. What is the logic in standarising 1 template in a stand-alone group> If you get my point. So when we want to centralise the use of "from" (or whatever) we have to do that at {{DMCA}}, {{Fix}}, {{DatedAI}}, {{Article issues}} and {{Tdeprecated}} (done). Debresser (talk) 23:59, 25 May 2009 (UTC)

By the way, did you know about Category:Attempted de-orphan, using "in" as programmed in {{Orphan}}? Could you rewrite it with {{DMCA}} please? It's easy. If you want to use "from", let me know. Debresser (talk) 00:09, 26 May 2009 (UTC)

I though we were close to done, but I forgot that I have information only about the catgories I worked upon together with you, which is only about 10 out of 43. I'll see if I have energy for all of them. But a good start would be to have {{Article issues}} to use {{DatedAI}} in all sections. Another thing is that {{DatedAI}} should know that {{cat-date}} is {{cat-undate}}+" from". Which would simplify {{Article issues}} and centralise the use of "from". What to do with the exeption, Category:Wikipedia cleanup and Category:Cleanup by month The obvious solution would be to rename Category:Cleanup by month and all its monthly categories to Category:Wikipedia cleanup by month. The best thing is probably to build the exeption into {{DatedAI}} and discuss it later, after all is centralised. Debresser (talk) 01:13, 26 May 2009 (UTC)

Four last small notes:

1. I have not found any more templates. Those slow cats are perhaps lower on the priority scale of the queue.
2. I personally can see the use of all-inclusive cats for bots that work with them.
3. You can delete all monthly categories with "since" in Category:Merge by month and Category:Articles needing expert attention by month. Debresser (talk) 01:28, 26 May 2009 (UTC)
4. The change to {{DatedAI}} would look something like from {{#if:{{{cat-date|}}}|[[Category:{{{cat-date}}} {{checkdate|{{{name}}}}}]]}}|{{#if:{{{cat-undate|}}}|[[Category:{{{cat-undate}}}]]}}<nowiki></code> to <code><nowiki>{{#if:{{{cat-undate|}}}|[[Category:{{{cat-undate}}}]][[Category:{{{cate-undate}}} from {{checkdate|{{{name}}}}}]]}}. Debresser (talk) 01:37, 26 May 2009 (UTC)

Oh, I know you are a programmer, and I am not. It wrote this to explain what kind of change I had in mind. Words are ambiguous, code is not. Would it work the way I wrote it? I would be very proud if it would. I really am not a programmer. I just look a lot at what I see and try to understand the way things work. This is without the abovementioned exception. Debresser (talk) 01:43, 26 May 2009 (UTC)

I was not being modest. I am not a programmer. When I was a child I learned the basics of Basic and in university the basics of Pascal and that's it. What language are these templates written in anyway? Another reason I wrote you the code is so that I shouldn't give the impression I am just inviting you to do all the hard thinking.

Now another thing. If we want this to work we must check all templates use either {{Fix}} or {{DMCA}}. Could you send me the list of all 423 templates you said ScmackBot dates. If up util now you could justify not sending me this list by claiming that I might actually find some more templates, that isn't true any more because now we are starting to standarise categories that are already at "from". BTW, did I find you any templates ScmackBot didn't know about? When I get the list I'll start sorting them per category and I'll add indicators like I did with the new "from" categories at User:Debresser/My_work_on_Wikipedia#Articles. BTW, I think we'll need to copy that section somewhere into Wikipedia namespace, for future reference. Probably something like Wikipedia:List of monthly maintenance categories with templates. I'll do that.

Had a look at Wikipedia:List of monthly maintenance categories with templates?

About User:Rich Farmbrough/temp5. Am I allowed to remove redlinks and update redirects? Nothing else. Debresser (talk) 15:56, 26 May 2009 (UTC)

Above questions waiting for answers. And I asked you once what language templates are written in on Wikipedia. As to my question, did I find you any templates ScmackBot didn't know about? The answer is: yes (at least {{Season needed}}). You might want to add it. Or I could, if you tell me that's ok. Debresser (talk) 17:12, 26 May 2009 (UTC)

Perhaps I didn't understand you. Is User:Rich Farmbrough/temp5 supposed to have all redirects, or not, or doesn't it matter? Because if you say it is - I can add them, and if you say it isn't - I can remove them. So far I added 1 template, fixed 1 typo (=1 redlink), deleted all redlinks. Debresser (talk) 21:09, 26 May 2009 (UTC)

BTW, I removed a few redirects from User:Rich Farmbrough/temp5. I also removed {{Merge-school}}, because it doesn't use a date parameter in the category, but I forgot to mention its removal in the edit-summary. Debresser (talk) 22:48, 26 May 2009 (UTC) Since it does take a date, just that it is not used in categories, I relisted it. Debresser (talk) 10:23, 27 May 2009 (UTC)

Why are you so quite? I mean, in connection with things here. Debresser (talk) 20:46, 27 May 2009 (UTC)

What's interesting in {{Fix}} at the moment? Debresser (talk) 22:25, 27 May 2009 (UTC)

Please add |from=yes to {{Attribution needed}}. Debresser (talk) 21:20, 27 May 2009 (UTC)

The section in {{Article issues}} dealing with {{Cite check}} is missing the line | cat-undate = Articles lacking sources. Could you fix that? Debresser (talk) 00:31, 26 May 2009 (UTC)

Done. Rich Farmbrough, 23:41 27 May 2009 (UTC).

A technical question: does {{DMCA|Articles lacking reliable references|from|{{{date|}}}|All articles lacking sources}}{{{category|[[Category:Articles needing more viewpoints|{{PAGENAME}}]]}}} do the same as {{DMCA|Articles lacking reliable references|from|{{{date|}}}|All articles lacking sources}}[[Category:Articles needing more viewpoints]]? Can {{DMCA}} take both categories inside? Debresser (talk) 21:34, 27 May 2009 (UTC)

Answered on user's talk page. Rich Farmbrough, 23:41 27 May 2009 (UTC).

And in the same vein: can {{#if:{{{date|}}}|{{{category|[[Category:Articles with broken or outdated citations from {{{date}}}]]}}}|{{{category|[[Category:Articles with broken or outdated citations]]}}}}}{{{category|[[Category:All articles with broken or outdated citations]]}}}{{#if:{{NAMESPACE}}||{{#if:{{{date|}}}|{{#ifexist:Category:Articles with broken or outdated citations from {{{date}}}||[[Category:Articles with invalid date parameter in template]]}}|}}}} be replaced by {{DMCA|Articles with broken or outdated citations|All articles with broken or outdated citations}}?

Answered on user's talk page. Rich Farmbrough, 23:41 27 May 2009 (UTC).

I'm checking all templates. Want me to do these first? Debresser (talk) 23:05, 27 May 2009 (UTC)

They are the relevant in-line ones, so yes that would be good. Rich Farmbrough, 23:46 27 May 2009 (UTC).

Please add |from=yes to {{Facts}}. Debresser (talk) 00:06, 28 May 2009 (UTC)

Rich, I'm sorry to disappoint you, but I have no idea what you meant with that last post to me. I need simple answers, like "yes" or "no, because this does #1 and that does #2". Debresser (talk) 21:56, 27 May 2009 (UTC)

that was apropos of the section it was in. Rich Farmbrough, 23:41 27 May 2009 (UTC).

My fault for not paying attention. Debresser (talk) 02:55, 28 May 2009 (UTC)

I created Category:Articles with close paraphrasing from March 2009. Please have a look and tell me if I did right. Then I'll make the other 2 monthly categories needed here. Debresser (talk) 22:45, 27 May 2009 (UTC) I made some changes, was content, and created the others. I also added it to Wikipedia:List of monthly maintenance categories given month. Debresser (talk) 22:56, 27 May 2009 (UTC)

Pretty much ok just missing a Tl . Rich Farmbrough, 23:46 27 May 2009 (UTC).

Thanks.

I noticed {{Clarify me}} a week ago. It uses "from" but the text is |from=from. If you want, please change it to |from=yes and remove that whitespace after the "cat-date" which is a thorn in my eyes. :) Debresser (talk) 23:11, 27 May 2009 (UTC)

It's fine, when we are done the line won't be needed. Rich Farmbrough, 23:46 27 May 2009 (UTC).

I know. Thanks for doing it anyway for my sake. Debresser (talk) 02:55, 28 May 2009 (UTC)

Would you have a less awkward solution for the beginning of {{FalseStatement}}? That would centralise "from", I mean. Debresser (talk) 00:10, 28 May 2009 (UTC) Ok. Deleting it was a nice idea. Debresser (talk) 02:55, 28 May 2009 (UTC)

Now if we want to work into {{DatedAI}} the exeption for Category:Wikipedia cleanup it shoud probably be something like {{#if:{{{cat-undate|}}}|[[Category:{{#ifeq:{{{cat-undate}}}|Cleanup|Wikipedia |}}{{{cat-undate}}}]][[Category:{{{cate-undate}}} from {{checkdate|{{{name}}}}}]]}}. I seem to remember that within parser functions spaces are discarded so perhaps that should be Wikipedia & # 32 ;.

No I think it is a bad idea for the dated AI to know about what is calling it. I'd rather fix the cat structure later. Rich Farmbrough, 23:41 27 May 2009 (UTC).

Ok. I understand your point. Debresser (talk) 02:55, 28 May 2009 (UTC)

When you finish {{DatedAI}}, the next thing will be to make {{Article issues}} use only {{DatedAI}}. Which is up to you, because of the editprotection. The only three entries not yet using {{DatedAI}} are "notable", "notability", and "Intro rewrite". Let me know when you finish, ok? Debresser (talk) 09:44, 26 May 2009 (UTC)

This is where it has been going for some time. The notablity stuff is I recall complicated. Rich Farmbrough, 23:41 27 May 2009 (UTC).

I noticed that you added "wikify" today. I must have missed this fourth entry somehow. Debresser (talk) 02:55, 28 May 2009 (UTC)

{{Chemformula}} has a dated category in it, but no dated categories exist. Apparently none have ever been created. I propose to remove it from the template. What do you say? Debresser (talk) 22:06, 27 May 2009 (UTC) I see you changed it in a way that keeps the dated cat. I really don't think we need more than one category for all of them, since it is not in use at all. Debresser (talk) 22:49, 27 May 2009 (UTC)

I am not minded to mess with it. If it is used then it's useful to know if the items are old. Rich Farmbrough, 23:46 27 May 2009 (UTC).

This is true, but see below that I can use this argument also... Debresser (talk) 03:04, 28 May 2009 (UTC)

Can't {{{category|{{#if:{{{date|}}}|[[Category:Chemistry articles with topics of unclear importance]]|[[Category:Chemistry articles with topics of unclear importance]]}}}}} used in {{Chemical-importance}} be replaced by [[Category:Chemistry articles with topics of unclear importance]]? Or even by {{DMCA|||Chemistry articles with topics of unclear importance}}? Debresser (talk) 21:45, 27 May 2009 (UTC)

Yes the straight category I think. Rich Farmbrough, 23:46 27 May 2009 (UTC).

That's what I like about {{DMCA}}. It is so general. Debresser (talk) 02:55, 28 May 2009 (UTC)

You made some typos in {{Episode}}. I fixed them. Debresser (talk) 00:13, 28 May 2009 (UTC)

I'm updating User:Rich Farmbrough/temp5. I remove the redirects up till #45. And added all templates I found from those you sent me. I'm afraid SmackBot will be one busy bot the next few days. Debresser (talk) 00:17, 28 May 2009 (UTC)

I updated Wikipedia:List of monthly maintenance categories given month and still have to update Wikipedia:List of monthly maintenance categories with templates. No sleeping for me here. Debresser (talk) 02:55, 28 May 2009 (UTC) Done. Debresser (talk) 04:15, 28 May 2009 (UTC)

I added User:Debresser/What's up? to the top of my talk page. From it you can see that in another 2-3 hours I'll have a 2-day wikibreak. Debresser (talk) 12:39, 28 May 2009 (UTC)

Remember about "The obvious solution would be to rename Category:Cleanup by month and all its monthly categories to Category:Wikipedia cleanup by month"? Since there is discussion now at Wikipedia:Categories_for_discussion/Log/2009_May_26#Category:Wikipedia_deletion and the two entries after that in the same vein, I think you should make that proposal now (and possibly even refer to those discussions). Debresser (talk) 10:31, 27 May 2009 (UTC)

The point of preceding category names with "wikipedia" is lost on me. Especially now they are hidden. I would prefer to move to "Articles needing cleanup" and loose the inclusive cats. Bots can recurse the categories, and counting can be done using parser functions and template cleverness. Rich Farmbrough, 23:41 27 May 2009 (UTC).

Actually I think I have a point here. The whole idea is simplifying {{DatedAI}} and {{Article issues}} with that code I wrote above, which eliminates the need for both a {{{cat-date}}} and {{{cat-undate}}} parameter, using only {{{cat-undate}}}. This can be done only when the names for the dated and undated categories are the same.

Therefore I propose the abovementioned rename. Actually, the "wikify" which you added to {{DatedAI}} today also has different names: Category:Articles that need to be wikified and Category:Wikify from November 2024. Again I would propose to rename the monthly categories to Category:Articles that need to be wikified from November 2024 e.g.

Actually you said yourself above "I'd rather fix the cat structure later." You could wait, of course, but it has to be done sooner or later. Debresser (talk) 02:55, 28 May 2009 (UTC)

I like to go a little slow with this stuff, because than any problems can be reverted. I'm fine with moving those cats - again Dated AI is built to deal with the reality of what was there, if the names can be systemitisd to be "[All] article XXXX [from YYYY]" then Dated AI calls can be simplified. The only issue is a style type one where we are passing a string to create a category. I mention this because I haves seen several cases where a string is made into an image - "image = my_picture.jpg" - this is hard for automated tools to recognise as an image name. However this is a very self-contained template. Rich Farmbrough, 12:29, 29 May 2009 (UTC).

Ok. Let me know when you are ready. Debresser (talk) 19:22, 30 May 2009 (UTC)

I saw {{Catholic-cleanup}} which sorts into Category:Wikipedia cleanup, but is in content parallel to {{1911 POV}} which sorts into Category:NPOV disputes. I'd propose to have both sort into the same category, preferably something like Category:Articles with minor POV problems or Category:Wikipedia articles in need of updating. Debresser (talk) 03:40, 28 May 2009 (UTC)

Catholic and 1911 may have specialised gnomes working in them? Try their talk pages. Rich Farmbrough, 12:29, 29 May 2009 (UTC).

Left {{1911 POV}} and changed the sorting category of {{Catholic-cleanup}} analogously to {{1911 POV}}. I left a message on the talkpage (which was empty). Debresser (talk) 19:22, 30 May 2009 (UTC)

I don't know how you made that list of templates using {{Fix}} without the line |from=yes, but I'd like you to try again. I'll be glad to here the result is "none found". Actually, I expect you'll still see {{InlineXend}}. I don't know how to fix it, so I'll leave it to you. Debresser (talk) 00:15, 28 May 2009 (UTC) When you move the "from" into {{Fix}} let me know, and I'll remove |from=yes from all templates I can, while you have a look at Wikipedia:List of monthly maintenance categories with templates to find the editprotected ones. Debresser (talk) 04:17, 28 May 2009 (UTC)

The whole X stuff is unused and should be nominated for deletion. Rich Farmbrough, 12:29, 29 May 2009 (UTC).

I saw you changed {{Fix}}. Congratulations with this big step forwards. You removed |from=yes from all templates, or do you still need some help? Debresser (talk) 19:22, 30 May 2009 (UTC) Which stuff did you mean here? Debresser (talk) 19:23, 30 May 2009 (UTC)

All done. Rich Farmbrough, 19:29, 30 May 2009 (UTC).

Hi. Please have a quick look at #Closing reactions and then a longer one over here, because you have not replied to 2 of my questions. Debresser (talk) 19:22, 30 May 2009 (UTC)

The category page of Category:Self-contradictory articles needs an update introducing a date parameter to the general public. Debresser (talk) 23:28, 27 May 2009 (UTC) The same with {{Csense}}. Debresser (talk) 23:36, 27 May 2009 (UTC)

Hm I'll take a look. Rich Farmbrough, 23:46 27 May 2009 (UTC).

OK it {{Contradict}} doesn't take a date parameter yet. And even if it did I prefer to simply document the categories rather than parameter. Reason is that so many people get the parameter wrong, they try all sorts of fancy stuff like date= {{Date}} not to mention mis-spelling "date" and the month names. I spend a fair amount of time clearing up these messes. Rich Farmbrough, 23:52 27 May 2009 (UTC).

I see I have to add some explanation here. First of all about {{Csense}}. It takes a date parameter and uses a dated category. But the documentation page doesn't mention anything about that.

We have two templates sorting in Category:Self-contradictory articles: {{Contradict}} and {{Contradict-inline}}. The difference is that {{Contradict}} doesn't take a date parameter, while {{Contradict-inline}} not only does take a date parameter, but also uses a dated category and sorts in Category:Self-contradictory articles by month.

I think both should behave the same. By your argument above in connection with {{Chemformula}}, that "If it is used then it's useful to know if the items are old." we should add a dated category to {{Contradict}}. Many users have indeed added a date parameter to it, not knowing that the template doesn't do anything with it. Note that {{Contradict-inline}} is at the moment nowhere in use, and monthly categories do not exist yet. Let me know what you decide, please. Debresser (talk) 02:55, 28 May 2009 (UTC)

YEs I think that's fine to do. I wil ahve a quick look. Rich Farmbrough, 19:29, 30 May 2009 (UTC).

Thanks. I fixed the typos ([103]). And here too. Debresser (talk) 20:59, 30 May 2009 (UTC)

What is the difference between {{Contradict-inline}} and {{Contradiction-inline}}? Debresser (talk) 01:47, 31 May 2009 (UTC)

That's what I thought. But if so, {{Contradict-inline}}, which is the template for contradicting other articles, should sort into Category:Articles contradicting other articles, like {{Contradict-other}}, and not in Category:Self-contradictory articles. Note that Category:Articles contradicting other articles is not dated. Debresser (talk) 01:55, 31 May 2009 (UTC)

Obviously itself. The existance of Category:Articles contradicting other articles proves this. Debresser (talk) 02:02, 31 May 2009 (UTC)

I fixed this. I'll update all the documentation pages and category pages. Debresser (talk) 02:11, 31 May 2009 (UTC)

BTW, the right moment to make the new monthly categories using Wikipedia:List of monthly maintenance categories given month is at noon GMT. I'm not going to be around tomorrow at that time. So would you like me to create them today, or are you going to be around? Debresser (talk) 20:31, 30 May 2009 (UTC)

I understand why you say "mignight UTC", but noon GMT is more logical, since that is the time the first place on earth enters the new month and any user there will rightfully want to add his tag to the new category.

I stronly recommend making sure all of them get created in front of time (and frankly speaking I think they can already be created), because any article tagged before the category gets created will clutter Category:Articles with invalid date parameter in template. Debresser (talk) 00:45, 31 May 2009 (UTC)

• Please delete all monthly categories with "since" from Category:Articles with dead external links. Debresser (talk) 23:45, 30 May 2009 (UTC)

• And from Category:Wikipedia articles needing factual verification. Debresser (talk) 23:50, 30 May 2009 (UTC)
• And Category:Articles that may contain original research. Debresser (talk) 00:08, 31 May 2009 (UTC)
• And Category:Articles with specifically-marked weasel-worded phrases. Debresser (talk) 00:33, 31 May 2009 (UTC)

Please also notice my last edit to Wikipedia:List of monthly maintenance categories. Debresser (talk) 02:40, 31 May 2009 (UTC)

While creating categories in Wikipedia:List of monthly maintenance categories given month, I noticed that 2 categories do not exist, so I put them aside as remarks. Wich makes 4 remarks. Debresser (talk) 09:22, 31 May 2009 (UTC)

What happened to Wikipedia:List of monthly maintenance categories given month/cat?? Why does it say "July" now? Debresser (talk) 02:44, 31 May 2009 (UTC) In other words, why does {{#time:F Y|+1 month}} give December 2024, while {{#time:F Y}} gives November 2024? Debresser (talk) 02:58, 31 May 2009 (UTC)

After the fact it was obvious: we told it to create a new cat starting from 31 (May+1) = 31 June. But since June has only 30 days, that became 1 July. Your +30 days solution has solved this. Debresser (talk) 09:22, 31 May 2009 (UTC)

I promised not to make any more changes to categories without discussion. And we really shouldn't. It is an obvious proposal though. It might even be speedied. Debresser (talk) 19:50, 30 May 2009 (UTC) The same for the proposal concerning the cleanup categories. You might consider finishing work on the last parts of {{Article issues}} first. Debresser (talk) 20:31, 30 May 2009 (UTC)

I'll draft a proposal tonight. How is {{Article issues}}? Debresser (talk) 09:22, 31 May 2009 (UTC)

• I have some issues with article issues. It doesn't alert to non-existent cats like the other templates. I will sort this some time soon.

If only I knew what that means. Debresser (talk) 19:40, 31 May 2009 (UTC)

• I fixed up your dating templates.

I noticed. Thanks. Debresser (talk) 19:40, 31 May 2009 (UTC)

• You might be interested in {{Progress box}} - needs a minor tweak but works pretty well.

Nice. You had {{Merge progress}}. Was that also yours? Probably works analogous, just a generalisation? Debresser (talk) 19:40, 31 May 2009 (UTC)

Re: {{Notability progress}}

Hello, Rich Farmbrough. You have new messages at Black Falcon's talk page.
Message added 17:15, 31 May 2009 (UTC). You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{Talkback}} or {{Tb}} template.

I've left a note at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Notability#Template:Notability progress. Cheers, –BLACK FALCON ^(TALK) 17:57, 31 May 2009 (UTC)

Copyedit template

Cheers for doing that. It took a fare while to update that template with a calculator. --James Chenery (talk) 18:05, 31 May 2009 (UTC)

A study on how to cover scientific uncertainties/controversies

Hi. I have emailed you to ask whether you would agree to participate in a short survey on how to cover scientific uncertainties/controversies in articles pertaining to global warming and climate change. If interested, please email me Encyclopaedia21 (talk) 18:40, 31 May 2009 (UTC)

Admin

See 1, 2 and then 3, if you want to have a good laugh. Hint: it has to do with a certain person we stumbled upon in a recent discussion. Debresser (talk) 00:41, 24 May 2009 (UTC)

Thank you for your kind warning. Keeping detached is one of your more admirable traits. Anyway, I did my best to convey the message in as neutral words as I could, and have succeeded to a certain degree, which should keep me save. Debresser (talk) 14:25, 24 May 2009 (UTC)

Have another look at Wikipedia:Wikiquette_alerts#User:William_Allen_Simpson where the discussion has gone astray, but has been forcefully reversed to its course. You might have a look at User_talk:William_Allen_Simpson#Invitation also. I can't help feeling elated that justice is being meted out, as I percieve it. Debresser (talk) 03:24, 28 May 2009 (UTC)

You can congratulate me. Now he's putting me on WP:WQA. :) Debresser (talk) 11:20, 1 June 2009 (UTC) So far without any success. He isn't really trying either. If he does, I'll show argument after argument how it realy was "a lot of unfounded accusations", and he will be looking very badly indeed. Debresser (talk) 15:19, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

SmackBot

I have a suggestion. SmackBot could leave educational edit summaries like "Please use capitals for names of months", "No comma should used between the name of the month and the year", "Please do not use dates when tagging templates, just the month and the year", "Please use only the current month and year when dating a template" (see e.g. [104]). This may be some work, although I think it shouldn't be too hard. I feel sure this would be beneficial. Debresser (talk) 12:06, 1 June 2009 (UTC)

Merge templates

All the merge templates (see here) could use {{DMCA}}. If that can be done (you never know, substitution and all), please do the three editprotected templates, and let me know there's no problem and I'll do the rest of them. Debresser (talk) 02:55, 28 May 2009 (UTC) Why don't you answer about this one? Debresser (talk) 00:45, 31 May 2009 (UTC)

I'm fine with you changing the templates to use DMCA. If you wnat me to do the last three, not a problem. Rich Farmbrough, 01:13, 31 May 2009 (UTC).

The more I have a look at them, the more I wonder if it can be done. They seem to have certain provisions for use in various namespaces. I'd really rather leave this up to you. Debresser (talk) 01:34, 31 May 2009 (UTC) You know I {{Nudge}} you only in the interest of the "cause". Nothing personal. Debresser (talk) 20:21, 31 May 2009 (UTC)

OK I did one. Rich Farmbrough, 20:15, 1 June 2009 (UTC).

I saw you did {{Merge}}. That one I could have done myself (if I were an admin). But what with {{Mergefrom-multiple}} e.g.? Debresser (talk) 20:59, 1 June 2009 (UTC)

The problem is they aren't consistent. Maybe when we have resolved the naming situation it will be clearer. Rich Farmbrough, 21:57, 1 June 2009 (UTC).

Intuitively I would say that will not be the case. Debresser (talk) 23:06, 1 June 2009 (UTC)

Colloquial

Did this edit of yours perhaps include a mistake, changing from Category:Wikipedia articles needing style editing to Category:NPOV disputes? Debresser (talk) 21:37, 1 June 2009 (UTC)

 Fixed Ffixed. Rich Ffarmbrough, 14:58, 2 June 2009 (UTC).

With "since" and editprotected

• {{Expand language}}

Ffixed. Rich Ffarmbrough, 14:58, 2 June 2009 (UTC).

Honvédség

Yes i plan to expand article.--98.111.139.133 (talk) 17:20, 1 June 2009 (UTC)

Templates for deletion nomination of Template:Sockadmit

Template:Sockadmit 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. DisturbedNerd999 (Delete!) 19:41, 1 June 2009 (UTC)

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Temp 5

Please let me know ASAP: User:Rich Farmbrough/temp5 is for all templates that take a date parameter, not just those that sort in a dated category, right? Debresser (talk) 19:30, 1 June 2009 (UTC)

That was very nice of you, making this list specially for me. But you somehow failed to answer my question: if a template takes a date, should it be in the list? In other words: should SmackBot know about it? BTW, I do advice you to update the master list accordingly, since there are many changes. Debresser (talk) 19:46, 1 June 2009 (UTC)

I have copied most of the changes. Yes if it takes it of the form date=July 2009 and it can be applied at any time (the sooner the better). So it is not apporriate for tdeprecated, although for other reasons SB will skip those pages. Rich Farmbrough, 20:15, 1 June 2009 (UTC).

"I have copied most of the changes." That pleases me. Anything to be learned from asking why you didn't copy all of the changes?

Probably not. I just didn't cut and paste the whole thing because it's been put in human format, and I have added other templates since. Rich Ffarmbrough, 15:04, 2 June 2009 (UTC).

Could you put them on my talkpage, please? Debresser (talk) 18:07, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

Just to see if I understand you correctly. "It can be applied at any time " would also exclude "Attempted de-ophan in ..."? Debresser (talk) 20:51, 1 June 2009 (UTC)

basically if an attempted de-orphan has been left undated, is it better for SB to date it or not? I would say yes for the do-orphan template as was. However if an ordinary orphan template is there it would be worng for SB to add a de-oph attempt date to it. Rich Ffarmbrough, 15:04, 2 June 2009 (UTC).

Don't forget that the difference between an "orphan" and "de-orphan" template is only the |att=November 2024. "Orphan" should be dated, off course. "De-orphan" with an empty |att= shouldn't, just delete it. Debresser (talk) 15:11, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

Well it should have the orphan part added. Mayber the two templates shoudl be merged

Rich Ffarmbrough, 21:00, 2 June 2009 (UTC).

But it is one and the same template. That's the whole point. "De-orphan"doesn't exist. It is {{Orphan}} with the |att= parameter. Debresser (talk) 21:40, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

Ah well it did exist. {{Do-attempt}} ? Rich Ffarmbrough, 23:06, 2 June 2009 (UTC).

Csense

I updated the documentation page for {{Csense}} a little. Please finish it, if you can. And tell me, please, wasn't I supposed to see some text when hovering with the mouse over the link, other than Wikipedia:Common sense? I also updated the documentation for {{Fix}}, removing mention of |from=yes. Debresser (talk) 20:36, 31 May 2009 (UTC)

That is the correct mouseover. Csense is not used so I can;t get excited about the documentaiton unless theres a problem? ~~

• Shouldn't the date parameter in the template read |date={{{date|}}} in stead of just |date=?
• Do you have any "See also"'s that you think should be added to the documentation page
• According to the documentation at {{Fix}} the title parameter should be displayed upon mouseover. Why doesn't that happen?

Probably. Rich Ffarmbrough, 21:00, 2 June 2009 (UTC). I guess

|class = noprint Template-Fact

is breaking it. But that's css, not to hot on that. Rich Ffarmbrough, 21:04, 2 June 2009 (UTC).

I see you fixed it. Thanks. Debresser (talk) 21:43, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

Merge FJC

I introduced a "normal" date parameter to {{Merge FJC}}. That was my first time. Does it look ok? Debresser (talk) 19:55, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

Looks fine. Except possibly use DMC not DMCA, becsue these pages aren't in articlespace? Rich Ffarmbrough, 21:00, 2 June 2009 (UTC).

You're right. Would dropping the "A" of "DMCA" do the trick, or does that template work differently? BTW, can DMCA take more than 1 category? In other words, can I combine two DMCA's into 1? Debresser (talk) 21:56, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

Check but they should be identical in usage. No they can't be combined. Rich Ffarmbrough, 23:07, 2 June 2009 (UTC).

It works. Now waiting for the queue. :) Debresser (talk) 23:40, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

The queue did what it was supposed to do. I refined the template and "shalom" (used both for "hello" and "goodbye", in this case the latter). Debresser (talk) 11:14, 3 June 2009 (UTC)

Metamaterial

Rich - I think I was able to establish from the history of the page Metamaterial that you left the "expert needed tag." I re-wrote and expanded the whole introduction for this article. I'd like you to take a look and "hear" what you have to say. You may respond at my talk page or at the article's talk page.

And, please feel free to let your bot roam free through this article. If it does editing fixes I am all for it. Better the bot than me.
(or is that - "Better Ye than Me...") Ti-30X (talk) 05:39, 1 June 2009 (UTC)

Answered on user's talk page. Rich Ffarmbrough, 11:04, 3 June 2009 (UTC).

The micro sign

Hello! I noticed you replaced all instances of µ with µ at R10000 as part of a clean up. May I enquire as to why? Is it required by WP:MoS, some other policy or guideline? Thanks! Rilak (talk) 08:13, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

Yes the principle; "Use the simplest markup to display information in a useful and comprehensible way." Rich Farmbrough, 14:31, 2 June 2009 (UTC).

OK, thanks! Rilak (talk) 08:01, 3 June 2009 (UTC)

Since cat

There is a "since" category in Naoki Miyanishi, probably because {{Expand Japanese}} needs a null-edit. Debresser (talk) 11:45, 3 June 2009 (UTC)

Wrong. The reason is the editprotected {{Expand language (non-Latin script)}}. Could you please change all instances of "since" to "from". Debresser (talk) 18:21, 3 June 2009 (UTC)

Thanks. BTW, the good thing before was that I would move fixed things higher up on the talk page. That would save me the trouble of checking all sections to see if there is anything new. Debresser (talk) 22:46, 3 June 2009 (UTC)

SmackBot

You have another problem. See this diff. Debresser (talk) 22:32, 3 June 2009 (UTC)

Hmm SB would catch that second time around. Rich Farmbrough, 01:23, 4 June 2009 (UTC).

That I realised. But why do it? Debresser (talk) 10:02, 4 June 2009 (UTC)

Well the rule that spots there is a month followed by year as a default argument is case-insensitive - so it still works. The rule that replaces malformed month names is applied before that, and only to date= constructs. Cahnging the order of the rules would create more complexity, but maybe I will add another simple rule dealing with case only. Rich Farmbrough, 10:06, 4 June 2009 (UTC).

Drug categorization: consensus sought

Should the 2nd, 3rd and 4th levels of the Category:Drugs by target organ system mirror the Anatomical Therapeutic Chemical Classification System exactly, or be consolidated when possible?

Please read the more thorough description of this issue at WT:PHARM:CAT and post your comments there. Comments are much appreciated! Thanks ---kilbad (talk) 00:24, 4 June 2009 (UTC)

SmackBot -ERDLator

Additional links to other article have been done. Please review. I believe orphan template issue resolved. Thanks. Jrcrin001 (talk) 07:57, 4 June 2009 (UTC)

Articles needing coordinates

I updated Category:Articles needing coordinates from June 2009. Both stylistically as in content. The thing is that the page of {{Locate me}} claims that {{Locate me}} is deprecated. In connection with this I have 2 questions:

1. Is the new Category:Articles needing coordinates from June 2009 fine?
2. If {{Locate me}} is deprecated, why isn't it tagged with {{Tdeprecated}}?

Debresser (talk) 19:34, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

It's a can of worms. Locate me goes on talk pages. There's is a whole new category structure. I was looking at it today. Rich Ffarmbrough, 21:00, 2 June 2009 (UTC).

Perhaps {{Locate me}} used to be in articles and on talk pages alike, and then somebody renamed all instances in articles to {{Coord missing}} because it became "deprecated"? That was my though, when I noticed this before. Debresser (talk) 21:49, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

I contacted one of the editors of this template. We'll see what comes out of that. My guess is things wil stay precisely the way they are, in the end. Unless you want to mix in, of course. Debresser (talk) 11:16, 3 June 2009 (UTC)

According to his answer I was right. So we can change all templates if we want. Anything needs to be done to add the {{Tdeprecated}} template? Debresser (talk) 17:33, 3 June 2009 (UTC)

No I don't think so. But the co-ord templates I will not do anything with until I have thought things through. Rich Farmbrough, 23:08, 3 June 2009 (UTC).

I have done some thinking also. {{Locate me}} is indeed a template that is made especially for talk page headers and used only there. {{Coord missing}} is used only in articles. The difference in their usage is big. {{Locate me}} takes a date, and sorts into Category:Articles needing coordinates (or a dated subcat of it). {{Coord missing}} doesn't take a date and sorts into other categories, which are luckily also subcats of Category:Articles needing coordinates. I've updated the text of Category:Articles needing coordinates and its dated subcats accordingly. I've also updated the explanations on {{Locate me}}, {{LocateMeLong}} and {{Coord missing}}. Debresser (talk) 00:04, 4 June 2009 (UTC)

afaik, The Anome had a bot of his add {{coord missing}} to any article which had {{Locate me}} or {{LocateMeLong}} on its talk page. I'll point him to this conversation fwiw. {{coord missing}} has been added in a fairly systematic way to, currently, circa 162k articles. I don't think sleep would be lost if the locateme templates were marked as deprecated. --Tagishsimon (talk) 00:52, 4 June 2009 (UTC)

That's a good thing, that bot. I had wondered if something like it existed. Interesting that the other way around doesn't exist. I can think of a reason why not, but of better reasons why yes.

We could deprecate them, even remove them. No problem. Template documentation and category pages can be updated. I personally don't think that that is a good idea though. I even would welcome that other bot I mentioned just now, adding a lot more of these templates. On the other hand I agree that if {{Coord missing}} would become visible, that {{Locate me}} becomes redundant. Which is why I stressed on your talk page the point that my work in this area has been to reflect status quo. Debresser (talk) 00:59, 4 June 2009 (UTC)

The clearest argument against persisting with a banner on the talk page is that it takes two edits, one to add coords to the article, another to remove the {{Locate me}}. A bot could be employed, I suppose, but it would represent make-work, I think. The idea of making {{coord missing}} visible has been floated on Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Geographical coordinates, notably at #Arguments for and against visible {{coord missing}} tags, but also in previous and now archived discussions. {{Coord missing}} was once visible and was made invisible after a couple of complaints. {{orphan}}, which has recently added its banner to 160k or so articles, stands as something a precedent, although I feel something less disruptive would be more appropriate. Meanwhile apologies to Rich for stealing his talk page...I think Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Geographical coordinates would be the place to take this discussion, as & when you wish. --Tagishsimon (talk) 01:14, 4 June 2009 (UTC)

Since {{Coord missing}} isn't on any talkpages, and {{Locate me}} isn't in any articles, and the documentation is updated to clearly show this usage, and we have established that at present {{Locate me}} is not deprecated, and there is no compelling reason to do so until {{Coord missing}} becomes visible, I don't think this is of any immedeate concern to us now, and I propose to drop the thread. Debresser (talk) 12:46, 5 June 2009 (UTC)

PD-self

Could you please change {{PD-self}} to the following code? Copy from edit window to preserve formatting!

{{imbox | type = license | image = [[Image:PD-icon.svg|52px]] | text = ''I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby release it into the '''[[w:public domain|public domain]]'''. This applies worldwide.''<br/> In case this is not legally possible,<br/> ''I grant any entity the right to use this work '''for any purpose''', without any conditions, unless such conditions are required by law.'' }}{{File other | {{DMC|User-created public domain images|from|{{{date|}}}|All user-created public domain images}} }}{{free media}}<noinclude> {{Documentation}} <!-- Add categories and interwikis to the /doc subpage, not here! --> </noinclude>

 Done Rich Farmbrough, 07:16, 5 June 2009 (UTC).

Deprecated template

I noticed {{Section rewrite}} is officially deprecated and not in use. Shouldn't it be deleted then? If so, what is the correct way? Should it be nominated at wp:afd, or can any admin delete it since it has been officially deprecated? Debresser (talk) 20:09, 4 June 2009 (UTC)

SmackBot

SmackBot is replacing the inline {{syn}} with the banner {{synthesis}}.[105] Hrafn^Talk_Stalk^(P) 04:38, 1 June 2009 (UTC)

Someone re-re-redirected SYN to synthesis, thus confusing the bot. Rich Farmbrough, 11:57, 1 June 2009 (UTC).

Are you sure? I could see no redirect in {{syn}}'s recent edit history. Hrafn^Talk_Stalk^(P) 04:31, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

No {{SYN}}. Rich Farmbrough, 21:52, 4 June 2009 (UTC).

My suggestion is: delete {{SYN}}. Nobody is going to use all capitals anyway, and better removing it than changing it between {{Syn}} and {{Synthesis}} every few months. Debresser (talk) 00:37, 5 June 2009 (UTC)

Charlie Lawson

Hello Rich, If you are feeling game, I have a saved a list of sources for adding in content on Charlie Lawson which are in the bottom of my sandbox. You are welcome to appropriate them as you wish. I have been trying to get my hands on an expensive rare book on the subject but no luck so far. Keep up the good work!
⋙–Berean–Hunter—► ((⊕)) 17:39, 4 June 2009 (UTC)

Query

Rich, when I look at an edit like this from an experienced editor like yourself, I don't doubt that it's correct. But I gotta ask you—how did you know that that needed to be changed? I mean, a) how do you know what it should actually be, and b) how did you come to see it? I'm just curious. Unschool 03:46, 5 June 2009 (UTC)

I did a major clean-up of ISBN numbers in 2006/7 with the help of a number of editors. I recently stumbled upon Wikipedia:WikiProject Check Wikipedia and discovered that they have got out of hand again since (the software I wrote at the time has been partially lost). I scanned a recent database dump for these errors and fixed them. Rich Farmbrough, 07:29, 5 June 2009 (UTC).

Too abstract

I saw here that you added a dated category to this template. That seems to me like a mistake, since {{Ambox}} doesn't take such a parameter, so I removed it. Debresser (talk) 22:03, 4 June 2009 (UTC)

Yes I fixed up the template to take a date properly. Though it has only 2 uses. ~~

I saw it has only 2 uses. 1 with and 1 without a date. Why do you add <includeonly>...</includeonly> tags to {{DMCA}}? Debresser (talk) 22:47, 4 June 2009 (UTC)

They aren't needed. Maybe they hint at the catgoriness of DMCA...Rich Farmbrough, 18:19, 6 June 2009 (UTC).

Smile. BTW, I added a date to the one that previously dodn't have it. Looked it up in the history. Debresser (talk) 18:54, 6 June 2009 (UTC)

You made a few more mistakes in the template. Fixed. Debresser (talk) 23:04, 4 June 2009 (UTC)

MW 1935

May I suggest that this edit was a mistake. There are no monthly categories for Category:Articles containing potentially dated statements, just yearly. The previous version seems correct to me (if it worked). Debresser (talk) 15:37, 5 June 2009 (UTC)

They are broken down by year, into monthly cats. But that template is probably wrong adn maybe should read Category:Articles_containing_potentially_dated_statements_from_before 1990

I am sorry. From 2005 on they are categorised per month. Before that only per year. Before 1990 there is only 1 all-inclusive cat. I see you made the change, and I think that was a good, idea. Thanks. Debresser (talk) 18:58, 6 June 2009 (UTC)

rp template

Please note that {{rp}} only takes a "date" parameter if the "needed" parameter is also specified. Adding "date" parameters to {{rp}}s that actually have the page numbers listed as was done here is not necessary. --Pascal⁶⁶⁶ 17:40, 5 June 2009 (UTC)

The bot didn't add the date parameter, just changed "Sept." to "September". That is a good idea in any case. My mistake. Debresser (talk) 18:04, 6 June 2009 (UTC)

Ah yes it did, after the first occurance. I will look into it.Rich Farmbrough, 18:08, 6 June 2009 (UTC).

Templates and dated categories

I finished checking all templates from User:Rich Farmbrough/temp5 and updating that same list. I added {{DMCA}} where I could, and updated many a documentation page. I hope my updates to the list have been usefull to you and your bot. I won't be needing the list any more.

I have added all templates using a dated category to Wikipedia:List of monthly maintenance categories with templates. I would appreciate it if you could update that list with any further templates using a dated category you may find. I made that list for future reference. In short perspective it may be used to see which templates still need to be standarised (with either {{Fix}}, {{DMCA}} or {{DMC}}). There is many an editprotected template there that caneasily be standarised, and a few that need more thorough attention.

Since all tasks in furthering the standarisation of dated categories and their templates are now either to editprotected templates or above my technical abilities, apart from the proposals for category standarisation, I'll have to restrict myself to following your progress in these. Debresser (talk) 16:02, 5 June 2009 (UTC)

SmackBot

On Crusoe (TV series), SmackBot changed a US flag template (United States) to a warning template (). A bug? Andyross (talk) 21:31, 6 June 2009 (UTC)

Yes sort of. {Us} redirected there. I made {Us} the same as {US}. Rich Farmbrough, 04:20, 7 June 2009 (UTC).

Progress box

Nice work on {{Progress box}}. I wonder how hard it would be to merge in the functionality of {{DeletedMonths}}. --Pascal⁶⁶⁶ 01:36, 1 June 2009 (UTC)

Done. Rich Farmbrough, 22:25, 4 June 2009 (UTC).

I couldn't figure out how you did this, so I tested it and whatever you did does not appear to work. I just added an article to Category:Articles to be expanded from December 2006 which caused {{DeletedMonths}} to show it at Category:Articles to be expanded by month, but the {{Progress box}} on that page did not detect the deleted category with an article in it. --Pascal⁶⁶⁶ 23:29, 4 June 2009 (UTC)

I just added the functionality of {{DeletedMonths}} to {{Progress box}}. Anywhere you add {{Progress box}} you can now delete {{DeletedMonths}} from (if it is there). This way they are not both on the same page using expensive parser functions running through the same old categories to see if they exist. --Pascal⁶⁶⁶ 08:18, 8 June 2009 (UTC)

I hade a look at Template:Splitting progress. The "All articles" link is redlinked because it uses "All Articles" with a capital. That is a small oversight: don't just add "All", but also turn the capital "A" from "Articles" into a regular letter. Debresser (talk) 00:34, 5 June 2009 (UTC)

I have fixed the capitalization issue. --Pascal⁶⁶⁶ 17:54, 5 June 2009 (UTC)

SmackBot - Bot is making mistake

See this edit for an example of a mistaking edit that needs to be fixed. I have seen many of these already, not thinking it was the bot who made this mistake. But then it became a little too often, and I checked who did this, and guess whom I found? Debresser (talk) 13:27, 3 June 2009 (UTC)

Don't bother searching for the mistaken edits. I'll clean them up. Debresser (talk) 13:37, 3 June 2009 (UTC)

Yes I fixed this. But keep your eyes open for anything similar. Rich Farmbrough, 16:11, 7 June 2009 (UTC).

Template:Section rewrite

I just noticed that you deleted this template with the rationale "redirect to deleted template." In an above section, it is correctly stated that the template was deprecated, but it was not a redirect to a deleted template. Please advise. Thank you. —David Levy 12:08, 5 June 2009 (UTC)

You are correct. Its use is continued by {{Cleanup-rewrite}}, and it has no incomming links apart from the discussion here, but it was not a redirect. He probably meant that it was deleted as a deprecated template. Debresser (talk) 12:23, 5 June 2009 (UTC)

Deprecation is not a speedy deletion criterion. To ensure that future transclusions (by users unaware of the deprecation) function properly, the standard practice is to either label the template "deprecated" (as this one was) or redirect it to the template that has superseded it. —David Levy 12:55, 5 June 2009 (UTC)

And then we keep it indefinitely? Mind you, I'm not arguing, just asking about what the procedure is. Debresser (talk) 13:01, 5 June 2009 (UTC)

Yes, that's correct. —David Levy 13:19, 5 June 2009 (UTC)

Thank you. In that case, I'm sorry I made the suggestion above to delete it. Now let's see what Rich will have to say. Debresser (talk) 14:46, 5 June 2009 (UTC)

The usual procedure is that it is TfD'd, deprecated, orphaned, dated and deleted. The reason for the incorrect edit summary was that I was also deleting a redirect to it, with the obvious consequence. I must say that this does seem to be a cyclic "lets have a section version of everything" and "lets consolidate these section versions into one" phenomena, similar to many others on WP, which is one reason haven't much worried about template cruft, although I have got some ideas for combating it. Rich Farmbrough, 14:56, 5 June 2009 (UTC).

It does sound compellingly logical, that sequence ending with "deleted"... Debresser (talk) 15:50, 5 June 2009 (UTC)

The usual procedure is that it is TfD'd, deprecated, orphaned, dated and deleted.

When it comes to longstanding templates superseded by others, that isn't the procedure with which I'm familiar. Historically, there have been widespread concerns regarding potential future transclusions and past transclusions viewable in old page revisions. This is why, for example, long-superseded templates such as {{cleanup-date}}, {{attention}} and {{attention (on talk page)}} redirect to {{cleanup}} and long-superseded templates such as {{mergewith}} and {{mergedisputed}} redirect to {{merge}}.

And that sound even more logical. :) Debresser (talk) 18:05, 6 June 2009 (UTC)

The reason for the incorrect edit summary was that I was also deleting a redirect to it, with the obvious consequence.

What was the actual rationale? —David Levy 17:22, 5 June 2009 (UTC)

I await your response. —David Levy 23:13, 5 June 2009 (UTC)

Join the club. :))) Debresser (talk) 18:05, 6 June 2009 (UTC):::

That it was deprecated and orphaned. Rich Farmbrough, 18:09, 6 June 2009 (UTC).

That isn't a speedy deletion criterion (for reasons noted above). Please restore {{section rewrite}}, {{sectionrewrite}}, and any other templates that you've deleted under this rationale. Thank you. —David Levy 18:52, 6 June 2009 (UTC)

I await your response. —David Levy 15:19, 7 June 2009 (UTC)

I was going to say undelete them if you like. But I have done so. Rich Farmbrough, 16:09, 7 June 2009 (UTC).

Thank you. Have you deleted any other templates for this reason? —David Levy 17:31, 7 June 2009 (UTC)

Not that I am aware. Rich Farmbrough, 07:51, 8 June 2009 (UTC).

Thanks again! —David Levy 08:22, 8 June 2009 (UTC)

SmackBot June 2009

SmackBot changed a "fact|June 2009" template coding to "Fact|June 2009|date=June 2009" earlier today in this George Washington article edit. I removed the extra "|June 2009" though you may wish to make a change so SmackBot only inserts "date=" in such situations. —ADavidB 19:07, 6 June 2009 (UTC)

Hi, thanks for your useful bot work. A minor observation: noticed today that SmackBot doesn't appear to know that {{Fact}} invites dummy parameters; I say this because those present in this appear to have caused SmackBot to see the pipe and assume a date was present. (I won't watch for a reply here but please use my talk page should you need to discuss.) PL290 (talk) 13:36, 8 June 2009 (UTC)

Template:Cat ASOF

I have added Category:Articles containing potentially dated statements to Wikipedia:List of monthly maintenance categories given month. Do you think I could nominate Template:Cat ASOF for deletion? Debresser (talk) 19:24, 6 June 2009 (UTC)

Guess it should be a soft redirect to Category:Articles containing potentially dated statements. Rich Farmbrough, 20:47, 9 June 2009 (UTC).

Should be migrated to {{Monthly cleanup category}}. Rich Farmbrough, 21:23, 9 June 2009 (UTC).

You mean you want to turn the monthly categories of Category:Articles containing potentially dated statements into categories that are standarised with {{Monthly cleanup category}}? You'll excuse me, I don't understand the word "migrating".

Will you take care of that? Debresser (talk) 21:49, 9 June 2009 (UTC)

Yes that is what I meant. But looking in more detail it may not be worth it , or it may be better for Cat ASOF to call {{Monthly cleanup category}}, since it has special code for its slightly special hierarchy. Rich Farmbrough, 22:02, 9 June 2009 (UTC).

I saw [[Category:Articles containing potentially dated statements {{#if:{{{2|}}}|from {{{1}}}{{!}} {{#ifexpr: {{{2}}} < 10|0}}{{MONTHNUMBER|{{{2}}}}}|{{!}} {{{1}}}}}]]. Nothing here that isn't regular in other maintenance categories. Or is there? That's why I thought we should delete it, after discussion, since no other maintenance category has a template to create its monthly categories, and Wikipedia:List of monthly maintenance categories given month can do the same (and I have actually added a line there with precisely that purpose). Debresser (talk) 22:26, 9 June 2009 (UTC)

YEs that's the bit that's puts it in the parent cat for the year. Basically it says if a month was specified then put it in the year cat. If not in the over-arching cat. Rich Farmbrough, 22:49, 9 June 2009 (UTC).

It does add a leading zero to the sort key, which is good when it's missed but f someone puts 09 it will become 009. This can be fixed with an #expr: in the right place. Rich Farmbrough, 22:56, 9 June 2009 (UTC).

I saw the use of <includeonly>...</includeonly> and <onlyinclude>...</onlyinclude> tags. I would have thought the page of Template:Cat ASOF should be empty, since all text is inside <onlyinclude>...</onlyinclude> tags. Nor do I understand the need for the <includeonly>...</includeonly> tags.

So the special thing is the automatic inclusion in the yearly category. Is that enough reason for a separate template? We regularly create monthly maintenance categories with Wikipedia:List of monthly maintenance categories given month and just paste the previous month's page with editing the month and year. This would be nothing else. Debresser (talk) 23:26, 9 June 2009 (UTC)

Template:Time context

I really appreciate it you update me about new templates, but in this case...

1. you can see in the history, that I made 2 recent edits to it, so it's likely I know about it.
2. the template does take a date, but does not use a dated category, so is not of direct interest to this standarising project of ours.

There are over 6700 articles in Category:Wikipedia articles needing context. Perhaps add a monthly category? Debresser (talk) 23:19, 6 June 2009 (UTC)

I would very much appreciate some direct reaction to the other points I mentioned above. And of course any further updates about templates with a dated category, or new progress on {{Article issues}} e.g. Debresser (talk) 22:38, 6 June 2009 (UTC) But

I did another datedAI yesterday. So only notability left. I have also updated the doc page you created a little.Rich Farmbrough, 16:14, 7 June 2009 (UTC).

So I see. Very nice. As soon as we make a little order in those categories that will allow for significant simplification. Did you notice who agreed to a template deletion proposal of mine, as well as to the category rename? Perhaps now you propose to rename one of the categories? Debresser (talk) 22:40, 7 June 2009 (UTC)

Template:Infobox German location

Hi Rich, I tried to update the above template so it can take account of the latest changes to fields in German Wikipedia (without throwing away the existing ones), but it's protected. How can I get it updated? --Bermicourt (talk) 18:45, 7 June 2009 (UTC)

Answered on user's talk page. Rich Farmbrough, 18:48, 7 June 2009 (UTC).

Smackbot problem

Everytime it edits savant syndrome a cite error occurs.--125.14.233.56 (talk) 07:41, 8 June 2009 (UTC)

Clean up "et al."

I'm not sure why "et al." is preferred over "et al", however here is one case where it is not correct: this edit broke a template that has "et al" in its name. I must say that use of the template seems very odd to me, but I restored it (I was there replacing linkspam). This is just FYI, no need to reply. Johnuniq (talk) 10:54, 8 June 2009 (UTC)

listas

Please do not do this, it makes work for other people to fix. Gurch (talk) 19:08, 8 June 2009 (UTC)

Sorry about that I avoided most of the bands. Rich Farmbrough, 22:48, 8 June 2009 (UTC).

Or to be more accurate gave them a correct listas. Rich Farmbrough, 22:48, 8 June 2009 (UTC).

Minor Smackbot problem

Hi Rich,

A couple of days back, in this edit to Mono (software) SmackBot changed the wikilink to mod_mono to one for mod mono. Normally this would be the correct edit, but the name of the package and thus the page really does have the underscore in the name.

Can you add this as a special case to the bot's edit rules please?

Thanks Kiore (talk) 06:36, 9 June 2009 (UTC)

Bishampton

Thanks for your recent clean up of this Bishampton article. This tiny village stub has been subject to constant vandalism since it was created. The various IPs are probably used by one person. If you have time, could you too please continue to help the Worcestershire project team keep an eye on it. Thanks.--Kudpung (talk) 09:57, 9 June 2009 (UTC)

SmackBot bug

In this edit[106], SmackBot destroyed the "year" unnamed parameter of template:update after. Furthermore, the "date" parameter it inserted is completely bogus, the template was put in the article already in March[107]. — Emil J. 13:49, 9 June 2009 (UTC)

Yes not good. Steps taken to stop it happening. Rich Farmbrough, 20:45, 9 June 2009 (UTC).

Infobox Software

It might have been better to discuss the move [108] on the talk page for {{Infobox Software}} ahead of time so it could have instead been done at the same time as the next update of the template itself. Now ~1,100+ cached pages have to be needlessly rebuilt since the template was changed. Tothwolf (talk) 20:39, 9 June 2009 (UTC)

Hey Tothwolf. Thanks for your message. I wouldn't worry , 1,100 is nothing to the job queue. Rich Farmbrough, 20:45, 9 June 2009 (UTC).

Yeah, but still, this is the time of day the servers tend to get overloaded anyway... Tothwolf (talk) 21:09, 9 June 2009 (UTC)

Outline collaboration!

As you know, Penubag is working on a banner to advertise the Outline WikiProject. And he's almost done.

The banner prominently presents the "Outline of chocolate", which of course will become the most widely advertised outline as soon as the banner goes live. The first thing many editors will do after seeing the banner is look for that outline.

The problem is, we don't have one.

So that's our first outline collaboration!

I started a draft this morning.

It needs to be finished and moved to the article namespace before we can start using Penubag's banner ad!

Come join in on the fun. It's chocolate!

The Transhumanist 22:00, 9 June 2009 (UTC)

That Was Quick

I went back to correct the Newburgh Enlarged City School District as soon as I could get back to the computer, and you had already done it. Thank you. nbhtownclerk —Preceding unsigned comment added by Nghtownclerk (talk • contribs) 00:58, 11 June 2009 (UTC)

Technical

Template:Technical is made especially for talk pages. Nevertheless there are some (<75) instances where it is used in articles. I propose moving it from the articles to their talk pages. Could SmackBot do that? Do you think {{Cleanup-jargon}} should be added to the articles instead? If it's too much trouble for the bot, I can always do it with AWB.Debresser (talk) 21:32, 4 June 2009 (UTC)

I've replaced all instances in articles by {{Technical (expert)}}. Could you program SmackBot to do this automatically in the future, please? Debresser (talk) 10:08, 5 June 2009 (UTC)

Your edit to this template causes it to be invisible on the template page. Which makes it a little hard to know what it looks like. Debresser (talk) 14:47, 11 June 2009 (UTC)

Technical (expert)

Now Template:Technical (expert) is not made for talk pages, but the documentation claims it should be put only on talk pages. It is in use one 20 tak pages and 10 articles, which seems to show that I am not the only one with this opinion. My proposal is to delete that line from the documentation page and move all of them to the articles. Debresser (talk) 21:48, 4 June 2009 (UTC)

It even caries a category Article message boxes. So I removed that line. I replaced all transclusions on talkpages by Template:Technical. Could you program SmackBot to do this automatically in the future, please? Debresser (talk) 09:46, 5 June 2009 (UTC)

OK what I propose is merging the templates. I mocked this up in userspace. Um I'll look for it later. Rich Farmbrough, 19:59, 9 June 2009 (UTC).

Merge a talkpage template with an article template?? Debresser (talk) 20:28, 9 June 2009 (UTC)

I've reverted Debresser's removal of the talk page requirement. This has been the consensus for a long time. The template is the same as the technical template but with the expert request added. So the same reasoning that puts the technical template on the talk page applies. I don't know where Debresser got the idea that one template goes on the talk page and the other doesn't. It's contrary to what is written in the guideline for the templates. (I also reworded the template to match the wording of the technical template which more accurately reflects the guideline and people seem to be ok with)--C S (talk) 13:25, 11 June 2009 (UTC)

After some heated discussion C S understood that my reason was the word "ambox", which he promtly changed to "tmbox". I personally think it should stay an article namespace template, but if it will be a talkpage template, then so be it. It is not the same as {{technical}} in that it asks for expert attention as well. So I don't know whether a merge would be a good idea.Debresser (talk) 14:37, 11 June 2009 (UTC)

I've revived this discussion here, adding a new proposal. Debresser (talk) 20:01, 11 June 2009 (UTC)

SmackBot

In this edit I noticed your bot is doing what you have been reprimanded for doing on wp:AWB, namely removing the whitespaces in headers. Since there is no reason to do so, and Wikipedia default is otherwise (and I personally agree with that as being more clear), please tell the bot not to do this. Debresser (talk) 21:39, 11 June 2009 (UTC)

Waiting for reply

1. #Technical
2. #Template:Cat ASOF

Debresser (talk) 16:21, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

The Fountains

Hi - Regarding The Fountains I added a PROD to it; it is totally unreferenced and it needs sources to show notability and verifiability. WhisperToMe (talk) 00:56, 13 June 2009 (UTC)

SmackBot

Hi RIck - boy, your bot is quick :) - I was in the middle of making a change to 59th (2nd_Nottinghamshire) Regiment of Foot (changing it from being merely a recursive redirect into a slightly informative stub (hm.. I should find out how to put in the 'Stub' notice) when it put it back to the original. Cheers, Csalmon (talk) 01:32, 13 June 2009 (UTC)

SmackBot broke Infobox

Hi, I would like to report a problem with Smackbot. It recently broke the infobox on Republic of China by removing a "<br/>" tag (or maybe by replacing it by a line break) from the "footnote" field. See this edit. Laurent (talk) 15:17, 13 June 2009 (UTC)

Rename proposal

1. Rename Category:Cleanup by month to Category:Wikipedia cleanup by month to fit the name of the parent category Category:Wikipedia cleanup. (Analogously for the monthly subcategories, from Category:Cleanup from ... to Category:Wikipedia cleanup from ...)
2. Rename Wikify from ... to Category:Articles that need to be wikified from ... to fit the name of parent category Category:Articles that need to be wikified.
3. Rename Category:Category needed to Category:Uncategorized to fit the monthly categories Category:Uncategorized from ....
4. Rename Category:Articles to be split to Category:Wikipedia articles to be split to fit the names of the monthly categories. Or the other way around, whatever.

• Rationale. Most maintenance categories (not including those that are a subcategory of another maintenance category) follow the logical rule of format that the dated and undated category name differ only in "name"/"name from ....". This can be verified on this page. Extending this principle to the abovementioned categories is logical and clarifying, improves Wikipedia housestyle and simplifies template programming considerably.
• Note. This is not the place and the time to discuss the preferability of the word "since"/"from". That discussion will have to be delayed until after the simplifying of the template-category interaction has been finished, of which this proposal is an integral part. Frankly, I wouldn't have though it necessary to bring trivial and obvious improvements like these to a discussion, but recent misunderstanding have prompted some response and discussion has become recommendable. Nevertheless, I hope we can keep the discussion minimal and come to a speedy agree here. Debresser (talk) 20:15, 31 May 2009 (UTC)

OK I suggest

• getting rid of "Wikipedia" as proposed at the naming convention page by me, and elsewhere by W.A.S. and others.
• All should conform to one of the four standards - just one, not a choice form four:

1. Articles to be fooed
2. Pages to be fooed
3. Articles needing to be fooed
4. Pages needing to be fooed

Any all-encompassing cats should then be

1. All articles/pages to be/needing to be fooed

And the daughter cats named appropriately.

Rich Farmbrough, 20:15, 1 June 2009 (UTC).

This proposal of yours is a change to present guidelines, see point 2 here. Just taking notice.

Wikipedia_talk:Naming_conventions_(categories)#Update_administrateve_categories_section Rich Farmbrough, 22:06, 1 June 2009 (UTC).

I would not mind it if such a proposal were to be accepted, but myself feel fine with different standards for different categories. But, there should be uniformity within each category. Which brings me to the following point.

For the sake of simplifying {{DatedAI}} and {tl|Article issues}} it will be a big step forward to reach this last condition: uniformity within each category. This is what my proposal is about. You do not think it is a good and realistic proposal? Debresser (talk) 21:09, 1 June 2009 (UTC)

OK here's the thing. DatedAI and Article issues don't really matter much, because they are largely done. What it is useful for is for new work "going forward". E.G progress box should' just work with {Progress box|descriptor}}, but I had to build in special case handling. There are ways around it, for example reading the list of categories I made gives you the structure and you could automatically do stuff from there. Trouble is every non-canonical usage breaks a tool - the option to fix the tool is path of least resistance - 20 minutes coding vs. submitting proposals, or renaming stuff and getting jumped on by those who WP:DONTLIKEIT - but if it isn't fixed the next tool someone makes will also break, and one's own tool will be more complex and likely to break too. Moreover people will find stuff harder to "guess" - like infobox names. Rich Farmbrough, 22:06, 1 June 2009 (UTC).

OK I just lost a long comment - possibly edit conflict. Rich Farmbrough, 22:26, 1 June 2009 (UTC).

Don't close the page until after you see your edit has been processed. That's what I always do. Debresser (talk) 11:18, 3 June 2009 (UTC)

I have no problem with what you say. I would even support it. Still, in my opinion the simplification and symmetry that can be obtained by "just" obtaining uniformity within each category is very attractive and more easily obtainable. In my vision, this is a project that works in steps: each step obtaining additional standarisation. I know you agree with me in this respect, generally. I think my proposal is the next logical step. If you think otherwise, I shall wait for your steps, and hope you won't overstep. Debresser (talk) 23:05, 1 June 2009 (UTC)

BTW, it is not only about {{DatedAI}} and {{Article issues}}, but also about all templates that sort into these three categories, that can not use ({{Fix}} or) {{DMCA}} unless the categories are uniformised. Debresser (talk) 23:33, 1 June 2009 (UTC)

I think I want to make that proposal. Do you have any advice. What and how to say or not to say? Debresser (talk) 11:18, 3 June 2009 (UTC)

I made the first proposal. By way of test. See Wikipedia:Categories_for_discussion/Log/2009_June_4#Category:Articles_to_be_split. Debresser (talk) 23:57, 4 June 2009 (UTC)

In view of what I think will be the success of the first nomination, I now nominated a seond one here. Debresser (talk) 16:09, 8 June 2009 (UTC)

Since a certain uncivil editor has reacted to this last nomination by bringing an example from Category:CfD 2009-06 I have nominated that category for renaming to Category:Categories for discussion from June 2009, see Wikipedia:Categories_for_discussion/Log/2009_June_9#Category:CfD_2009-06. Debresser (talk) 17:35, 9 June 2009 (UTC)

I have informed all that have been part of the previous discussions. The opponents have shown up right away. I have refuted their argumetns with ease. Now I'm waiting for a few proponents. It was nice that the first reaction was positive. Debresser (talk) 18:50, 9 June 2009 (UTC)

Discussion is fierce. But to the point. Interesting. The discussion at Wikipedia:Categories_for_discussion/Log/2009_June_4#Category:Articles_to_be_split will be closed soon. I think it will be closed on the alternative. Which is fine with me. Shall I go ahead and create those pages, or should I wait? Debresser (talk) 09:03, 10 June 2009 (UTC)

Once it has closed. Rich Farmbrough, 16:13, 12 June 2009 (UTC).

I feel I can use some support at Wikipedia:Categories_for_discussion/Log/2009_June_9#Category:CfD_2009-06. Debresser (talk) 23:55, 10 June 2009 (UTC)

Another concern of mine is that the closing admin of most discussions is one who does not seems to overly appreciate my proposals. Do you have any good ideas? Debresser (talk) 23:59, 10 June 2009 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Categories_for_discussion/Log/2009_June_8#Category:Wikify_from_June_2009 needs some more opinions. Debresser (talk) 01:05, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

Ok I'll try and get there . Rich Farmbrough, 16:13, 12 June 2009 (UTC).

And please have a look at Category_talk:Pages_for_discussion as well. Debresser (talk) 01:05, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

Sure. Rich Farmbrough, 16:13, 12 June 2009 (UTC).

Wikipedia:Categories_for_discussion/Log/2009_June_4#Category:Articles_to_be_split is the only entry on the page that isn't closed yet. Although all 3 editors have agreed on the alternative. Please also don't forget to add your opinion to Wikipedia:Categories_for_discussion/Log/2009_June_8#Category:Wikify_from_June_2009 and Wikipedia:Categories_for_discussion/Log/2009_June_9#Category:CfD_2009-06. Debresser (talk) 06:20, 14 June 2009 (UTC)

Great! Now WAS came back and "suddenly" changed his mind about that nomination that wasn't closed. Why wasn't it closed yesterday??? (frustration) Debresser (talk) 12:47, 14 June 2009 (UTC)

You made the right decision there. Audacious. All templates and categories done. Debresser (talk) 13:56, 14 June 2009 (UTC)

Minor error

You moved the external links section to a wrong place here. Just to let you know. Happy editing, Spencer^{T♦Nominate!} 23:06, 13 June 2009 (UTC)

"orphan"

Concerning this edit: The only pages in the article space linking to that article are two topics lists and a redirect page (if you click on "what links here", one of the two topics lists appears twice, with two different names, but it's actually only one list). Doesn't that qualify it as an "orphan"? Michael Hardy (talk) 00:11, 14 June 2009 (UTC)

Well technically it is an orphan, no doubt. The important question for this article is, is there somewhere it should link from. Else the tag is redundant. The next question is whether, in general AWB should spot and ignore lists in it's count, an it should. Slightly more deeply I have reservation on the concept of orphaned articles being useful. Rich Farmbrough, 03:38, 14 June 2009 (UTC).

There very probably are articles that should link to this one, among those on statistics and those on epidemiology, and perhaps some on scientific experiments.

Do you mean that you have reservations about whether it is useful to label orphans as orphans? Or about whether the articles themselves are useful? If the former, the point would seem to be to call them to the attention of those who might know what links should be added. Michael Hardy (talk) 03:57, 14 June 2009 (UTC)

LegoBot reverting your changes

I noticed this at Copthorne, West Sussex. User:Smackbot made these changes. otherplaces3 template moved to the top and Mid Sussex template moved above the categories. Almost immediately, User:Legobot reverted them. I do not know who is right, I am just bringing it to your attention. MortimerCat (talk) 08:33, 14 June 2009 (UTC)

Thanks. SmackBot is "right" but this is just an edit conflict, not a reversion as such. Rich Farmbrough, 14:29, 14 June 2009 (UTC).

Reflist

In the two days I've been out of editing there have appeared 140 articles in Category:Pages with missing references list. This is about the daily average, which I estimate to be close to 80. This is clearly too much for any editor to fix on a daily basis, and I am pretty much fed up with it. Do you have any ideas? BTW, as to my questions and remarks above. Debresser (talk) 22:23, 30 May 2009 (UTC)

Together with another user we once fixed over a thousand of them. We even awarded each other a Barnstar for that. For what unexplicable reason did SmackBot stop fixing this? In my experience, over 80% of the cases are either new articles or old articles receiving their first references and can be fixed by a bot adding a references section. The other articles, where e.g. a references section exists but was rendered inactive by a remark or reference tag without a closing remark or reference tag, can be fixed manually afterwards. That is because I do that anyway, but the numbers will be a lot more reasonable. Debresser (talk) 22:37, 30 May 2009 (UTC)

Does that mean that from now on SmackBot will try to fix this error category? There are now only 30 articles left. That would mean some 10-20 per day. That I can handle. Debresser (talk) 00:12, 31 May 2009 (UTC)

Oh, I just remembered something. Please make SmackBot fix only the articles, not anything else showing up here. We also have templates, category pages and help pages here, but those I prefer to fix manually. Debresser (talk) 00:22, 31 May 2009 (UTC)

The category is filled with over 60 articles. What's with SmackBot? Debresser (talk) 23:38, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

Ah well the secret is it is not completely a bot, it needs to be manually started. And this applies to every run of every task. And despite appearances to the contrary I have other things in my life than Wikipedia. Rich Ffarmbrough, 11:07, 3 June 2009 (UTC).

I had no doubt. But your "secret" really comes as a surprise to me. Why is that? Your bot is one of the most active and helpfull around (if not the most). Debresser (talk) 11:13, 3 June 2009 (UTC)

Do you have a certain time of the day you run this reflist fixed? I'm asking because I saw 40 articles again today, and I'd rather fix 15 after you run it. Debresser (talk) 01:29, 8 June 2009 (UTC)

There were 31 "problem" articles at that time . I run it by noon probably. And I re-run it several times a day, because all I have to do is click a couple buttons. But on m,y to-do list is auto running. Rich Farmbrough, 20:01, 9 June 2009 (UTC).

Iwas very suprised your bot doesn't auto-run. Debresser (talk) 20:29, 9 June 2009 (UTC)

Are you still running this fix? Please don't forget it. Why isn't it automated? Debresser (talk) 21:40, 14 June 2009 (UTC)

I use AWB. It requires at least two mouse clicks to set it off, eventually I might fix this. Rich Farmbrough, 23:05, 14 June 2009 (UTC).

We have lots of street cats here in Israel. Perhaps send you one? To set the mouse in motion. :) Debresser (talk) 23:33, 14 June 2009 (UTC)

Naming conventions for Wikipedia categories

The Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (categories) had recently been updated with a pretense of reflecting consensus on a subject discussion you initiated. But in fact it did not reflect consensus at all, but rather the opinion of the specific editor making that change. In this edit I changed that section to reflect consensus and reason. Debresser (talk) 02:23, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

Who would believe it? Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard/Edit_warring#William_Allen_Simpson_reported_by_User:Debresser_.28Result:_.29

BTW, see also User_talk:Aervanath#Advice_needed for some more things this editor is doing without consensus. Debresser (talk) 13:41, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

See also this edit of mine. :) Debresser (talk) 16:36, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

Hi. Could you please have a look at Wikipedia_talk:Naming_conventions_(categories)#Update_administrative_categories_section and tell me if my behavior in this conflict has been as it should be? Please also advice me what to do if William_Allen_Simpson will return to making these changes of his. If you please write me on my talkpage? Debresser (talk) 18:25, 13 June 2009 (UTC)

The page has been protected. See the end of User_talk:William_Allen_Simpson. To help resolve the stranded discussion, perhaps you could return to the discussion? Debresser (talk) 14:14, 14 June 2009 (UTC)

In the beginning the protected verion was the one last edited by me. Now it has been reverted to a version of about half a year ago, with the contested text which was added 2 1/2 years ago by WAS. I have a feeling WAS will not be in a hurry to comply with the expressed wish of the protecting admin to discuss. Debresser (talk) 16:32, 14 June 2009 (UTC)

BTW, Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard/Incidents#User:William_Allen_Simpson. Debresser (talk) 21:54, 14 June 2009 (UTC)

Template:DMC & Template:DMCA

Can you please explain what these names stand for? This doesn't appear to be documented anywhere, and the question was raised at Template talk:DMCA. (Like Jack Merridew, I immediately thought of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.) Thanks! —David Levy 20:51, 14 June 2009 (UTC)

Smackbot

Changing {{main|}} to {{Main|}} is not necessary, and defies a certain convention of using lowercase for template tags. -Stevertigo 21:02, 15 June 2009 (UTC)

Re: Your recent edits to Template:Technical

Can you fix it so that the template itself (not just the docs) is actually visible when you view the template page? So people can know what the template actually looks like? Like in Template:Technical (expert), you can still see the tmbox.. know what I mean? -- œ^™ 02:31, 16 June 2009 (UTC)

Yes. Rich Farmbrough, 15:09, 16 June 2009 (UTC).

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Last categories done

You can delete all categories with "since" in Category:Articles with unsourced statements and Category:Articles to be expanded by month.

• You may want to add Template:Transreq to your bot. Could you fix the category part in it? It seems real bugged. Debresser (talk) 23:01, 15 June 2009 (UTC)

• You may want to remove Template:English source from the bot, since it has been deleted after a Tfc. Debresser (talk) 23:32, 15 June 2009 (UTC)

The discussion at Wikipedia:Categories_for_discussion/Log/2009_June_8#Category:Wikify_from_June_2009 is near its closure and you have not yet expressed your opinion. I'd strongly ask you to do so. Debresser (talk) 08:50, 16 June 2009 (UTC)

Too late: closed as "no consensus". What now? Mind you, this may happen to tomorrows closure also, if you don't help out. Debresser (talk) 15:23, 16 June 2009 (UTC)

I asked to closing editor to reconsider and relist it becase only 2 editors had replied. Debresser (talk) 15:26, 16 June 2009 (UTC)

Your closure of the discussion at Wikipedia:Categories_for_discussion/Log/2009_June_4#Category:Articles_to_be_split has been reverted in this edit. Debresser (talk) 12:36, 16 June 2009 (UTC)

Rich? Debresser (talk) 19:38, 16 June 2009 (UTC)

DMC/A

{{DMCA}} and {{DMC}} were merged and renamed. I wrote on the talkpage that I was not in favor of the rename. Was the merge correctly executed? It was done by an editor whom I know as an expert in templates, but you never know. Debresser (talk) 13:13, 16 June 2009 (UTC)

Yes I'm happy enough with this. I'm not keep on cryptic template names when other people do it. And bringing them together is good to, it reduces maintenance. I would be thinking about DMCAT which I had in mind for article and talk pages, and hence generalising, but this can be done when it is needed. Rich Farmbrough, 13:35, 16 June 2009 (UTC).

Ok. Since the merge was technically correct, then in my opinion that is a big unification. The name though is another case: a lot too long to be attractive for a template name. Debresser (talk) 14:45, 16 June 2009 (UTC)

On the one hand it's only used by a handful of people, so cryptic is less of a problem, on the other it's only used in a handful of places so long is less of a problem. But the abbreviations still work. Rich Farmbrough, 15:11, 16 June 2009 (UTC).

I agree. I wrote on the talk page there that I am now in doubt how they work. Could you help out with a short explanation there? Debresser (talk) 15:21, 16 June 2009 (UTC)

The merging editor explained, and I understood. I extensively updated the documentation page. Debresser (talk) 19:37, 16 June 2009 (UTC)

SmackBot question

Why did SmackBot remove my wikify tag here? Who then was a gentleman? (talk) 17:29, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

It is part of WP:AWB general fixes or tagging. I don't know the metric used, but the article has an infobox, links, headers and categories. Rich Farmbrough, 17:44, 17 June 2009 (UTC).

But it needed a lot more. Oh, well. Who then was a gentleman? (talk) 17:51, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

Oxford Leadership Academy

Hi, regarding the article Oxford Leadership Academy, we have been attempting to simply provide information about our company in a non promotional way but have had tags placed on the page. We have referred to similar articles eg McKinsey & Company and tried to compose the article in a similar way. we would very much appreciate some guidance on what should be added or removed in order to meet your criteria, so interested wikipedia users can find useful background info on the company and it's history. I look forward to your reply.Strategy2009 (talk) 21:15, 18 June 2009 (UTC)

Outline update - Full Steam Ahead! - 06/18/2009

Several members of the WikiProject have been hard at work.

Buaidh has been building and refining the outlines on the U.S. States, the states' historical outlines, and the Historical outline of the United States. Lately, his edits have dominated the project's watchlist readout. (I think he's overdue for a barnstar or two. hint hint)

Penubag has been working on medals for all the main branches of the OOK, and has completed the OOK WikiProject's animated advert banner (see below).

Highfields has been filling in the currencies for each country on their respective outlines.

NuclearWarfare and Thehelpfulone have been busy with WP:AWB, posting banners and notices, and helping our sister project, the Index WikiProject, get established. Indexes work hand-in-hand with the outlines and are prominently linked to from the top of most of them. And the outlines, which serve as tables of contents, are only as good as the pages they link to.

Since we started integrating (linking) the OOK and its support pages into the encyclopedia and into the Wikipedia community, activity on outlines has been increasing. Though there's still much left to do.

But I digress. There are a couple more...

Welcome our new members! Stefan and MacMed

Stefan is building the Outline of sharks.

MacMed has joined our advanced wiki-tools team, and is currently adding links to outlines in the corresponding subject articles' see also sections.

Be sure to stop by their talk pages and say "hi".

WPOOK's advert banner has gone live!

Penubag has finished this WikiProject's animated advert banner, and it is now being displayed on the Wikipedia ads template which in turn is displayed on about 2000 user pages. Each time someone access one of those pages, there is a 1 in 184 chance of them viewing this:

Wikipedia ads	file info – #184

If you'd like to display the banner on your userpage locked-on to the ad as above, use the following code:

{{Wikipedia ads|ad=184}}

(By the way, it's been awhile since we've barnstarred Penubag).

Watchers needed!

If you haven't already, please add the entire project's watchlist to your watchlist. Here's how:

From the edit window, copy and paste Wikipedia:WikiProject Outline of knowledge/Watchlist into your raw watchlist.

Or go to Wikipedia:WikiProject Outline of knowledge/Watchlist using Related changes and click on "Related changes" in the toolbox menu in Wikipedia's sidebar on the left hand side of the screen.

Check the watchlist every time you log on!

I forgot to mention this step above.  :)

The OOK is in 5 other Wikipedias?

I can't make heads or tails of 'em, but these links were on Portal:Contents/Outline of knowledge:

• ar:ويكيبيديا:مواضيع أساسية
• fa:پورتال:فهرست موضوعات پایه
• pl:Przegląd dziedzin wiedzy
• pt:Portal:Conteúdo/Esboço do conhecimento
• zh-yue:基礎課題表清單

Resurrected from the grave yard...

I discovered an AfD discussion on possibly the first article named "Outline of", which was called Outline of Islamic and Muslim related topics, and which was created 4 years ago. Of course they deleted it. But now it has many friends, and so it has risen from the dead.  :)

See the DRV discussion at Wikipedia:Deletion review/Log/2009 June 7#Outline of Islamic and Muslim related topics.

A diamond buried in project space

• When G716 found the page "Learn" tucked away as a subpage of the Probability WikiProject, he thought "This deserves to be in the article space", and moved it to the encyclopedia. See Outline of probability.

Recruiting

Recruiters needed. Drop me a note if you are interested.

Advice from the mentors

• Astatine-210, Strdst grl, and Willscrlt - link to the outlines from the corresponding subject articles' see also sections - this is underway by MacMed (non-country outlines) and User talk:NuclearWarfare (counry outlines).
• Astatine-210 - add a link to the outlines to the disambiguation pages of the corresponding subjects - good idea. Since "Outline" is just the type of page, not the subject, I think these might qualify for inclusion on disambiguation pages. We need someone to look into the relevant guidelines on this.
• SimonTrew - provide a badge (userbox) for WPOOK members to add to their user pages - Penubag will have one for us soon.
• Zachary crimsonwolf - create a card explaining outlines, and send it to everyone you know, and make it viral (by including a request for the recipients to send the card to everyone they know) - this task has been split in three:

1. Creation of a "thank you for your interest" card which introduces (explains) outlines, to send to queriers, new participants to discussions, those who seem to be confused about outlines, etc.
2. Creation of a thank you card / invitation to the WPOOK, to send to users we see working on outlines, including a request for them to invite others whom they think might be interested

• weebiloobil - contact Wikignomes - OK...

3. Creation of an invitation to Wikignomes, with a brief rundown on the types of tasks there are for them to do on the outlines. The invitation will include a request for them to invite anyone they think would enjoy working on outlines.

• weebiloobil - add examples to Wikipedia:Outlines - more examples will be added as suitable outlines are completed
• weebiloobil - add a picture to Wikipedia:Outlines (it doesn't have to be relevant), to provide atmosphere and to break it up visually and add a splash of color - will do, and we'll add a caption to make it relevant, with a link to the outline on that subject. Thank you for the idea.
• Zachary crimsonwolf - ask Jimbo Wales to bestow the award(s) for the country outlines contest, once you get it going first - we'll give that a try
• Zachary crimsonwolf - ask everyone in the project to inform their acquaintances around Wikipedia about the OOK - will do, as soon as the cards
• UzEE - collaborate with all the WikiProjects you share scope with - we've placed a banner on their talk pages, and have placed task notices on some. We'll be posting more tasks, and plan to create a section on contents system development and maintenance for each WikiProject page itself.
• SriMesh - if you can't get outlines added to next year's WikiCup, then create your own WikiCup-like contest - there's 6 months left to this year to address reservations and work out the details at WikiCup. In the meantime, there's the 200-WikiProject contest, which needs input.

More outline tasks

• Wikipedia:WikiProject Outline of knowledge/Drafts/Outline of chocolate draft - our current outline collaboration!
• Outline of psychology - someone moved a big chunk of this article to the talk page, leaving a big gap in the outline. Editors are needed to add subheadings and links.
• See also links - add {{main|Outline of x}} (where "x" is the subject) to the see also section of the corresponding subject article of each outline

New outlines in article space

• Outline of sharks - under construction in article space
• Outline of Hinduism (converted from "List of Hinduism-related topics")

New outline drafts

• Outline of chocolate
• Outline of Christianity

Main discussion pages

• Wikipedia talk:Outlines
• Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Outline of knowledge
• Portal talk:Contents/Outline of knowledge

Keep up the great work

I'm impressed with the level of enthusiasm and work going into the outlines. I'm proud to be working with each of you.

The Transhumanist 23:23, 18 June 2009 (UTC)

Error caused by general fix

Hello Rich Farmbrough, a recent edit you made to Sag Harbor, New York caused a disambiguation template to appear as normal text, rather than in its proper format. Your change deleted one of the braces ( { ) that appeared before otheruses4. The error has been fixed without reverting your other changes. Thanks. --JBC3 (talk) 09:26, 19 June 2009 (UTC)

Hi, I also spotted this same error with your edits to Pretoria, Oklahoma City and Managua, and I corrected them. Tassedethe (talk) 12:13, 19 June 2009 (UTC)

Thanks I will review the all my edits for this error. Rich Farmbrough, 16:55, 19 June 2009 (UTC).

Hello again Rich, another edit, this time to Glens Falls, New York, changed the order of consecutive refs such that, had I not caught it, the wrong ref would appear to be a deadlink. I checked most recent batch of the (many!) general fixes you made, and in all but this one I found no problems! Take care. --JBC3 (talk) 11:15, 21 June 2009 (UTC)

Adding nbsp?

Not sure if this is intended, and I figure it's easily reversed if it isn't, so I won't stop your bot. It's putting the nbsp; space in between units of measure and their abbreviation, ie: 50$nbsp;km. Seems unnecessary, perhaps it's from trying to make sure there's a space. Looks fine on the outside but my guess is that it's not optimal, so there you are. - BalthCat (talk) 11:55, 20 June 2009 (UTC)

Durr, diff - BalthCat (talk) 11:56, 20 June 2009 (UTC)

fyi

something went wrong here. 66.57.4.17 (talk) 04:06, 22 June 2009 (UTC)

Answered on user's talk page. Rich Farmbrough, 05:10, 23 June 2009 (UTC).

Magelang

Is a city - http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Magelang&diff=298044631&oldid=297897195 and the reason for settlement? SatuSuro 02:48, 23 June 2009 (UTC)

You have changed a considerable number of genuine Indonesian city articles city templates to 'settlement' (ugh) - any reason? SatuSuro 04:57, 23 June 2009 (UTC)

Answered on user's talk page. Rich Farmbrough, 05:09, 23 June 2009 (UTC).

Fair enough - recent views of large awb edits wandering through the Indonesian project leave me sceptical and nervous - no offence to your work - just checking :) SatuSuro 06:49, 23 June 2009 (UTC)

Could you please explain further...

Could you please explain why you added a Europeanized listas parameter to Abdullah Kamel Abdullah Kamel Al Kandari?

Was this based on the advice of a robot assisted editing tool?

I am sorry to tell you that there are some robot assisted editing tools that routinely recommend Europeanized listas parameters for individuals where it is highly inappropriate. It is a maintenance nightmare, as it will be a lot more work to clean up after these rogue bots as it would be if the robot assisted editing tools stuck to the tasks which can be done by robots, and let humans figure out things that require human oversight.

Individuals with Arabic names should almost never have their name shoehorned into the European style of inherited lastname-surnames.

Over and above the problems with Arabic names, if you look at the Abdullah Kamel Abdullah Kamel Al Kandari article you will see that the DoD transliterated his name over half a dozen different ways.

I regard this as a very serious problem. I'd appreciate help getting the authors of these bots to be more humble and responsible in the tasks they try to make their bots tackle.

Thanks! Geo Swan (talk) 02:54, 23 June 2009 (UTC)

Humble is good. From memory , probably this one was due to Abdullah being a a name widely sued in the West as well as the East. I can review all the Abdullahs, probably only a few thousand. The obvious thing is to compare the DEFAULTSORT and the Listas, that will be done at some point. Rich Farmbrough, 05:07, 23 June 2009 (UTC).

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Cites

This could just be me but SmackBot seems to be going through articles reversing the order of cites. I always put them in the order information appears but I realise there might be some rule I'm not aware of. Here's an example anyway, would be good to know either way A Rush of Blood to the Head‎ Cavie78 (talk) 18:00, 23 June 2009 (UTC)

Answered on user's talk page. Rich Farmbrough, 18:24, 23 June 2009 (UTC).

Is this necessary?

Are edits like this really necessary? PC78 (talk) 22:57, 23 June 2009 (UTC)

Basically yes, but fundamentally no. SB was responding to the OR template, which had been removed. It could ignore white space only changes but that would mean fixes like date=June2009 => date=June 2009 would be skipped. Rich Farmbrough, 00:18, 24 June 2009 (UTC).

I finally got to whack somebody with a trout!

That was fun.  :)

The Transhumanist 23:58, 23 June 2009 (UTC)

Bug: moving {{Portal}} from the "External links" to the "See also"

When was smack bot approved to move {{Portal}} links from the "External links" to the "See also"?[109] WP:LAYOUT made the statement that the "See also" section is the "best place" for these links, but the guideline was not being absolute. For example, in the article Global warming, with the added portals links, the two templates hang into "Notes" section, disrupting the CSS dynamic columns.[110] ChyranandChloe (talk) 05:17, 24 June 2009 (UTC)

WP:LAYOUT is right. These are not external links. The WikiBooks link under See Also, however, is an external link. Rich Farmbrough, 05:27, 24 June 2009 (UTC).

So when was smackbot approved to preform this operation? It feels like the bot is overstepping. WP:LAYOUT says its the "best place" for the portals links, it does not mandate that is has to be held there. I agree thought, use the {{Portalbox}} instead. It remains silent on {{Wikipedia-Books}} until the project matures, it's more half and half, the pdf download is still on-wiki, however to buy the print is not. It's reasonable though. Images come after the navigation links (e.g. {{Main}} and {{Seealso}}), this is because placing them before would confuse screen readers as it would oddly read the image captions then the navigational links. Slow down Rick, and discuss it first. ChyranandChloe (talk) 05:54, 24 June 2009 (UTC)

It's a minor clean-up that is part of WP:AWB general fixes. The reason the image comes before the Main (which might be better as Detail) and See also is to improve layout. Change it back if you don't like it but it seems silly to break layout for everyone in order to preserve ordering for screen readers. The Sister link already includes a wikibook link, to Climate change -- maybe you could swap them around. Or if the wikibook is not complete then comment out the link to it. We would not link to any other half-book. Rich Farmbrough, 06:04, 24 June 2009 (UTC).

WP:ACCESS mandates in "Section structure" that images go below the navigational links. Currently this concept is supported by WP:LEAD, which used to be a part of WP:LAYOUT until they deferred it.[111] How does it break layout? It sounds to me that you did it out of personal preference, in addition to disparaging to those on screen readers. Support you claim, because to say "silly to break layout for everyone" sounds very dubious.

There is a difference between the sister project Wikibooks and Wikipedia:Books. Wikipedia:Books are pdfs generated from articles on Wikipedia. They are compiled on Wiki, which removes it from being purely an external link. It's half and half because in addition allowing readers to download books, it also allows readers to purchase prints from the German company Pediapress. I swapped the two around using the "logical progression from on-wiki to off-wiki information" clause from WP:LAYOUT's entry to WP:PEREN.[112]

I'm approved to use AWB,[113] and you can turn off that feature. I'm looking for the bot approvals page. Your response fails to be satisfactory. Look, I know what you did was in good faith, but you're starting to sound tired. See you tomorrow. ChyranandChloe (talk) 06:41, 24 June 2009 (UTC)

Really this isn't a big deal. The graphic flowed into the next section, which was your gripe about having the portals there to begin with. Since you like quoting WP: space take your pick of WP:IAR and WP:SOFIXIT. Rich Farmbrough, 06:46, 24 June 2009 (UTC).

Template:Infobox_settlementIT

In recent edits to articles on Italian municipalities you have been changing {{Infobox CityIT}} into {{Infobox_settlementIT}}, which does not exist. (See Special:WhatLinksHere/Template:Infobox_settlementIT for a list)

Would you mind reverting? Thanks. Ian Spackman (talk) 07:38, 24 June 2009 (UTC)

Of course. Rich Farmbrough, 07:41, 24 June 2009 (UTC).

Done. Rich Farmbrough, 07:55, 24 June 2009 (UTC).

Great! Thanks, Ian Spackman (talk) 09:48, 24 June 2009 (UTC)

myasthenia gravis

Wot up hommie G. I edited myasthenia gravis page by adding cholinergic crisis. You delelted the portion...saying they are different. You are right, althought there is still outstanding discussion in autoimmune specialist community whether they should be bundled as sub types of myasthenia or not, as for now they are considered seperate. But lot of people have lot of confusion distinguising these two and understanding the concept of crisis since both of them are type two autoimmne reactions and both have the same symptomps. If we keep them seperate then we still need to mention edrophonium test to differentiate both of them, I will do that now. Le me kno if you O K with it. Thx. Never mind too late someone has already included edrophium test under diagnosis still it would be appropriate to mention that before any other test, due to its importance. I am writing this stuff on your page but I am not very fmiliar with editing Wiki so if I screwedup something or if this is not how you wanted people to reply to you then I am sorry and you can delete this. Keep it real and keep fighting the good fight.  — [Unsigned comment added by Ninad 1999 (talk • contribs).]

Archive please Rich Farmbrough, 06:29, 25 June 2009 (UTC).

Worcestershire

Archive please Rich Farmbrough, 06:29, 25 June 2009 (UTC).

caps fix

Rich, I totally understand going through and fixing things like titles, subtitles, and templates that have the wrong case. But I'm confused, as I see you are also changing {{coord}} to {{Coord}}. Yes, Template:Coord is capped, but all of the documentation says {{coord}}. Are you doing those changes by hand or with a tool? tedder (talk) 20:48, 24 June 2009 (UTC)

I wouldn't go out of my way to change coord, it doesn't greatly matter, I am happy to leave them unchanged. I use tools extensively. Rich Farmbrough, 20:51, 24 June 2009 (UTC). 20:51, 24 June 2009 (UTC)

Sounds good- I was just curious. I updated my "infobox schools" template to match the proper capitalization, hopefully you won't have to clean up after me as much going forward. tedder (talk) 21:02, 24 June 2009 (UTC)

Infobox education

Have you changed the Infobox: Education in the United States to the proper lower case? Several of the pages you have updated now have a redlink to an infobox that apprently doesn't exist yet and I'd hate to go through and fix them back if they will be working soon. The "Infobox: school" is OK, but not the "Infobox: Education in the United States." --JonRidinger (talk) 02:21, 25 June 2009 (UTC)

Answered on user's talk page. Rich Farmbrough, 06:27, 25 June 2009 (UTC).

Closing CfD discussions

Please add a closing edit comment when you close these discussions. It makes finding closes a lot easier. Thanks. Vegaswikian (talk) 06:17, 25 June 2009 (UTC)

np. Rich Farmbrough, 06:27, 25 June 2009 (UTC).

Infobox Indian Jurisdiction

We see that you have moved {{Infobox Indian Jurisdiction}} to {{Infobox Indian jurisdiction}}. This infobox is transculed to thousands of articles of Indian places. Looks like the template move have broken thousands of articles like Chhota Gobindpur. Can we revert it back ? See also related discussion here -- Tinu Cherian - 11:22, 25 June 2009 (UTC)

Thanks . looks like it is working now :) -- Tinu Cherian - 11:33, 25 June 2009 (UTC)

Outline update - Push push push - 06/25/2009

Work is proceeding apace...

• Julian is working on getting a bot account (and he delivered this update as his trial run).
• Penubag is working on the Project page and upcoming contest.
• Buaidh is developing all of the U.S. state historical outlines.
• Tarheel95 is writing a proposal to add a link to the Main Page leading to the the OOK.
• Highfields is integrating the OOK into the encyclopedia by deorphanizing outlines by placing a {{main}} link in the see also section of the subject articles that have a corresponding outline.
• I've been trying to keep up with them.  :)

New members

• Minnecologies - developing Outline of forestry and is watching the big picture.
• Mnation2 - improving Outline of Lebanon

Hatnotes

The current consensus is that we can't place a hatnote leading to an outline at the top of a subject articles unless the outline being presented is of at least the same quality-level as the article.

What's next...

Improve outline quality by completing them.

Place hatnotes for the outlines of high enough quality.

Guidelines pertaining to outlines need to be updated. Outlines emerged as a class of pages only a few months ago, and most of the relevant guidelines don't cover them specifically. For example, Wikipedia:Stand-alone lists is incredibly out of date.

Invite wikignomes, wikielves, and wikifairies (all 2500+ of them) to help on the outlines .

Identify 600 more subjects with coverage extensive enough to justify outlines, create rudimentary drafts for them, and post notices to the corresponding WikiProjects and subject talk pages to help build them.

Convert outlines titled "List of" to outline articles, and add them to the OOK. There are a few hundred of these. Conversion instructions are needed.

Add a description of outlines to About Wikipedia and Wikipedia:Basic navigation, and add tips about outlines to the WP:TOTD and Tips library.

Keep up the great work!

The Transhumanist 20:27, 25 June 2009 (UTC)

Zii Labs: Smackbot deleting orphan tag on orphan article

See [114]. Smackbot deleting orphan tag on orphan article, where there are no articles other than redirects pointing to it. I'm just guessing, but since there are four redirects, I suspect you're counting them. TJRC (talk) 17:12, 26 June 2009 (UTC)

Answered on user's talk page. Rich Farmbrough, 17:19, 26 June 2009 (UTC).

Odd Smackbot Edit (Unreferenced -> Refimporve)

I'm not sure what happened here: [115]. There were no references on the page, so the changes don't make sense to me.—C45207 | Talk 04:48, 27 June 2009 (UTC)

{{coord missing}} tags don't need dating

Please could you stop SmackBot dating {{coord missing}} tags? It breaks my bot's current workflow: I could fix it by recoding various parts of the bot, but it would be much easier if you just stopped SmackBot from adding the date tags. Thanks. -- The Anome (talk) 13:21, 27 June 2009 (UTC)

Spörer Minimum

Would you please review the following page again? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sp%C3%B6rer_Minimum

I added the references which should have been there from the beginning and corrected the most serious errors such as the dates for the Spörer Minimum. If I get a chance I will review the other dates as time allows. In the case of the Spörer Minimum even last weeks New York Times got it wrong also.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/18/us/18eddy.html

And yes, I notified the NY Times of the error. Somewhere on the Internet there is another bad source which I will have to find and correct.

The 1976 paper by Dr. Eddy also makes the connection to the Little Ice Age. I included a link to a public PDF copy of the paper. Read the quotes by John. A. Eddy. http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_A._Eddy

Michael Ronayne (talk) 23:02, 28 June 2009 (UTC)

SmackBot

The bot changes templates to sentence-casing. It changes Infobox Film -> Infobox film when the former is correct. See Ice Age (film). BOVINEBOY2008 13:04, 29 June 2009 (UTC)

Answered on user's talk page. Rich Farmbrough, 17:55, 29 June 2009 (UTC).

Invitation

Since you are one of the editors who has participated in the discussion about renaming Category:Pages for deletion to Category:Pages for discussion, I'd like to invite you to comment upon my proposals for this category here. Debresser (talk) 16:07, 29 June 2009 (UTC)

Request for feedback

Minnecologies has done an incredible amount of work on Outline of forestry and posted a note to me on my talk page requesting feedback.

I've posted my observations at Talk:Outline of forestry#Finished outline review.

Please take a look at the outline and let Minnecologies know what you think of it on the outline's talk page.

Thank you.

The Transhumanist 19:37, 29 June 2009 (UTC) Delivered by JCbot (talk) at 20:16, 29 June 2009 (UTC).

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Delivered by SoxBot (talk) at 02:26, 30 June 2009 (UTC)

Law of Chastity

You previously made some contributions to the article Law of Chastity, and there are some comments up for discussion on the talk page that you might like to weigh in on.

Archiveplease. Rich Farmbrough, 17:33, 30 June 2009 (UTC).

Tomato Products and Human Health

Thank you for your assistance so far.

I have made some edits (some appear to take and some not), not sure how my footnotes got the way that they are. How do I get the message removed that the entry will be deleted in 7 days?

Tomatoproducts (talk) 23:42, 29 June 2009 (UTC)

Some of my changes to references took, and some did not. I see you fixed the remainder. I very much appreciate your assistance as I learn my way through this process. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Tomatoproducts (talk • contribs) 17:59, 30 June 2009 (UTC)

{{Infobox Film}}

Why have you moved this template? The lower case "f" is contrary to guidelines. PC78 (talk) 16:34, 29 June 2009 (UTC)

Yes I moved it to a lower case "f" and it conforms to guidelines. Rich Farmbrough, 01:02, 30 June 2009 (UTC).

Hmmm, I see the guideline has changed since I last looked at it [116]. I assume the change stems from this discussion? A pity it couldn't have been a bit more widely publicised. It might be an idea to mention the guideline change in your edit summaries when moving other infoboxes. PC78 (talk) 15:31, 30 June 2009 (UTC)

Yes indeed, I will try to include a pointer to the guideline for important infoboxen. Rich Farmbrough, 17:32, 30 June 2009 (UTC).

SmackBot

Can you reevaluate Landmark Marketing. I went over it to make it sound less like an advertisement and added references. How can I improve? WahooCommerce (talk) 17:03, 30 June 2009 (UTC)

Aurangabad tagging

Dear Smackbot sir, I think the article, Aurangabad, Maharashtra apart from the maintainance tag requires a morefootnotes tag, since there are hardly any references or sources mentioned in the article. Please do the needful. Nefirious (talk) 14:43, 1 July 2009 (UTC)

You can add this tag if you think it is needed. Rich Farmbrough, 01:06, 2 July 2009 (UTC).

SmackBot - minor issue with dates

I added some maint tags to an article on July 1 here in New Zealand. SmackBot changed the date to June. I guess it works on server time. Can you set up the bot so that it does not alter dates that are less than 12-24 hrs before the server time? Cheers. -- Alan Liefting (talk) - 21:43, 1 July 2009 (UTC)

Well it should work on UTC, but due to a bug in mediawiki I have to hard code it. That means I regenerate the regular expressions every month. It doesn't greatly matter if things are pushed forward or back by a day, or, to be honest even if they are in completely the wrong month, the important thing is that the tagging should mean they will not be left indefinitely. (It works well for uncategorized, for example.) Th reason your article was picked up was probably that the dated cat didn't exist. Rich Farmbrough, 11:40, 2 July 2009 (UTC).

SmackBot is killing my HTML :(

SmackBot converts following wiki code

<ul>
<li> item 1
     <p> blah-blah-blah
<li> item 2
</ul>

into

<ul>
<li> item 1

blah-blah-blah


<li> item 2
</ul>

Which renders differently in a browser:

• item 1

  blah-blah-blah

• item 2

versus

• item 1 blah-blah-blah
• item 2

// Stpasha (talk) 19:14, 2 July 2009 (UTC)

Hm, tricky.

You could look at using

* item 1 <br> blah-blah-blah
* item 2

• item 1
  blah-blah-blah
• item 2

or

* item 1 
:blah-blah-blah
* item 2

• item 1

blah-blah-blah

• item 2

Rich Farmbrough, 07:08, 3 July 2009 (UTC).

template name changes

You do realize you broke a ton of redirects with your move of Template:Infobox officeholder, right? You're supposed to fix them when you do things like that. john k (talk) 19:07, 3 July 2009 (UTC)

look at my contribsRich Farmbrough, 19:08, 3 July 2009 (UTC).

Ah...sorry, should have done that beforehand. I just happened to load up a bunch before you fixed them. It seems kind of like a massive waste of your time, though - who cares if a template page is named inappropriately? john k (talk) 19:10, 3 July 2009 (UTC)

Takes a few moments, the reason is that if we are using a more or less standard scheme we don't have to remember the capitalisation of names of templates, whether they are joined by spaces, CamelCase dashes, etc.. Rich Farmbrough, 19:36, 3 July 2009 (UTC).

You missed the one for mayor. I tried to fix it, but it's locked from editing. Paxsimius (talk) 22:13, 3 July 2009 (UTC)

Thanks, fixed. It had the underscore in the name. Rich Farmbrough, 22:19, 3 July 2009 (UTC).

thanks!

for retraining Smackbot regarding the citation-needed template - please feel appreciated Sssoul (talk) 15:18, 4 July 2009 (UTC)

What was the point?

Hi.

What was the point of your edits today to Wikipedia:List of monthly maintenance categories given month? Debresser (talk) 10:00, 3 July 2009 (UTC)

Answered on user's talk page. Rich Farmbrough, 22:24, 3 July 2009 (UTC).

That was necessary because not all categories were created in time? Debresser (talk) 08:31, 5 July 2009 (UTC)

I would have changed Wikipedia:List of monthly maintenance categories given month/cat to {{#time:F Y|+25 day}} for a few minutes and then change it back. I think that is preferrable to making 2 lists. Debresser (talk) 09:03, 5 July 2009 (UTC)

That's a good point. Ideally, of course, somebody should create all categories in time. Debresser (talk) 09:41, 5 July 2009 (UTC)

Can you help write my Wiki Page

Hi Rich,

I was wondering if you can help me write a Wiki Page. I am uneducated in the whole Wiki editing process.

I'd like to send you a bio and references for the article. The article is already written but of course I understand your editing magic will be necessary.

How do I send you the article request ? My email is: hiltonboy1560@aol.com

Please email me and I will send you the article to review, to see if you may be interested in helping. It is a short Wiki article. Nothing major.

Thanks ! —Preceding unsigned comment added by RadioMediaCorp (talk • contribs) 12:16, 5 July 2009 (UTC)

SmackBot

I am new to wiki. I created this page. There are sources sited in this article so I am not sure why this is being tagged for deletion. Would renaming help?

Tomatoproducts (talk) 18:18, 28 June 2009 (UTC)lhs

(user Tomatoproducts)

Archive please Rich Farmbrough, 19:48, 5 July 2009 (UTC).

SmackBot

Dear Rich,

Please advice. With several persons involved in creating organizing and sailing the event "2008 Vintage Yachting Games" we created this page and put references to sides of all involved authorities. Wat do we need to do to have the correct references so that the article will not be deleted. Please give us some advice/exapmples in relevans to the article involved. We are open for your advice and ready to learn from you but have no clue at this moment wat we are missing her.

Thanks in advance

Rudy den Outer (rudy.den.outer@quicknet.nl) 84.105.17.54 (talk) 17:47, 5 July 2009 (UTC)

It is unlikely to be deleted. The (a) preferred way of citing references in WP is inline like this. You can re-use references like this then again, and a third time.

The references will appear where you place this code

Of course inline is not necessarily appropriate for every article. Rich Farmbrough, 03:14, 6 July 2009 (UTC).

SmackBot

Hi, the SmackBot keeps adding a References section to the template:Current Men's Singles ATP Rankings, which causes some problems, as it makes the section appear in the middle of the articles where the template is used (as in 2009 ATP World Tour or Association of Tennis Professionals). I've reverted the Bot once, but it came back with the same edit a couple of days later. What do you think can be done ? --Don Lope (talk) 19:16, 5 July 2009 (UTC)

I have noincluded the references list. Rich Farmbrough, 19:48, 5 July 2009 (UTC).

Of course. I should have thought of that. Thanks ! --Don Lope (talk) 19:52, 5 July 2009 (UTC)

SmackBot

Hey buddy wassup!!!!!!Hey buddy wassup!!!!!!Hey buddy wassup!!!!!!Hey buddy wassup!!!!!!Hey buddy wassup!!!!!!Hey buddy wassup!!!!!!Hey buddy wassup!!!!!!Hey buddy wassup!!!!!!Hey buddy wassup!!!!!!Hey buddy wassup!!!!!!Hey buddy wassup!!!!!!Hey buddy wassup!!!!!!Hey buddy wassup!!!!!!Hey buddy wassup!!!!!!Hey buddy wassup!!!!!!Hey buddy wassup!!!!!!Hey buddy wassup!!!!!! —Preceding unsigned comment added by 122.170.121.170 (talk) 10:41, 6 July 2009 (UTC)

SmackBot

Not sure if this is a recurring problem, but with this edit, SmackBot added {{reflist}} and a references section to a template. This seems undesirable? Or at least wrap them in noincludes? → ROUX ₪ 07:12, 5 July 2009 (UTC)

Yes they should be there noincluded, but I have to do that manually. Rich Farmbrough, 10:10, 5 July 2009 (UTC).

Please see my edit there. I would recommend for SmackBot to start using {{Templaterefsection}} in all templates, together with <noinclude>...</noinclude> tags. Shouldn't be hard to program. Debresser (talk) 11:32, 5 July 2009 (UTC)

'Tis done. Rich Farmbrough, 03:19, 6 July 2009 (UTC).

Well done. Although, as the person who invented the name "templaterefsection" I was not thrilled by your rename. It is awfully long. Debresser (talk) 18:55, 6 July 2009 (UTC)

PPC Orphan Tag

Rich - I would like to request that you review an article which you flagged as an "orphan" a few months ago. I have been doing more research to gather more information before adding any more information about the company in reference. The link is: PPC worldwide. Please let me know if you have any further recommendations for this article. Thanks! Kruegsj (talk) 20:20, 6 July 2009 (UTC)

Please kind sir

I saw that you reverted a edit changing the church of scientology to cult of scientology?! i see that there are a lot of errors refering to the cult as a church and YOU ARE NOT HELPING!?!?! I will have to contact the owner of winkapedia if you continue abusing your ability to revert good edits.! —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.200.177.76 (talk) 23:19, 8 July 2009 (UTC)

SmackBot - issue with defaultsort

See this edit; the chance in capitalisation SmackBot made to the defaultsort was incorrect. I've reverted, but the bot shouldn't be doing that. PC78 (talk) 00:35, 7 July 2009 (UTC)

Hm I think it should. It's part of WP:AWB general fices adn therse guys generally know what they are doing. Rich Farmbrough, 21:33, 8 July 2009 (UTC).

The capitalisation should match the article title. Can you throw me a more useful link? PC78 (talk) 22:35, 8 July 2009 (UTC)

Here might help. The goal is to get an effectively case insensitive sort. The name displayed in the category, is of course, the article name, regardless of the sort order. Rich Farmbrough, 23:35, 8 July 2009 (UTC).

SmackBot

Hi Rich, I have a couple of requests about your changes to articles with the French commune template (for example this change).

1. Could you also change the name of the template itself from "French commune" to "Infobox French commune"?
2. Change the "departement" parameter name to "department"?

Regards, Kiwipete (talk) 09:17, 8 July 2009 (UTC)

Done. Rich Farmbrough, 23:36, 8 July 2009 (UTC).

Cleanup and Fix Box

Hello Farmbrough,

It's possible to don't put again the cleanup and others box on top in the article because all article for the refineries in Canada and oil refining center are in construction. When you put that, i supposed you are against my articles.

Thanks. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Fredoues (talk • contribs) 13:05, 8 July 2009 (UTC)

Wikipedia Signpost: 6 July 2009

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• Wikipedia in the news: Wikipedia and kidnapping, new comedy series
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Delivered by SoxBot (talk) at 03:25, 9 July 2009 (UTC)

DearmackBot/Rich

I would like to be able to cite and confirm notability to the page John Mann(comedian) but I do not know how. Could you either help me to or remove the Bot of Smack. You are lovely. Cheery24 —Preceding unsigned comment added by Cheery24 (talk • contribs) 10:29, 9 July 2009 (UTC)

New dated template

Template:Cleanup-list-sort Debresser (talk) 15:41, 9 July 2009 (UTC)

Help

I got a question here, plz help. I found that you had changed the information of Waste Management, Inc(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Management,_Inc.). Do you know whether the company have office in China? If have, could you help me to find out how to connect them (their phone number or address in china)? It'll help me a lot. Sorry for bother you. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 210.13.84.106 (talk) 08:03, 9 July 2009 (UTC)

I have no idea but it looks unlikely. You could ask the US business attaché in China, or email the company and ask. Rich Farmbrough, 10:37, 9 July 2009 (UTC).

I will email them. Thank you for your help. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 210.13.84.106 (talk) 02:06, 10 July 2009 (UTC)

SmackBot

Rich (alias smackbot) - thanks for giving my entry a reference at Nuclear propulsion. I was trying to do so earlier today (many hours ago) and I couldn't get the reference to work. It wasn't reading the tags or something, at the time. Anyway, thanks. Ti-30X (talk) 01:44, 10 July 2009 (UTC)

Outline Update - Exhausted - 07/10/2009

I'm sorry that I haven't been available to assign tasks lately. For the past 3 days (not including today) I've been almost totally consumed in discussions concerning the location and very existence of outlines. Today I finally broke free and got back to work on outlines. Felt good.

A great deal has been happening with outlines and behind the scenes. I just don't have time to tell you all about it this time around. Here's the best I can do...

How to watch what's going on with outlines

If you'd like a bird's eye view of everything that's happening with respect to outlines, see this page:

• WP:OOKWL - watchlist for copying and pasting into your raw watchlist.

Or go to these pages (and click on "Related changes" in the sidebar's toolbox menu):

• WP:OOKRC - a version of the above watchlist for use with "Related changes".
• WP:OOKDIR - a list of key pages related to the OOK, along with their shortcuts.
• WP:OOKDISC - list of discussions pertaining to outlines.

Recently converted to outlines

These outline articles, which were named "List of...", have been converted to an OOK format:

• Outline of martial arts (was "List of martial arts-related topics")
• Outline of wine - converted by Stefan (was called "List of wine-related topics")
• Outline of the creation-evolution controversy (was "List of topics in the creation-evolution controversy")
• Outline of actuarial science (was "Actuarial topics")
• Outline of industrial organization (was "List of topics in industrial organization")

Recently merged into outlines

There are a lot of "List of" articles that are outlines. Some of them are on the same subjects as the "Outline of" articles. The following one have been recently merged:

• List of finance topics into Outline of finance

The Transhumanist 01:14, 10 July 2009 (UTC)

Smackbot 2

That smakbot is quite a useful tool. It really comes in handy. Ti-30X (talk) 02:03, 10 July 2009 (UTC)

Here is my list of outlines, and scientists - these seem to be working well for Wikipeida: Ti-30X (talk) 02:16, 10 July 2009 (UTC)

See: The Wikipedia
Outline of Knowledge for Mathematics,
Logic, Natural and Physical Sciences

• Leon Lederman, Nobel laureate, Partical physics
• Murray Gell-Mann, Nobel laureate, Partical physics
• The late Henry Kendall, Nobel laureate, Partical physics
• Steven Weinberg, Nobel laureate, Quantum field theory
• David Gross, Nobel laureate, Paritcle physics
• Frank Wilczek, Nobel laureate, Theoretical physicist
• Joseph Rotblat, Nobel laureate, Nuclear fission
• Walter Gilbert, Nobel laureate, Particle physicist, Molecular biology
• Gerald Edelman, Nobel laureate, Immune system, Neuroscience
• Peter Doherty, Nobel laureate, Immune system
• Jared Diamond, Nobel laureate, Anthropology, Physiology,Geography
• Brian Greene, PhD, String theory, Cosmology, Mirror Symmetry
• Lisa Randall, PhD, Particle physics, Cosmology, expert in String theory
• Lawrence Krauss, PhD, Physics, Space Exploration, Mathematics
• Alan Guth, PhD, Theoretical physicist, Originated Cosmic Inflation 1979
• John D. Barrow, PhD, Cosmologist, Theoretical physicist, Mathematician
• Joseph Lykken, PhD, Theory of Particle physics, Dark matter
• Leonard Susskind, PhD, Quantum field theory, co-founder of String theory
• Marvin Minsky, PhD, Artifical Intelligence
• Paul Davies, PhD, Quantum field theory in curved spacetime, theoretical physics, astrobiology. Produced 20 topical physics books
• Ray Kurzwell, BS, a pioneer in the fields of optical character recognition (OCR), text-to-speech synthesis, the technology of speech recognition, and electronic keyboard instruments. Authored several books on health, Artificial intelligence (AI), transhumanism, the technological singularity, and futures studies.
• Rodney Brooks, PhD, Robotics, Artificial intelligence, Computer Science
• Neil de Grasse Tyson, PhD, Physics, famous Astrophysicist, President of the Planetary Society. Authored 11 topical Astronomy books.

See: The Wikipedia
Outline of Knowledge
The History of Science

David Ferguson (impresario)

Hi Rich: Some time ago you made comments about the above referenced article that had several templates added by two users with a history of negative edits. Would you be so kind as to take another look at the text, citations, and templates and share your views at the talk page of David Ferguson (impresario)? There is also a discussion at the Wikipedia:Biographies of living persons/Noticeboard, however I have posted a request to move to the article's talk page; anything you could add to the discussion would be most appreciated. Thank you. --deb (talk) 05:37, 10 July 2009 (UTC)

Same tag twice

Dear sir, you have by mistake placed the additional references tag twice in the article Aurangabad, Maharashtra. It may be of appropriate for you to remove it or let me remove the same for you. 16:05, 10 July 2009 (UTC)

If a tag is wrong you can remove it. Rich Farmbrough, 04:15, 11 July 2009 (UTC).

Tennis articles

Greetings Rich,

I'd just like to bring to your attention that, on some of the tennis articles, a certain user has been deleting the names of French (Roland Garros) champions, and changing the founding date of the championship. Even though outside sources, such as:

1. ESPN 2. Encylopedia Britannica 3. the Roland Garros website 4. the World Almanac

have supported the inclusion of all French Open winners to 1891, a single solitary user has been deleting the names of pre-1925 champions because it was "not open to international competition"--but that's a lie. The very first winner, in 1891, was a British man, and two other British men made it to the final in the 1890s.

Attempting to rewrite history with Wikipedia is what some people have done, rather than understand that Wikipedia is an encyclopedia.

What do you think I should do next? User Fyunclick has refused to compromise or discuss the issue rationally.Ryoung122 00:46, 11 July 2009 (UTC)

Answered on user's talk page. Rich Farmbrough, 04:15, 11 July 2009 (UTC).

Other than humans

A lot of views other than humans ? That was sarcastically said. Anyway, thanks for contributing and improving the article. Nefirious (talk) 05:40, 11 July 2009 (UTC)

Answered on user's talk page. Rich Farmbrough, 10:20, 12 July 2009 (UTC).

NOT HISTORICAL, NO I'M NOT REGISTERING

It's probably not worth stopping the bot over either, but look how it mangled the second reported dead link on:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Alcohol_rub&diff=301597414&oldid=301594779

Bad bot. Naughty ;)

 —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.132.136.198 (talk) 22:01, 11 July 2009 (UTC) 

Well, I take it back. The links were naughty not the bot. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.132.139.162 (talk) 22:05, 11 July 2009 (UTC)

New dated template 2

Template:Formula missing descriptions Debresser (talk) 11:39, 12 July 2009 (UTC)

"Disputed" tag and three articles

I have been watching the article BosWash for two years. It and the associated articles ChiPitts and SanSan concern the concept of a theoretical entity known as a Megalopolis. The talk page discussion Talk:BosWash#Isn't this kind of melodramatic? sums up the disputes I and another editor have with the form and content the article has taken on. My major problem with all three articles is that although the subject and title do exist as part of a theory published by Jean Gottmann in 1961, the articles themselves treat the three terms, BosWash, ChiPitts and SanSan as actual physical locations with real boundaries and constituent geographical members. Not only is this not true, it is unencyclopedic and supported only by original research that masquerades as fact within each article. I would like to place a {{Disputed}} tag on each article. The documentation for the tag directs that a new section called "Disputed" be added to the article's talk page. I have two questions about how to proceed: in your opinion, is my proposed placement of the tag for these three articles warranted? and if so what is the best way to include the statements already made on the BosWash talk page within a new "Disputed" section, can they simply be copied into the section, and how can the discussion of all three pages be centralized? Sswonk (talk) 16:02, 12 July 2009 (UTC)

I'm not sure the "Disputed" tag will add any value - we already know there's a dispute (or multiple disputes), the question is what are we going to do about it and who is going to support that. The talk pages for the articles are entirely about these disputes already.

You might want to also look at the Megapolitan article. I didn't create that article but have edited and added to it. It is mostly about one team's research, but the material is cited to them. I think it would be good to follow and compare different authors' varying ideas of a given American megalopolis through time within a single article.

The city lists in each article are chronic problems. I think we just have to continue efforts to trim or eliminate them unless they are based on cited material. I've also considered adding a request not to add detailed original city lists, but am not sure whether some might consider the request itself to be unencyclopedic. If we can cite different definitions from more than one author, this will also get across the message that there is no single definition the article is endorsing. --JWB (talk) 16:38, 13 July 2009 (UTC)

I think what I am looking for is some sort of visual clue, like appears at the top of essay pages that are not official Wikipedia policy, that states in so many words that these terms are not actual places, that the articles are a mess that are being edited in support of a pseudo-scientific concept, that the terms are not in use by the people that actually live there, and that we are attempting to remedy this situation. The simplest remedy would be to have the articles reduced to stub status, defining their titles as terms used by Gottmann, and then eliminating any of the lists of cities and so on. People are throwing names and images in that they could easily provide citation for, but unless the citation says "Boswash includes this place" it is Original Research. It irritates me to no end that these articles add legitimacy to a neologism that is almost 50 years old simply by having them and numerous mirrors of them appear in Google search results. It is SEO results population for a flawed concept. "Boswash" doesn't exist, regardless of what this article says, and that puts us in the business of providing inaccurate information. I guess I could throw {{fact}} tags all over it, but I would really like someone in authority to do what is really necessary, that being start the articles over from scratch. Sswonk (talk) 20:51, 13 July 2009 (UTC)

SmackBot

Why do you have User:SmackBot/References Log added to Category:Pages with missing references list? Debresser (talk) 00:12, 13 July 2009 (UTC)

I find this even more strange in view of the fact that User:SmackBot/References Log is already linked on that category page. Unless there is some special, technical reason, I propose to remove that category. Debresser (talk) 00:17, 13 July 2009 (UTC)

Can't you find a more elegant solution? :) Debresser (talk) 16:49, 13 July 2009 (UTC)

FYI

You may wish to comment at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard#Undo Page Redirection. –xeno^talk 14:25, 13 July 2009 (UTC)

Request

Hi Rich,

I need your help. I've been accessing Wikipedia from a library computer, which leaves me unable to do anything really fancy.

I was hoping you could update the following page for me:

• Wikipedia:List of Wikipedians by number of recent edits

The instructions are here:

• Wikipedia:List of Wikipedians by number of edits/How to generate the lists.

I plan to use the list to contact prolific editors in various subject areas or who do a lot of particular types of edits.

It would also be nice to see who is active on Wikipedia this summer.

I look forward to your reply on my talk page.

Sincerely,

The Transhumanist 20:02, 13 July 2009 (UTC)

Thank you for the reply. WPinas by number of edits includes inactive editors. The above list only covers edits for the past 30 days. The Transhumanist 20:46, 13 July 2009 (UTC)

Thank you. The Transhumanist 20:56, 13 July 2009 (UTC)

SmackBot

Hi, an article that has been written has been vandalised and I have tried to delete the vandalism, but your bot (and I dont quite understand how they work) is being used to reverse the edits that are trying to take the article back to the original. IE someone is subscribing ( if that is the phrase) to your bot so that my corrections back to the original are seen as vandalism. How do I stop that? IE your bot is creating the vandalism and my corrections are seen as vandalism. I am not sure that this what your bot was set up to do. I am sure you are asking who is the vandal and who is the corrector? Given the vandal will read this i can provide details of the article by secure email if required. What do I do? Many thanks Goalcatcher (talk) 16:54, 14 July 2009 (UTC)

Just give me the name of the article. The chances are that there is something in the WP Manual of Style you are unaware of, but it could be that the bot is making a mistake. Rich Farmbrough, 18:40, 14 July 2009 (UTC).

Hi, the article is 'AnneMain', there are political opponents that are vandalising various MPs sites by placing political statements on them in the light of the expenses issues in the UK. You will see how your bot is being used. thanks

Anne Main I guess. Rich Farmbrough, 19:25, 14 July 2009 (UTC).

OK nothing to do with the bot some IP removed the stuff. Rich Farmbrough, 01:58, 15 July 2009 (UTC).

Hi Rich, I must have been ambiguos. There are political activists putting political statements on many MPs wikis regarding the expenses - so instead of a factual entry regarding the MP and their position it becomes a political noticeboard whihc is not what Wike is about., you ironically replaced what was required to be removed. :-) So the IP that has just removed what you put back (at c. 9:05 am UK time) is valid. You will see on many other UK MPs the same issues, people are just making political capital of these expense issues. I hope that I have explained correctly.The reason i contacted you was that one of the edits stated in the history was Smartbot and I just thought it must be one of these activists using your bot to automatically replace their vandalism when someone removed their vandalism. Thanks. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Goalcatcher (talk • contribs) 08:13, 15 July 2009 (UTC)

Yes, you were ambiguous, you didn't state which was the "right version"! The expenses scandal is noteworthy, being a significant step in the process of changing the financial accountability of UK MPs. To remove well sourced information seems like using WP to push your own political viewpoint. The articles should remain factaul, NPPOV and well sourced. If there is a problem then I suggest discussing it at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Politics of the United Kingdom. Rich Farmbrough, 08:25, 15 July 2009 (UTC).

I would counter your statement that the political points are being made to the original adder of the expense information. What about the positive stuff that is done by these people? Then wiki just becomes a political noticeboard and not an encyclopedic entry. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Goalcatcher (talk • contribs) 11:59, 15 July 2009 (UTC)

Thank you

Your temp16 file should serve my purposes just fine. Thank you!

By the way, out of curiosity, how do you manage 18,000 edits in a month!?

The Transhumanist 02:16, 15 July 2009 (UTC)

Just checking... The edit counts are for the past 30 days? The Transhumanist 16:31, 15 July 2009 (UTC)

Another big request

Since (I'm assuming) you just downloaded Wikipedia, that reminds me of a wish I've had for a long time. Maybe you can grant it...

Can you make a new one of these: Wikipedia:List of base pages in the Wikipedia namespace?

(It's a copy of User:JesseW/WPindex. I contacted him with this request in 2007, but he never responded.)

It would be much better than the Special:AllPages index of the Wikipedia namespace, because that is choked with thousands upon thousands of AFD subpages, ANI archives, etc.

Such a page will allow us to actually see what's currently in the Wikipedia namespace, and it will be instrumental in updating pages like most of these:

And for updating the Help system, as there are a great many help pages in the Wikipedia namespace.

I'll make sure a link to it gets posted in all the right places.

The Transhumanist 17:58, 15 July 2009 (UTC)

New templates

Do you have the templates I added today in Wikipedia:List of monthly maintenance categories with templates? Debresser (talk) 18:24, 15 July 2009 (UTC)

WGBH ident

I noticed that SmackBot edited the WGBH idents. There are lots of variants on the announcer and the logos. should i put them in the WGBH idents article itself or a seperate article. Meteorman7228 (talk) 19:09, 15 July 2009 (UTC)

I would suggest the logos might go in a gallery in the article. Not sure what you mean by variants in the announcer. Rich Farmbrough, 06:22, 16 July 2009 (UTC).

Date Formatting

The manual of style says "Wikipedia does not use ordinal suffixes, articles, or leading zeros" for dates, but in this edit, SmackBot changed the date 2009-07-1 to 2009-07-01. I guess if no leading zeros are to be used, then the correct fix would have been to change 2009-07-1 to 2009-7-1? —Notyourbroom (talk) 21:02, 15 July 2009 (UTC)

well look a few lines down, where it talks about YYYY-MM-DD format, leading zeros are used there, and for good reason. With the leading zeros the format is date sortable. Rich Farmbrough, 06:11, 16 July 2009 (UTC).

Please delete

Can you please remove this text "Ted Sycamore 10:57, 15 July 2009 (UTC)" at the start of the CAIRO GANG article. I made an edit and this appeared. It was clearly not intended to appear there. Ted Sycamore 11:31, 16 July 2009 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Ted Sycamore (talk • contribs)  Done Rich Farmbrough, 15:30, 16 July 2009 (UTC).

Society of Hospital Medicine

Thank you for the visit. I have "un-orphaned" this entry and request that the orphan tag be removed. If there is anything else you would like updated prior to removing the tag, please advise...thanks a bunchDocbb1 (talk) 22:24, 15 July 2009 (UTC)

    Thanks for the follow up.  I have removed the tag, as there are now relevant wikis tagging this article.Docbb1 (talk) 18:43, 16 July 2009 (UTC)

Are you operator of SmackBot?

Nice to meet you. Just curious, Are you human? Cherry Blossom OK (talk) 09:28, 17 July 2009 (UTC)

wow. i first know SmackBot is a human. anyway, thanks to know it. Cherry Blossom OK (talk) 09:31, 17 July 2009 (UTC)

Prune

Do you have {{Prune}}? Debresser (talk) 10:40, 17 July 2009 (UTC)

I hope you also saw the other ones from my previous posts. They're still on this talkpage. Please have a look at User_talk:Debresser#Prune. Debresser (talk) 11:37, 17 July 2009 (UTC)

Yes I already have those. Thanks. Rich Farmbrough, 12:06, 17 July 2009 (UTC).

Besancon

I am afraid that the table on demographics in the article is mis-formated in a way that distorts all the subsequent text. Unfortunately, I don't know enough about tables to fix the problem. Regards, Acad Ronin (talk) 13:58, 17 July 2009 (UTC)

Fixed, underlying problem was fixed earlier but I must have missed this one. Should you see any others just undo my edit(s) and drop a note and I will take care of them. 79.79.20.228 (talk)

Argh I broke it again... Rich Farmbrough, 14:12, 17 July 2009 (UTC).

Thanks. I am reluctant to undo edits when only part of an edit is broken. I would have fixed the problem myself, had I known what to do. Regards, Acad Ronin (talk) 14:23, 17 July 2009 (UTC)

{{howto}} page move

Hi,

Normally I agree with moving templates to more normal English titles, but in this case the term howto is idiomatic. As that article suggests, maybe {{how-to}} would be a suitable title; however, that might need discussed first. For now I've reverted the page move. Just thought I'd give you a heads-up. Chris Cunningham (not at work) - talk 18:04, 17 July 2009 (UTC)

Answered on user's talk page. Rich Farmbrough, 20:29, 20 July 2009 (UTC).

Sago_Mine_disaster

Rich, just noticed (again) that there has been a tag since 2007 on this article. I went in the history to see who applied it, but maybe I missed something, so decided to write my favorite admin instead :). Could you peruse and see if the tag is still needed. If not, maybe you could remove it. If so, maybe you could give some idea of what types of changes need to be made in the discussion section. This article had been cited as excellent by a prof at WVU and I hate the idea that any traffic he drives to the article sees this tag. Thanks, as always. Cheers --Beth Wellington (talk) 16:07, 18 July 2009 (UTC)

Oops. I just realized there were no citations in the the initial part. I'm working on it. Do you know anyone else who can help me?--Beth Wellington (talk) 16:52, 18 July 2009 (UTC)

How do I remove speedy deletion from marketresearch.com?

How do I remove speedy deletion from MarketResearch.com?

Rich, Someone in our organization brought to my attention the notice, or banner, [This article needs references that appear in reliable third-party publications. Primary sources or sources affiliated with the subject are generally not sufficient for a Wikipedia article. Please add more appropriate citations from reliable sources. (July 2009)] on our Wikipedia site. Can you give me more info, or, more specifically, what should we fdix to meet Wiukipedia's criteria? I'm the STRATCOM Manager for the organization. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 160.149.1.36 (talk) 17:57, 20 July 2009 (UTC)

Looks like this has been dealt with. Rich Farmbrough, 20:39, 20 July 2009 (UTC).

SmackBot

Thanks for your note on the article I wrote. It really helped me understand where I could make improvements. SportsReport 20:13, 20 July 2009 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by SportsReport (talk • contribs)

Your 'clean up using AWB' on Nantes

Hi Rich.

At 03:32 on 17 July 2009, you edited the article Nantes, with the comment 'clean up using AWB'. Most of the changes were minor, like capitalising the first letters of various templates, and removing spaces in section titles.

But unfortunately one set of changes, that moved the | from one line to another around valign statements, completely broke the presentation of some in-text tabulations, resulting in the valigns appearing as text in the article. I have reverted this and all subsequent changes, and am in the process of rather laboriously reapplying those subsequent changes.

These things happen, but I just thought you would like to know, as this may indicate a bug in the tool you are using, which may affect other articles.

-- Starbois (talk) 18:37, 21 July 2009 (UTC)

Edit of Dannemarie, Yvelines

I reverted this edit you made with AWB. Hope you don't mind ;) Kiwipete (talk) 21:23, 21 July 2009 (UTC)

How very odd! But I did get an odd error yesterday. Thank you. Rich Farmbrough, 05:39, 22 July 2009 (UTC).

North Epping murders

Hi, seeking support to keep regarding Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/North Epping murders. Do you have an opinion on that? Thanks Ajayvius (talk) 09:44, 22 July 2009 (UTC)

*Lot* of stuff broke on move of Template.

Look at Roland Burris or Carol Moseley Braun for example. They all end up with 1. REDIRECT Template:Infobox officeholder at the top. From the other officeholders I saw, they *all* were affected.

Archive please Rich Farmbrough, 14:31, 22 July 2009 (UTC).

Insignificant changes

• It seems that the changes you're making to French communes are all insignificant changes per AWB, i.e., there is no visual effect to the reader; you're just shuffling around some code. –xeno^talk 14:22, 23 July 2009 (UTC)

• Is there a point to these changes? You're essentially fixing redirects which aren't broken and adding some whitespace. Shouldn't these changes be done along with something more significant, like typo fixing? And, if you're running this as an automated task (as I doubt you're sitting there manually clicking), shouldn't you run it through BRFA? –xeno^talk 14:29, 23 July 2009 (UTC)

• What a monumental waste of resources. I should block this account as an unapproved bot operating contrary to AWB's rules of use, but since you're almost done deprecating the redirect, I'm just going to leave you to it. –xeno^talk 14:38, 23 July 2009 (UTC)

  Hm no I'm also replacing the French names of the parameters with the English names. Rich Farmbrough, 14:44, 23 July 2009 (UTC).

  Yes, with no visual effect to the reader. Why? And if it's necessary and has consensus, why not run it through BRFA rather than running a bot on your main account? Please just continue as you were, you've got less than a thousand to go. But this was a giant waste (imo), or it should've been run as a bot task. (Too bad I didn't realize this was desired, as Xenobot recently hit most of these articles for more significant edits) –xeno^talk 14:48, 23 July 2009 (UTC)

SmackBot

Why did this bot remove the "more footnotes" tag at the start of the article here ? Hohum (talk) 14:32, 23 July 2009 (UTC)

It moved it to the references section. Rich Farmbrough, 15:09, 23 July 2009 (UTC).

Aah, I see that now. The diff view I was using didn't show it. Hohum (talk) 15:44, 23 July 2009 (UTC)

List of Nazi Party members

Hi I was wondering if you could AWB or whatever you have to cleanup this list, remove the gaps and wikilink the names? Dr. Blofeld ^{White cat} 16:46, 23 July 2009 (UTC)

French communes

Hello Rich,

I found several strange edits you made with AWB: [117], [118], [119], [120], [121], [122], [123], [124]. Do you know how this could have happened? Korg (talk) 22:53, 23 July 2009 (UTC)

I suspect AWB was gettign confused. I can check for any more like this, I think. Thanks for bringing it to my attention. Rich Farmbrough, 00:01, 24 July 2009 (UTC).

No problem, and thanks in advance for checking them! Another error I found is the replacement of the infobox parameter "cp" with "postal code" instead of "postal_code", causing the INSEE and postal codes to no longer be displayed: [125], [126]. Korg (talk) 00:49, 24 July 2009 (UTC)

Also dealt with. Thanks again. Rich Farmbrough, 14:23, 24 July 2009 (UTC).

Thank you! Korg (talk) 18:08, 24 July 2009 (UTC)

I found other buggy edits: [127], [128], [129], [130]. I just checked some of your contributions manually, and I probably have missed others. Could you please check them again? Alternatively, do you know an efficient way to spot the edits that need to be reverted? I'd like to ensure that no others remain. Thanks, Korg (talk) 01:24, 25 July 2009 (UTC)

Yes I scanned all commune articles for ones that don't contain their own name, and went through them, I have now done another scan for articles that don't contain their own name either bolded or as an interwiki. There are about 400 of these, most should be false positives. The full list is here. The current list User:Rich Farmbrough/temp17. Most of these will already have been checked. Rich Farmbrough, 12:31, 25 July 2009 (UTC).

SmackBot and order of tags

In this edit, SmackBot puts the dablink below the maintenance tags. Is this intentional? According to WP:LAYOUT, dablinks should go first. Iceblock (talk) 22:35, 24 July 2009 (UTC)

Thanks. I sould say htis is arguable, so perhaps it was argued and the WP:AWB implementers put the previous version. I will look later. Rich Farmbrough, 12:31, 25 July 2009 (UTC).

Date templates

A bot is still needed, please, to convert existing "first broadcast", "foundation", "founded", "opened", "released", or similar dates in infoboxes, to use {{Start date}}, so that they are emitted as part of the included hCard or hCalendar microformats. Further details on my to-do page. You expressed interest in this last year, but were unable to help, at that time. The task can be sub-divided, if that helps. I'd be very grateful if you could assist. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 22:29, 30 July 2009 (UTC)

Looking at it now. Rich Farmbrough, 21:43, 31 July 2009 (UTC).

Thank you. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 21:44, 31 July 2009 (UTC)

Please note a problem with your recent AWB/date edits, which I fixed on one page. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 23:25, 31 July 2009 (UTC)

Rollbacked the rest. Rich Farmbrough, 23:28, 31 July 2009 (UTC). 23:28, 31 July 2009 (UTC)

Great. The subsequent edits seem fine. BTW, please feel free to make use of the to-do list and add comments or strike-through completed templates, as you see fit. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 11:34, 1 August 2009 (UTC)

NB

I came across this, a work in progress. Occuli (talk) 13:00, 1 August 2009 (UTC)

Things that stayed too long

A date of birth in an infobox disagreed with the same fact in the article's lead for over a year, occasionally getting fixed by sharp-eyed IP users but promptly getting reverted as vandalism on each occasion. [131] ClickRick (talk) 13:39, 1 August 2009 (UTC)

Why is SmackBot time-warping?

Just curious why SmackBot time-warped and changed some maintenance tags back to the previous month. See this. The article was originally tagged at 0045 UTC on August 1, and SmackBot made its changes at 1238 UTC on August 1, so it's unusual that it set the month to July. Maybe Smackbot is secretly yearning for Professor Brown and his Delorean? Truthanado (talk) 15:39, 1 August 2009 (UTC)

Simply put, I forgot to tell it to re-calibrate itself. Many thanks. Rich Farmbrough, 15:42, 1 August 2009 (UTC).

Subsequent Impregnation theory

It has actually been proposed, e.g. by Gordon Gallup who also proposed the semen displacement theory.[132]. It has been called "fertilization by proxy" and can happen in insects. I don't think it has been documented in humans. A section under Sperm competition might be an option. I'm not going to deprod. Fences&Windows 20:02, 1 August 2009 (UTC)

List of Torchwood characters

Smackbot keeps messing up the above article by changing all the===subheadings to==headings. It's very tiresome to manually revert after there have been intermediate edits.~Zythe^{Talk to me!} 09:44, 2 August 2009 (UTC)

Hm don't know why. But fixed. Rich Farmbrough, 13:04, 2 August 2009 (UTC).

Episode dates

Hey there, I like the current task adding {{Start date}} to episode list articles ... can you add a function to do the same to dates currently formatted as mm/dd/yyyy? In List of Dynasty episodes, for example, most of them are incorrectly noted that way (I never got around to changing them) and the bot skipped those. Thanks!— TAnthony^Talk 16:07, 2 August 2009 (UTC)

Your edits involving Samurai Claw

During the last hour, he has created half a dozen articles or more and they have all been speedy deleted. One speedy deleted article uses WP:NOT a game manual. The important thing is there's no reason to prod it as it keeps getting speedy deleted under various titles. BrianY (talk) 20:00, 2 August 2009 (UTC)

SmackBot

Regarding Shortland Street 2000 storyline - this piece was missing in the storylines for the soap and I reinstated by researching the previous writing on Wiki. The problem I have is that the box which normally appears at the top somehow got shunted towards the bottom above the cast list. Only references are those duplicated from similiar pages. user:Tuiland Tuiland 03:13, 3 August 2009 (UTC)

—Preceding unsigned comment added by Tuiland (talk • contribs) 03:09, 3 August 2009 (UTC) 

Move of Template:Commons cat

Hi. A couple of us are wondering about your move of the above template, as your one word edit summary of "Readability" doesn't give many clues away for such a widely used template. If would be nice if you could comment at Template talk:Commons category. Arriva436^{talk/contribs} 19:34, 25 July 2009 (UTC)

Article entitled "William James Austin"

I am William James Austin. An article about me was recently submitted by the university professor, Dr. Marge Brown. One day after the article was posted, it was deleted, it seems, with a series of warnings in its place. Since I am the subject of the article, I've been asked by Dr. Brown to help.

1) There is no problem with copyright. Much of the information was taken from my website. That material is simply a list of facts, i.e. my publication and awards credits. She certainly has my permission to include material from my website.

2) If the fact that poets, writers, and artists know each other constitutes a neutrality problem, then Wikipedia is full of such problems. Artists are known to each other. Articles for Richard Kostelanetz, John M. Bennett and Cecil Touchon (in whose article I am named), for example, were written by other artists who know them. This is invevitable. We are all recognized members of the current avant-garde movement.

So I, in turn, ask for your help. If the problem is one of style, please advise. I admit that none of us is well versed in Wikipedia rules. Please help so that the article can once again see the light of day. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Austinwja (talk • contribs) 20:30, 25 July 2009 (UTC)

Could you please explain further...

Smackbot added a Europeanized {{defaultsort}} to Samoud Khan. But he is not a European. He is a pashtun. And their naming style is modeled after than used for Arabic speaking people -- in particular, no inherited lastname-surname.

When I see a bot add a Europeanized sort order to an article about someone without a European name I try to figure out how it came to happen. I didn't see a "listas" parameter anywhere. I've been told that all the robots that insert sort orders only do so if there is already an indication that a human left their opinion of the proper sort order.

But I think that some people are running instances of bots that are out of date. (I don't really understand bots. But back when I was a programmer, the first thing my programs did was check to see if they were an authorized version. It they found that they had been replaced by a new version they gave a polite explanation, and quit. And I wish all of our bots did that.

Can you help me figure out why this sort order was added?

Thanks! Geo Swan (talk) 22:03, 25 July 2009 (UTC)

Looks like AWB gen fixes is doing this; I am surprised at this, I would expect it only to to add a defaultsort normally if either

1. all cats have the same sort order explicitly
2. some have the name of the page explicitly

Clearly there are other more complex cases where a defaultsort makes sense - if most have the same order, and few or none have implicit sort, and recently it seems that multiword article names are being given a defaultsort too (see below). However I would say it is dangerous to try this with person names. I will refer to the developers. Rich Farmbrough, 12:33, 26 July 2009 (UTC).

P.S. I set the default sort to the article name in this case. Rich Farmbrough, 12:33, 26 July 2009 (UTC).

Thanks for looking into this. If the developers give a public response, could you give me a heads-up? Cheers! Geo Swan (talk) 12:28, 7 August 2009 (UTC)

SmackBot defaultsort question

I have noticed a couple of times that SmackBot has added to articles about acids {{DEFAULTSORT}} in which the sort key has capitalization that doesn't match the title of the article. Here and here are examples. Is there a specific reason for doing this? It seems unnecessary, but probably harmless. I'm just curious mostly. -- Ed (Edgar181) 11:28, 26 July 2009 (UTC)

Yes, it's an WP:AWB general fix, and means that in categories items will be sorted effectively "case insensitively" - they are still listed with their ordinary name, but, for example "TUC commission" would come before "TUC Executive" rather than after it. Rich Farmbrough, 12:21, 26 July 2009 (UTC).

P.S.: Richard...

How goes the base page thing?

The Transhumanist 01:23, 28 July 2009 (UTC)

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InsideNorthside - A North Minneapolis Encyclopedia

Hi, I noticed you've edited some articles related to North Minneapolis and I wanted to tell you about a project I'm involved in called InsideNorthside. It's basically a wikipedia for North Minneapolis, built on wikispaces (which is a bit more user-friendly then mediawiki, though not nearly as robust). Anyways, wanted you to know. I'm trying to find some wiki experts to help build an initial user base for the site. Check it out and let me know what you think. http://insidenorthside.org --Ariahfine (talk) 01:20, 29 July 2009 (UTC)

I'd like to try RfA again. Would you nominate me?

My last one is at Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/The Transhumanist 5

The Transhumanist 03:26, 29 July 2009 (UTC)

How do I get your bot to leave my custom template alone?

Hi – over at Noreen_Connell#References, I substed and then customized a template because I couldn't find an existing one for the message I wanted leave. Unfortunately, SmackBot here seems to keep wanting to "fix" it by forcing it back to the default template. Hence, I'm in a bit of an edit war with a bot. :) Is there any way I can set up my customized template so that your bot will leave it alone? Thanks, Iamcuriousblue (talk) 04:02, 29 July 2009 (UTC)

I imagine it's because you're wrapping it in the <!-- {{Refimprove}} start --> and <!-- {{Refimprove}} end --> comments, which makes bots think that anything in between is a normal {{refimprove}} and fair game. Remove those comments and the bot should leave it alone. Chris Cunningham (not at work) - talk 13:07, 29 July 2009 (UTC)

Yes Chris, that is the purpose of those comments. However the template contains a number of categories, some conditionally, which will be pulled to the bottom of the article and made non-conditional - that that had happened is the reason SB was visiting the page in the first place. These will be the wrong cats anyway if the wording of the template is changed. Rich Farmbrough, 13:20, 29 July 2009 (UTC).

Answered on user's talk page. Rich Farmbrough, 13:20, 29 July 2009 (UTC). Rich Farmbrough, 13:20, 29 July 2009 (UTC).

We're working on something special...

...to award Buaidh for all his hard work.

It's at User:Penubag/Sandbox3.

But it's not done yet. Feel free to help improve it.

I'm hoping that everyone involved with the WP:WPOOK will sign it (please sign without a timestamp).

Thank you.

The Transhumanist 23:02, 29 July 2009 (UTC)

Areas for reform

It's cool that you have added another area, but you have to include a concise description of the problem (like the others). If you are working on this as I write I apologise - it looks as if you added the new area several hours ago but I could be misinterpreting the timestamp of your edit. Slrubenstein | Talk 16:20, 30 July 2009 (UTC)

Thanks! Slrubenstein | Talk 18:18, 30 July 2009 (UTC)

Re: newsletter

I delivered the newsletter by hand using my own mailing list (it's the one I keep up-to-date), and didn't realize that the one I have Julian use was updated independently.

So I've reverted my post, sort of, leaving just a link, and have removed you from my mailing list.

Sorry for the mix up.

By the way, would you like to receive the newsletter as just a link?

The Transhumanist 21:46, 31 July 2009 (UTC)

Defaultsorts on species

G'day Rich,

Please don't capitalise species names in defaultsorts like this. It violates real-world laws of biological nomenclature, and it looks ridiculous. What you are doing here was recommended practice at Wikipedia:Categorization#Using sort keys a while back, but for no good reason, and has since been removed.

Cheers, Hesperian 00:21, 3 August 2009 (UTC)

Ok, we need a special sort for taxonomy categories, as per the discussions at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Categorization#Capitalising_every_word_in_the_defaultsort and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Plants#Scientific_names_in_genus_categories, this can be done, I am going to do Category:Abies as a pilot. With respect though how the default sort looks to a trained biologist is irrelevant since it is not written that way in either the article or the category. It is however likely that a number of binomial article are going to pick up these DEFAULTSORT values without corresponding genus specific sort orders, which is another problem I am trying to avoid - and I have brought up elsewhere - when part of a group is in each style (title case vs. sentence case) the sort order will be broken. Rich Farmbrough, 15:41, 3 August 2009 (UTC).

Of course it goes without saying that I welcome feedback for the biologists, which is why I am going very slowly at the moment. Rich Farmbrough, 15:46, 3 August 2009 (UTC).

Abies looks good. I previously did Category:Banksia taxa by scientific name, which is a good example of mixing case. Hesperian 23:13, 3 August 2009 (UTC) I was using banksia as an example, but the Drydana stuff queers the pitch. Inevitable I got sidetracked on fixing up the Fir article and can see a lot of other work that needs doing to get common names indexed. I'll do a couple more categories. Rich Farmbrough, 23:17, 3 August 2009 (UTC).

"and am happy to do them all if there are no objections." <grin> There aren't many editors here who would so blithely take on a project involving tens of thousands of articles. Hesperian 23:36, 3 August 2009 (UTC)

SmackBot

Regarding Shortland Street 2000 storyline - this piece was missing in the storylines for the soap and I reinstated by researching the previous writing on Wiki. The problem I have is that the box which normally appears at the top somehow got shunted towards the bottom above the cast list. Only references are those duplicated from similiar pages. user:Tuiland Tuiland 03:13, 3 August 2009 (UTC)

—Preceding unsigned comment added by Tuiland (talk • contribs) 03:09, 3 August 2009 (UTC) 

SmackBot, month transitions and UTC

Rich, here's an interesting situation. I added a {{cn|date=August 2009}} at 19:34 CDT (UTC -5) on 31 July 2009[133] and labeled it as August because the time was 00:34 UTC 1 August. SmackBot changed it to July.[134] I'm making several assumptions here, including that my math is correct, that timestamps for Wikipedia should generally go by UTC and that SmackBot isn't taking that into account. It's probably not a big deal in this case. ✤ JonHarder ^talk 17:58, 3 August 2009 (UTC)

I see you had a previous message on this same thing and you are aware of it. ✤ JonHarder ^talk 18:04, 3 August 2009 (UTC)

Dating tags

Thank you for your comment on my talk page.

I would be quite happy to look at current problem pages.

Incidently, what I have actually been doing is a bit more than just dating the tags! I have looked at the list of unsourced articles with no date, and then following the rules below:

1. If the article is obviously suitable for a Speedy Delete (none so far!) then I would nominate it as such
2. I try to find 2 (or at least 1) suitable citation (and/or suitable external links), and if found, cite these and then change the tag to Refimprove|date=month year
3. If I cannot find any, and feel that it is suitable for a PROD, I'll insert that
4. If I can't find any, but the article seems suitable for inclusion in the encyclopedia, I will change the unreferenced tag to include the date

As you can see from my history, sometimes I do find citations, and often I find that this prods others into finding more (as they obviously appear on their watch list!) - and sometimes I will leave a message on the relevant WikiProject talk page asking for the project's members to help find citations (especially if the article is about a non-English-language subject)

Anyway, once again, yes I'd be happy to look at current problem pages.

Incidently, I did put a request on the 'bot request page, but since you are its owner, I might as well ask you: is it possible for it to change any tags that say "|Date=" to "|date="? Or does it do that, and I've just come across a few before it had changed them?

Regards, -- PhantomSteve (Contact Me, My Contribs) 18:02, 3 August 2009 (UTC)

SmackBot

please refer to other similar pages and then start editing . Also include those images if you dint possess.

DEFAULTSORT on species again

Dude, what gives? You're still capitalising the specific epithet.[135]. Did I misunderstand your response?

The only reason to capitalise every word is enforce case-insensitive sort order, and the suggestion that we would always want to do so is deprecated.

Hesperian 03:55, 4 August 2009 (UTC)

Don't I even get a reply then? You're just going to keep doing it because you want to?[136][137][138][139][140][141].... Hesperian 04:32, 4 August 2009 (UTC)

Roger that. Hesperian 05:08, 4 August 2009 (UTC)

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Delivered by SoxBot (talk) at 05:52, 4 August 2009 (UTC)

SmackBot

In this edit of Hard water, SmackBot changes °f to °F. Citing the version before SmackBot's: "** French degrees (°f) (letter to be written in lowercase to avoid confusion with degree Fahrenheit — not always adhered to)". Iceblock (talk) 13:55, 4 August 2009 (UTC)

Suggestion for the preloaded SmackBot message

If you like, you might change the first "Leave a message" link on User talk:SmackBot by adding &preloadtitle=SmackBot and reword User_talk:Rich_Farmbrough/SmackBot_Message accordingly. This will preload "SmackBot" into the Subject/headline field. Not a big difference, but it will show up as (→SmackBot: new section) in the history and in watchlists. Just a suggestion. Iceblock (talk) 14:20, 4 August 2009 (UTC)

Cool thanks. Rich Farmbrough, 14:22, 4 August 2009 (UTC).

Apparently pointless listas parameter

Is there some purpose I'm not seeing to your recent edits such as this? Now that wgCategoryPrefixedDefaultSortkey is set to false, Talk:Lady Pank sorts as "Lady Pank" by default anyway. Algebraist 18:50, 4 August 2009 (UTC)

Ah that's interesting. But yes there is. WPBiog articles (talk pages) are all categorised as either "with" or "without" listas parameters. A few months ago there were approximately 400,000 "without" - since these are mainly peoples names most will not be default so they cannot be set easily. However many have been one way or another, and we are now down to about 44,000 "without" - explicitly setting the parameter for those cases where there is no effect enables others to see the wood for the trees - and in this case I am doing a lot of musical groups, some have minor changes from the default. there are also a number of bots User:ListasBot and another setting DEFAULTSORT for the article where it can. Rich Farmbrough, 19:02, 4 August 2009 (UTC).

Thanks, I thought it might be something along those lines. Algebraist 20:22, 4 August 2009 (UTC)

Move from impasse

Please have a look at Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard/Incidents#Request_to_revoke_sanction and the background discussion linked there. Perhaps you could give me an idea on how to attain my goal here? Debresser (talk) 18:53, 4 August 2009 (UTC)

John E. Hamm

Hi, You seem to also be interested in this topic.

Would you be kind enough to look at this article's John E. Hamm's discussion section and if you agree with me that Bearcat may be being unreasonable could you let me know.

Russ John5Russell3Finley (talk) 19:43, 4 August 2009 (UTC)

very urgent

Hi this is a cool dude calling for a special attention to nadar (caste)article. the list of notable personalities contains weasel words and names that cant be found not alone in the wiki but also in entire google data base. special deletion and auto deletion of such crap should be maintaintedProtecting (talk) 00:02, 5 August 2009 (UTC)§

Argentine films

Note I am in the middle of working on these, films 1980 -present I have to sort out. Dr. Blofeld ^{White cat} 17:57, 5 August 2009 (UTC)

PLease stop. this removed our standard sidebar templates which should be there for the lists, move the footer templates if needs be. I am reverting all of your edits on these lists until you bother to reply. Dr. Blofeld ^{White cat} 18:24, 5 August 2009 (UTC)

OK that's fine. Rich Farmbrough, 18:30, 5 August 2009 (UTC).

Please restore {{Argentinefilms}} to the top of the lists. If needs be remove the footer templates entirely from the lists anyway but please don't remove the side templates. Dr. Blofeld ^{White cat} 18:27, 5 August 2009 (UTC)

(Edit conflict)

Done. Hoever the footer navbox has more links and the sidebar really breaks up the flow of the page, see List_of_Argentine_films_of_1956, or is the plan that these two tables will be integrated? Rich Farmbrough, 18:41, 5 August 2009 (UTC).

Sorry to yell at you! My watchlist just lit up like a Christmas tree that's all!!. I appreciate that you are moving the templates with spacing. For those lists if you want to remove the footer templates for Argentina entirely for the lists no probs as the side templates serve the purpose for navigaiton. As for the other articles, continue with your good fixes! Dr. Blofeld ^{White cat} 18:35, 5 August 2009 (UTC).

OK, I understand how these things happen. I will return to the lists later. Rich Farmbrough, 18:42, 5 August 2009 (UTC).

Yeah its a tricky one as the sideplates are most useful for navigation on the lists but they do affect the flow of the tables unfortunately.... Eventually though the idea is that the templates are split by letter so it should be sorted eventually... Dr. Blofeld ^{White cat} 18:46, 5 August 2009 (UTC)

Just in case you had any doubts about a lot of the short stubs on the films the goal eventually is to have every article looking like La Guerra Gaucha. Unfourtunately there are few too many people working on Argentine cinema so the better articles tend to be the most recent ones... Dr. Blofeld ^{White cat} 21:56, 5 August 2009 (UTC)

I accept

The Transhumanist 01:41, 6 August 2009 (UTC)

Did you ever figure out...

...why AWB was applying the completely wrong code to some pages? (During your French commune task). I also had my bot do something peculiar on a page, that wasn't possible with the instructions it was given [142]. I've come to the conclusion that it was text meant for another page, but why did it get erroneously placed?... Bug report maybe... Not sure how to duplicate though! –xeno^talk 21:24, 6 August 2009 (UTC)

Yes sort of, it happened again using Ver 4.9, which I had compiled locally. I assumed it was a failed attempt at threading, and have just (like 5 minutes ago) re-synced my SVN version with the developers. What version are you using? Rich Farmbrough, 21:29, 6 August 2009 (UTC).

Hm... I think in the diff above that was using 4.9 rev 5122. –xeno^talk 21:30, 6 August 2009 (UTC)

A request

Rich, could you have smack bot go through this new article, Stealth technology as a pliable electromagnetic envelope when it has the chance. Ti-30X (talk) 04:52, 7 August 2009 (UTC)

In case you already read this, another editor says he is taking care of the small corrections that need to be done. So I guess I don't need to request a bot. Thanks anyway.Ti-30X (talk) 05:03, 7 August 2009 (UTC)

Well, since you are already there - thank you very much. The bot will save us a lot of work. Ti-30X (talk) 05:24, 7 August 2009 (UTC)

Well I can run AWB against it and do some general fixes. Those were just my copyedits. Rich Farmbrough, 05:30, 7 August 2009 (UTC).

Rich, whatever you feel like doing is OK by me. However, if you are busy with other stuff, don't worry about it. I agree with the title you chose for the article. I replied on the talk page. It is a much more appropriate title. I say, let's do it and get it over with, so we can move on (I hope you don't mind me saying that). Ti-30X (talk) 14:41, 7 August 2009 (UTC)

SmackBot

Well Known Person —Preceding unsigned comment added by 202.125.156.122 (talk) 14:22, 7 August 2009 (UTC)

Tasks

Yep, there is a lot to do certainly. Any chance you can merge the pages like Oriya films of 1969 into a List of Oriya films or at least by decade like Oriya films of the 1960s or something. As it is those pages are inadequate. Unfortunately a lot of Indian editors get over excited with lists like Bollywood films of 1970 and try to emulate them even if they are started devoid of real content All of the year pages for Oriya films should be deleted I think as the list is compiled on List of Oriya films. Dr. Blofeld ^{White cat} 16:40, 7 August 2009 (UTC)

Nice one, if needs be later they can be split by decade but definately not by year just yet... Thanks. Dr. Blofeld ^{White cat} 17:13, 7 August 2009 (UTC)

There is one more request actually, sorry to slow your film sorting errands down... As you may be aware a number of German politician articles started recently were deleted. However mine remain as I am sloughly ploughing through them manually, its exceedingly tough... I woundered if you could use AWB to remove the German wikipedia reference and replace it with the national party reference and fix layout like this. It doesn't have to be external linked yet but that would initially help to solve the BLP problem that was created. See List of German Christian Democratic Union politicians, so far I've replaced it from the beginning of A to Konrad Birkholz. Could you use AWB to add it to the rest like this, this would solve the initial problem and although they would still all be lacking at least they can be built upon? Over time then the specific page links on the CDU website or other references can be added. It is just to solve the initial problem.... Dr. Blofeld ^{White cat} 17:18, 7 August 2009 (UTC)

Yes thats's right. If you see how much content is missing from German wikipedia in general you can see why there suddenly seemed a rush to try to start the mass of missing content. I learned the hard way though that it is not a good idea, partly why I've set up a new project to try to encourage morre editors to activcely translate and raise awareness of articles on other wikis. All of the articles started are immediately verifiable and can be expanded fully, it is just soooo much to do... Dr. Blofeld ^{White cat} 17:25, 7 August 2009 (UTC)

Awesome, your awareness of, well everything on here and what needs doing is second to none!! Dr. Blofeld ^{White cat} 17:27, 7 August 2009 (UTC)

The birth date is taken from the German wikipedia. Every politician or major party member who was or is a part of the party is mentioned on the CDU website or regional site. When they come to be filled out it will just be a case then of finding the exact url link.. and filling them out more fully... Dr. Blofeld ^{White cat} 17:42, 7 August 2009 (UTC)

Such a shame that WikiProject Germany is very unresponsive on here. All of the articles can be quickly expanded like Andreas Birkmann, sadly 99% of potential editors work on German wikipedia who might show an interest. Dr. Blofeld ^{White cat} 18:17, 7 August 2009 (UTC)

That will be fine. Thanks. Don't remove the see also list of politicians though, eventually they will be worth visiting... Dr. Blofeld ^{White cat} 19:18, 7 August 2009 (UTC)

take a look

Rich, if you haven't seen it, take a look at the title and then the talk page over at Stealth technology as a pliable electromagnetic envelope. Unbelievable! One user tried to revert your (our) move and ended up with an extended title Ti-30X (talk) 00:16, 8 August 2009 (UTC)

Moving Stealth technology as a pliable electromagnetic envelope

I do appreciate your help with that article. Have you read my comment on it's talk page regarding the naming? I hoped you could reply before moving. Materialscientist (talk) 00:29, 8 August 2009 (UTC)

Just saw your note regarding the move. I understand moving back as a technical matter (fixing previous move) and that you don't mind which name is chosen. If so, please ignore my previous message. Materialscientist (talk) 00:37, 8 August 2009 (UTC)

DEFAULTSORT on species AGAIN

I'm starting to get very pissed off with you. There is no consensus for what you are doing. There is no guideline that recommends it. There is expressed opposition to it.

You seem to be pretending to engage in discussion whilst actually going on your merry way doing whatever the fuck you want.

Stop capitalising species epithets in defaultsort until you have secured consensus to do so, or I'll be taking formal dispute resolution steps regarding this.

Hesperian 05:36, 8 August 2009 (UTC)

Recommended reading: Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/Date delinking#Fait accompli:

"Editors who collectively or individually make large numbers of similar edits, and who are apprised that those edits are controversial or disputed, are expected to attempt to resolve the dispute through discussion. It is inappropriate to use repetition or volume to present opponents with a fait accompli or to exhaust their ability to contest the change. This applies to many editors making a few edits each, as well as a few editors making many edits."

This is, in my view, preciately what you are doing here. Hesperian 05:56, 8 August 2009 (UTC)

{{italictitle}}

This edit wasn't needed - the taxobox doesn't have a "name" parameter and therefore the title was already in italics. Smartse (talk) 22:44, 7 August 2009 (UTC)

Ah, I see you've done it to lots of other articles too....

Thanks for helping to change the titles to italics. I've been doing it to any that I find for a few months but it's going to take quite a while longer. For the majority you can just remove "name" from the taxobox from my experience. Smartse (talk) 00:30, 8 August 2009 (UTC)

I guess that the easiest way would be to see if the part of the name before the bracketed section like (isopod) is present in the binomial or genus section of the taxobox. Whether you can do that automatically or not I'm not sure. Smartse (talk) 22:05, 8 August 2009 (UTC)

SmackBot introducing newlines

For some reason, SmackBot inserted a newline into the title of a citation template at [Exabyte], thus breaking the reference. Is this a bug? Shreevatsa (talk) 17:27, 8 August 2009 (UTC)

Yes, thanks. Rich Farmbrough, 17:47, 8 August 2009 (UTC).

AWB listas edit

Hi there, I had to amend your AWB edit here, which for some reason removed all of the page's content, and added the WP:WPNZ banner to the talk page (dc Talk is not related to New Zealand). JamieS93 ^{be kind to newcomers} 20:46, 8 August 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for that. Hopefully this bug is in the past. Rich Farmbrough, 22:30, 8 August 2009 (UTC).

Negative index metamaterials

Rich, I thought I had the other editors organized to re-work the introduction together, but now one has put up a merger tag for the stealth section. This was a nice try, but the whole process is really bogged down. What do you think happened? My other question is this - Can I use the material that is not stealth related and unilaterly start another aritcle? (Controlling EM fields, negative refractive index, etc. etc. This is the material that I am most concerned with. This is the material that I worked hardest to understand and write about. Go ahead and reply here, and I will return. Thanks for all your help thus far. Ti-30X (talk) 22:35, 8 August 2009 (UTC)

Or should I just propose it to the group that this be a stand alone article. There are other merger tags that have been posted in the other sections. Ti-30X (talk) 22:54, 8 August 2009 (UTC)

Well there needs to be (should be) a merger discussion. It's best not to make a content fork, so if you want to take material to another article, it is best to move it and leave either a summary and a pointer Like {{Detail}} or a suitable see-also depending on the content being moved. Going back to your first point, what happened was that the article was a little essay like I suppose, also the information in it is desirable and well sourced (otherwise it would have been either ignored or at least tagged to death with "cite needed" ). I will try an look in on the article later and see what is happening. Rich Farmbrough, 23:04, 8 August 2009 (UTC).

Just so you know, the merger tags do invite discussion. It is not just merger now and see ya later. It seems that article is difficult for other editors to work with, so I can accept that. And great, look in when you have time. Ti-30X (talk) 23:31, 8 August 2009 (UTC)

Corella (bird)

Corella is a common name for a genus (or sub-genus) and it is not in italics, so I have reverted your edit. There may be a lot of taxa which have a common name which is used as the title of an article, and as far as I am aware, none of these should be in italics. "Corella" in the heading of the taxobox is not in italics, and perhaps a bot or perhaps regex in AWB would be able to automatically detect this. Snowman (talk) 18:21, 9 August 2009 (UTC)

SmackBot

Smack is moving References to below See Also. Up to now, it has always been above. Is this a change of policy pl? TerriersFan (talk) 23:43, 9 August 2009 (UTC)

Hi, in this dif, I don't think Smack should have moved the References section. TerriersFan (talk) 00:57, 10 August 2009 (UTC)

New template for SmackBot

Template:Allplot

I did some work on it and its talkpage, added it to Wikipedia:List of monthly maintenance categories with templates and dated all articles that used it without a date parameter (by checking with the articles' history).

Debresser (talk) 11:34, 10 August 2009 (UTC)

Template:Inappropriate tone you already have, but since it is protected, could you please change it to:

<!--{{Inappropriate tone}} start-->{{ ambox | type = style | text = This {{{1|article}}}'s '''[[WP:TONE|tone]] or style may not be appropriate for Wikipedia'''. Specific concerns may be found on the [[{{TALKPAGENAME}}|talk page]]. See Wikipedia's [[Wikipedia:Guide to writing better articles|guide to writing better articles]] for suggestions. {{#if:{{{date|}}}|<small>''({{{date}}})''</small>}} }}{{DMCA|Wikipedia articles needing style editing|from|{{{date|}}}|All articles needing style editing}}<!--{{Inappropriate tone}} end--><noinclude>{{documentation}}</noinclude>

Recentism

Could you change this protected template to

<!--{{Recentism}} begin-->{{ambox | type = content | image = [[Image:Gnome globe current event.svg|50x40px]] | imageright = [[Image:Unbalanced scales.svg|none|50x40px]] | text = This {{{1|article or section}}} '''may be [[Wikipedia:Recentism|slanted towards recent events]].''' Please try to keep recent events in historical perspective. {{#if:{{{date|}}}|<small>''({{{date}}})''</small>}} }}{{DMCA|Articles slanted towards recent events|from|{{{date|}}}}}<!--{{Recentism}} end--><noinclude>{{documentation}}</noinclude>

I think that should do the same. It is an article template, according to the docpage. Debresser (talk) 15:33, 10 August 2009 (UTC)

Make progress

Please notice I created Category:Statements with common sense issues and Template:Statements with common sense issues progress. A little overactive of me, perhaps, but not any worse than Category:Articles needing chemical formulas and Template:Articles needing chemical formulas progress. One has to start small, doesn't one? Debresser (talk) 15:50, 10 August 2009 (UTC)

Please note that I renamed {{Csense}} to {{Common sense}}. Debresser (talk) 15:54, 10 August 2009 (UTC)

Deleted templates

Template:Intro-disambig, Template:Obscure. Debresser (talk) 15:06, 10 August 2009 (UTC)

Also deleted are Template:English source, Template:Improve references (small), and Template:Said (I remember that discussion). Debresser (talk) 21:49, 10 August 2009 (UTC)

Asal

Hi
Since I moved Asal to Asal (film), can you please fix all the existing links to Asal . It is an AWB job I think.. Dr. Blofeld ^{White cat} 15:44, 10 August 2009 (UTC)

The move was reverted, so this request is now irrelevant. I guard Rich's time carefully. Debresser (talk) 21:52, 10 August 2009 (UTC)

List of Nazi Party members/toc

what's the purpose of that page? Carlossuarez46 (talk) 17:57, 10 August 2009 (UTC)

SmackBot

Hello Rich Farmbrough

I did not find any problem at the SmackBot remark.

Best Regards Valueyou (talk) 19:48, 10 August 2009 (UTC)

Could you make a list for me?

Could you make a list of all the articles that contain

{{Infobox journal}},{{Infobox Journal}} ,{{Infobox Academic Conference}}, {{Infobox Magazine}}, {{Academic-journal-stub}},{{journal-stub}}, {{humanities-journal-stub}}, {{sci-journal-stub}}, {{biology-journal-stub}}, {{chem-journal-stub}}, {{engineering-journal-stub}}, {{med-journal-stub}}, {{physics-journal-stub}}, {{socialscience-journal-stub}} (and their redirects)

is that something that Perl can do? if yes then mail the list to the email listed on my user page (you have to answer a captcha first). Thanks--Tim1357 (talk) 22:00, 10 August 2009 (UTC)

Oh im sory it looks like the task i was going to do is already being done. Thanks anyways.

re Music Council of Australia edit

This edit deleted all reference links etc to the MCAs own website. Hardly a balanced POV. Neither is the suggestion to rewrite my own words in my own words. Perhaps I need to invent a new language so as not to use any words that may have been used by others. Yergnaws (talk) 23:39, 10 August 2009 (UTC)

Deprecated template

Somebody tried to deprecate Template:Section rewrite. He did a good job, since it is not in use in any article any more. But when he put the notice of its deprecation, he put in on the template's talkpage. Would you care to do it the right way? Debresser (talk) 23:53, 10 August 2009 (UTC)

SmackBot

SmackBot is moving the template {{More footnotes}} from the top, where it should be, to the references section - it's done it twice recently, eg Finnish Army. Could you please look at this? Regards Buckshot06(prof) 02:24, 11 August 2009 (UTC)

I have noticed that in most articles this template is on top, but quite often it is at the beginning of the references section. Now, I have to consider the possibility that such was SmackBot's doing. I personally agree with the previous editor, that the top of the article is the best place, even for this template that concerns references. Debresser (talk) 02:42, 11 August 2009 (UTC)

Yes, there is another one that rightfully does belong down there, I think maybe AWB is a little overzealous, I'll check it out. Rich Farmbrough, 03:27, 11 August 2009 (UTC).

Which one would that be? Debresser (talk) 09:12, 11 August 2009 (UTC)

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Delivered by SoxBot (talk) at 05:13, 11 August 2009 (UTC)

Colon

All the articles you just created contain one colon too many, which means that they don't subst. 94.212.31.237 (talk) 12:08, 11 August 2009 (UTC)

The only thing I see at Al-Ghaydah al-Khadra' is the subst line. I saw one or two more, IIRC, so I assumed there was a general error, but then I saw some articles that came out right. 94.212.31.237 (talk) 12:16, 11 August 2009 (UTC)

Yemen

Thanks for fixing that Asal yesterday. There is one thing. I had anticipated that Anome would be able to add the coordinates to the articles in the sub categories of Category:Cities, towns and villages in Yemen. However he tells me his bot is case sensitive. Could you move all of the pages in lower casing to capitals? So Abu diyan would become Abu Diyan etc. I think it is correct that place names are capitalised anyway, right? Dr. Blofeld ^{White cat} 09:20, 11 August 2009 (UTC)

Hi. Article needing changing include Category:Cities, towns and villages in the Hadhramaut Governorate. and Category:Cities, towns and villages in the San‘a’ Governorate. They were only started in lower casing because the lists were generated by a site which has them in lower casing! Dr. Blofeld ^{White cat} 13:22, 11 August 2009 (UTC)

Ah the thing is don't we have duplicate articles now? Wouldn't it have been best to move the pages? E.g move Abu diyan to Abu Diyan? I meant something like this Dr. Blofeld ^{White cat} 13:24, 11 August 2009 (UTC)

I'm a little confused at your method.. As long as all of the lower casing articles have redirects rather than double articles in the end OK. Having double articles at present though seems to be a litttle confusing...!. Dr. Blofeld ^{White cat} 15:00, 11 August 2009 (UTC)

I've done Abyan anyway... Dr. Blofeld ^{White cat} 15:20, 11 August 2009 (UTC)

Ah, I see what you did now. Thanks for your help. Dr. Blofeld ^{White cat} 16:53, 11 August 2009 (UTC)

ace double jokes

dear sir - not quite sure what you did - did you just delete the jokes or move them to separate article ? Politely suggest prev version better Cinnamon colbert (talk) 13:51, 11 August 2009 (UTC)

Answered on user's talk page. Rich Farmbrough, 15:55, 12 August 2009 (UTC).

SmackBot

Hi. Thanks for the good work. Why is SmackBot removing the day from {{cite news}} on South Uist? I think a newspaper citation should have the full date, not just the month. Finavon (talk) 20:37, 11 August 2009 (UTC)

You are, of course, correct. Rich Farmbrough, 20:50, 11 August 2009 (UTC).

empty cat

Hi, do we need Category:OS articles with publication dates needing sources ? If so, what does "OS" mean? John Vandenberg ^(chat) 11:30, 12 August 2009 (UTC)

Well, no, since the template that used it was redirected [143], breaking that functionality, so that I had to fix Template:Infobox_OS_version another way.. sigh. Both the cat and the template can go. Rich Farmbrough, 15:54, 12 August 2009 (UTC).

Coord missing

I was suprised to find Category:Articles needing coordinates without any monthly subcategories. Then I noticed that this category is populated by 3 templates. 2 of them are talkpage templates that could add a dated category, but are not in use. Template:Coord missing is very much in use, but doesn't provide a dated category. Do you think that should be changed? Debresser (talk) 00:01, 11 August 2009 (UTC)

BTW, why doesn't SmackBot date Template:Locate me? See e.g. Talk:Dogali. And what about Template:LocateMeLong? Debresser (talk) 00:10, 11 August 2009 (UTC)

And where are those 7 undated articles in Template:Articles needing coordinates progress? I don't see them. If those are the 4 subcategories, 2 Wikipedia pages, and 1 article page, then that is not good. It should not list subcategories or Wikipedia pages. The same goes for all "progress" templates. Debresser (talk) 00:19, 11 August 2009 (UTC)

Rich? Debresser (talk) 22:23, 12 August 2009 (UTC)

OK this is something I meant to look in to. Locate me is more or less deprecated. I was dating Co-oord missing, but Alai said it was breaking their bot. IN terms of caluclating the undated numbers then I have built a fiddle factor into the progress vbocx template for that, if there's a better way, let me know. Rich Farmbrough, 22:27, 12 August 2009 (UTC).

If I knew what you are talking about, I would be happy to help. Sorry. :) But I do understand the other two things. That you had a good reason not to date {{Coord missing}}. Actually, it is a bad reason, but not you are to be blamed. And could you please add {{Locate me}} and {{LocateMeLong}}? Even though they are indeed almost not used any more, they are still not officially deprecated, and it is just plain sloppy to leave them like this. I do not mean that your are sloppy, but the fact looks sloppy. Unless you'd like to officially deprecate them. I have no problem with that either. Debresser (talk) 22:39, 12 August 2009 (UTC)

I did just that: deprecated {{Locate me}} and {{Locate me long}}. I added the {{Tdeprecated}} templated to them, and removed all (three) instances, replacing them by {{Coord missing}}. Debresser (talk) 00:54, 13 August 2009 (UTC)

Distance conversions

Hi, I noticed you've been adding miles to km conversions to various French articles. As the km is the unit of measurement in France, wouldn't these be better if they were km to miles conversions? Mjroots (talk) 04:55, 13 August 2009 (UTC)

Yes, but the original measurement is in miles, for whatever reason - while converting to km and back to miles will always give the same numbers (the same is not true if you convert from km to miles and back, for example 7 km => 4 miles => 6 km) the meaning is different: about 3 miles means between 4023 and 5633 metres, whereas about 5 km means between 4500 adn 5500m. If someone were able to source the km versions of these (some articles have them anyway) then I would say don't add the miles. Also a lot use the once (and maybe still) WP deprecated spelling "meter". Rich Farmbrough, 13:07, 13 August 2009 (UTC).

"Meter" is the US spelling of metre. Mjroots (talk) 15:06, 13 August 2009 (UTC)

I am aware. Should not be used on French articles! However atone point (though I think not now) WP house style was for the "re" ending. Simlilarly they followed the scientific community using "sulfur" (US) and "aluminium" (international) - these have now i think given way to using localised spellings where "apropriate". Rich Farmbrough, 15:25, 13 August 2009 (UTC).

SmackBot

Hi, You said you knew Roy. who are you and how did you know him? J —Preceding unsigned comment added by 213.253.54.130 (talk) 13:03, 14 August 2009 (UTC)

No, if you look carefully at the history that was someone else. Rich Farmbrough, 14:21, 14 August 2009 (UTC).

DYK for Negative index metamaterials

On August 15, 2009, Did you know? was updated with a fact from the article Negative index metamaterials, which you created or substantially expanded. You are welcome to check how many hits your article got while on the front page (here's how) and add it to DYKSTATS if it got over 5,000. If you know of another interesting fact from a recently created article, then please suggest it on the Did you know? talk page.

King of ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠ 14:14, 15 August 2009 (UTC)

Minor suggestion

In Template:Article issues, perhaps change It contains a '''plot summary''' that is too long compared to the rest of the article. to It contains a '''[[Wikipedia:How to write a plot summary|plot summary]]''' that is too long compared to the rest of the article.

 Done ? Rich Farmbrough, 16:22, 19 August 2009 (UTC).

Delete

I think we realy should delete Wikipedia:List of monthly maintenance categories lower case. Debresser (talk) 00:28, 11 August 2009 (UTC)

It claims that SmackBot picks up articles from here. It couldn't do that otherwise? I find that hard to believe. Debresser (talk) 00:31, 11 August 2009 (UTC)

I updated it anyway (together with Wikipedia:List of empty monthly maintenance categories and Wikipedia:List of missing monthly maintenance categories, that both do not work) from Wikipedia:List of monthly maintenance categories, which I have seriously updated today. Debresser (talk) 00:36, 11 August 2009 (UTC)

 Done was more useful before the invalid date category. Rich Farmbrough, 16:22, 19 August 2009 (UTC).

Fixed

I fixed Wikipedia:List of empty monthly maintenance categories, through Template:WMCSBM5 and (mainly) Template:EmptyMonths. But I have a problem.

That there are still blue (non-redlinked) categories in Wikipedia:List of empty monthly maintenance categories is normal. Those are categories that exist, but are empty, like e.g. Category:User-created public domain images without user-name from February 2009. But there are also some categories that were empty untill recently, e.g. Category:Articles needing coordinates from July 2009, which I created yesterday. But there are also categories that are far from empty, e.g. Category:Articles with disputed statements from July 2009. It just happens to be that all those are the very same categories that were previously at "since", and were created by us a few month ago. Do you get what is going on here? Debresser (talk) 10:44, 11 August 2009 (UTC)

Ok. I found the problem. It is not a matter of "since". From a certain point onwards, it just lists all categories. Appearently some overflow. This is indicated also by Category:Pages with too many expensive parser function calls. See Wikipedia:Template_limits#Expensive_parser_function_calls that 500 is the limit. When I put the first few categories in remark tags, the beginning of the remaining categories worked perfectly. Do you have a solution? Debresser (talk) 10:51, 11 August 2009 (UTC)

Only solution is to split the page up I am afraid. Rich Farmbrough, 10:55, 11 August 2009 (UTC).

I'll leave that to you. I'm content having fixed Template:EmptyMonths, and - basically - Wikipedia:List of empty monthly maintenance categories. Debresser (talk) 11:00, 11 August 2009 (UTC)

I fixed Wikipedia:List of missing monthly maintenance categories, (mainly) through Template:DeletedMonths/month. I even added a missing dated category to Point Valid to see if it works. Debresser (talk) 11:05, 11 August 2009 (UTC)

BTW, note that this page is twice as "expensive" as the previous one, because it uses both PAGESINCATEGORY and #ifexist. Debresser (talk) 12:02, 11 August 2009 (UTC)

No complements for the good work here? Debresser (talk) 22:46, 12 August 2009 (UTC)

Answered on user's talk page. Rich Farmbrough, 16:22, 19 August 2009 (UTC).

Al-Ma`Mar

Saw the new page - just wondering whether the ` symbol is what is normally used for names like this? Any reason not to use the ' ? ninety:one 16:30, 12 August 2009 (UTC) )

Answered on user's talk page. Rich Farmbrough, 16:22, 19 August 2009 (UTC).

Barnstar

		The Geography Barnstar
		For moving Yemeni articles to their proper title instead of replacing them with "THHEY FASCISTS!!!!11111!!!!!" I dream of horses If you reply here, please leave me a {{Talkback}} message on my talk page. @ 16:53, 12 August 2009 (UTC)

Thank you kindly. Rich Farmbrough, 16:22, 19 August 2009 (UTC).

Yes I second that, thanks for your help! Yes I noticed unfortunately that the governorate link linked to Egypt not Yemen about 3/4 through. Always something! Obviously it should be linked to Governorates of Yemen not Egypt! Dr. Blofeld ^{White cat} 20:03, 12 August 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for that. I've spotted that most of the articles on Union Councils in Pakistan are also about the village. Could you use AWB to add Category:Cities, towns and villages in Jhelum District to the articles in Category:Union Councils of Jhelum District and any other district. As it stands a lot of articles we already have on settlements are not categorised as such. Actually you could kill two birds with one stone and replace punjab-geo stub with Jhelum-geo-stub etc. That would be useful. Dr. Blofeld ^{White cat} 12:12, 13 August 2009 (UTC)

There is also gross abuse of File:Coat of arms of Pakistan.svg in many articles on towns. Completely redundant. Do you think you could remove it from all articles except the generic ones. E.g here. ON a lot of places too they have the flag of region which again is redundant on settlement articles. The paramteres are intended to display specific city flags not national ones. Otherwise every settlement article in the United States wuld have the American flag and state flag in big at the top. Annoying, Dr. Blofeld ^{White cat} 15:42, 13 August 2009 (UTC)

If you are busy let me know, I'll see if Ser Amantio can do it. Dr. Blofeld ^{White cat} 17:51, 13 August 2009 (UTC)

OK, the thing is though on rare occasions there are actually the official flags and coat of arms in the template. Most of the time time though it is the regional ones as you can see by the large number of articles. Dr. Blofeld ^{White cat} 19:54, 13 August 2009 (UTC)

I've made a proposal at Wikipedia:Templates for deletion/Log/2009 August 11 to merge the tehsil and union council templates into the Pakistani city template. They are practically identical paramters and it is pointless having seperate templates as a slight modification can be made to the main Pakistani templates to include them. See my proposal to User talk:Jack Merridew#Slight edit needed. The idea is that if it is a tehsil divsion you add tehsil=yes and it will display a blue bar in the template. All that would need doing is to change the name of the Pakistani city template to Template:Infobox Pakistani location. I know you made some editrs yesterday fixing the city name but please let me know what you think. Personally I don't like the idea of having too many unnecessary templates hanging around when you can simply use the same one. An example see Bagnotar, template looks crap to me. The Infobox Pakistan city template should be used. I would of course require your assistance to replace the tehsil and union council templates with the standard Pakistani city (location) template once the docemtation is added, which shouldn't take a minute.. I'll give you some peace then!! Dr. Blofeld ^{White cat} 13:01, 14 August 2009 (UTC)

Dreadful, I know. Some of the worst geo articles on wikipedia this is why it caught my attention as they desperately need sorting out and cleanup. At least most of the African geo stubs with the exception of Nigeria don't contain lots of bad english and lots of names in capital letters of dubious notability. Bangladesh and Pakistan, followed by India are by far the worst settlement articles on wikipedia. These countries attract a number of ip and new one off editors who barely read english and are not aware of requirements. Dr. Blofeld ^{White cat} 15:19, 14 August 2009 (UTC) Perfect example of the sorts of editors these pages get. This one from Lahore. I swear they teach Pakistanis and Bangladeshis in the shcools to type in cap locks. This kind of capital list really bugs me, looks hideously ugly. Dr. Blofeld ^{White cat} 15:25, 14 August 2009 (UTC)

Check out this. The state of these articles.... Dr. Blofeld ^{White cat} 17:26, 14 August 2009 (UTC)

Mmm maybe we ought to mention it on the noticeboard as requiring serious attention. We need at least 10 editors to go through Pakistan and Bangladesh articles and just remove all these bad edits. It wouldn't be so bad if it was just a few but it is a high percentage of articles which are just really appalling. Dr. Blofeld ^{White cat} 17:40, 14 August 2009 (UTC)

46%? Try 76% at least. With all due respect I have doubts in the running behind the project. From my experience I know of only two or three editors like Mr. Shahib, Brian Lara and another guy who do quality work. The majority of the members appear to be the itinerants who pop in once in a blue moon and make no real edits or quality edits. The rest are IPs and people who barely speak english. Same with the Bangladeshi project. At least you do get some evidence of peopl who speak english badly trying their best to add information but a scary amount of editors like to reel off like 100 local businesses, 200 schools and 300 local businessmen and leaders in capital letters mostly and think this is a good edit. A huge spick and span is needed, Pakistan and Bangladesh are the worst, rural India is also extremely bad. All sorts of stray IPs from villages add their POV "it is a beautiful village, famous" that sort of thing I'm sure you've seen it too. Dr. Blofeld ^{White cat} 19:46, 14 August 2009 (UTC)

Real headache material. Why can't all of the articles look like Harappa and have a standard infobox like that. It is far from perfect and needs a major copyedit but at least it looks above bog standard. I'm taking a break from Pakistan.... Dr. Blofeld ^{White cat} 20:42, 14 August 2009 (UTC)

I'm seriously considering nuking the district template too see the nmess it creates on Rahim Yar Khan District. Dr. Blofeld ^{White cat} 20:48, 14 August 2009 (UTC)

Email

Rich, ironically I just sent you an email regarding this article. You will see that it was necessary to email you. Please read it as soon as possible. Anyway if you have questions - email me back and leave a note on my talk page that you emailed. Ti-30X (talk) 22:04, 16 August 2009 (UTC)

SmackBot

It's really irritating when your editing of a new article, actually part of an old article being sub-paged, is interrupted by demands before the ink is even dry.P0M (talk) 01:16, 17 August 2009 (UTC)

Sorry, I don't know the right name. They did a lot of this kind of thing for the article on Race when it got too long. All I meant to indicate was that the "new article" has not changed very much from what was in another article for a long time without any requests for more more citations. P0M (talk) 06:08, 17 August 2009 (UTC)

Heisenberg

Rich, Patrick sent this to my talk page by mistake. I am sure this is for you: Ti-30X (talk) 02:32, 17 August 2009 (UTC)

I've moved the intimidating-looking math onto a sub-page. I think I have not left readers with any false impressions the way most of the popularizations seem to do. One of the confusing things is that some of the published discussions talk about the physical measurements that one would have to do to make a lab proof of indeterminacy, and they sometimes succeed in making it seem that Heisenberg started with lab data, plugged it into matrices, and then calculated a tiny discrepancy out of all of the interference due to experimental error. But the experimental error would have been so large that I think he probably could not have done it. That may be one of the reasons that he chose to publish his "microscope" experiment even though Bohr warned him not to. I wonder whether there is any strategy for preventing readers from getting led astray on that account. The reliable sources so far seem to be Mehra and Aitchison. Mehra's three volumes are expensive and probably not in many libraries, and Aitchison et al. have the right information but it is very highly concentrated. P0M (talk) 01:35, 17 August 2009 (UTC)

Templates for deletion nomination of Template:Birth event age

Template:Birth event age 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. Plastikspork _―Œ^(talk) 02:55, 17 August 2009 (UTC)

Smackbots said Weakly additive is‎ uncategorized

Weakly additive‎ was marked as uncategorized, smackbot should have known better,it even added a DEFAULTSORT for the categories. Dmcq (talk) 05:59, 17 August 2009 (UTC)

Probably me trying to out-think the bot - often a mistake. Rich Farmbrough, 16:22, 19 August 2009 (UTC).

Talkback

Hello, Rich Farmbrough. You have new messages at Rockfang's talk page.
You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{Talkback}} or {{Tb}} template.

--Rockfang (talk) 18:45, 17 August 2009 (UTC)

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Delivered by SoxBot (talk) at 03:49, 18 August 2009 (UTC)

Maintenance tag placement

I noticed SmackBot moves {{no footnotes}} into the References section, if it's been placed at the top of an article. I see, despite the documentation, that there's currently no consensus on its correct placement, as with many maintenance tags. This is an ongoing debate that's yet to be settled, so in the meantime I think it's inappropriate for SmackBot to impose any preferred placement. Equazcion (talk) 04:17, 18 August 2009 (UTC)

Well I have no strong feelings on this one, it's part of AWB general fixes. I am reluctant to turn them off to suppress that, but I will raise the matter with the devs. Rich Farmbrough, 04:47, 18 August 2009 (UTC).

I didn't know SmackBot had anything to do with AWB, but if so, thanks, please do. Equazcion (talk) 04:50, 18 August 2009 (UTC)

Please stop Smackbot from moving {{No footnotes}} to the references section. In the case of Lviv, this produced results that a human editor would have recognised as mad.--Toddy1 (talk) 05:29, 18 August 2009 (UTC)

Well indeed. The tag said it had no footnotes and it had quite a number. However both No and More footnotes have said they should go in the references section since they were created in 2006, despite a query in 2007. Nonetheless I will raise the question, as I said above. Rich Farmbrough, 08:16, 18 August 2009 (UTC).

Where did you raise the question. I'd like to add my few cents also. Debresser (talk) 10:38, 18 August 2009 (UTC)

OK well in that case you could raise the question at WP:AWB discussion page. Rich Farmbrough, 17:17, 18 August 2009 (UTC).

Thanks. :)) Consider it done. Debresser (talk) 18:39, 18 August 2009 (UTC)

Tdeprecated

I just had a look at Template:Disambig-Class td. Doesn't SmackBot date the {{Tdeprecated}} template? Debresser (talk) 10:36, 18 August 2009 (UTC)

No, it can't. The dating only happens after the template is orphaned. even then a "decent interval" I think is allowed. Sounds like a broken process. Rich Farmbrough, 16:27, 18 August 2009 (UTC).

I see. Thanks. Debresser (talk) 17:13, 18 August 2009 (UTC)

Did you see my 2 questions in 2 sections above? Debresser (talk) 17:14, 18 August 2009 (UTC)

The Girls (album)

I'm not sure what caused the notes section to screw so badly, but you might want to look at the article.--Launchballer (talk) 12:40, 18 August 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for that.--Launchballer (talk) 19:20, 18 August 2009 (UTC)

The e-mail is there in case there are issues there regarding delivery and all the relative mumbo jumbo. Pardon the language used in the e-mail, but I go completely mad with profanity if not online.--Launchballer (talk) 20:32, 18 August 2009 (UTC)

Alpha tsentr

Pal, you delete the page about alpha tsentr and marked it as "vandalism", but i'm convinced that that page was a viral page built for viral markting reasons, and is therefore part of a future page about the "product". Just FYI. I know wikipedia is not for viral marketing, but that page has some value imo. I'm not anyhow related with this "thing", i'm just a random web lurker. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 93.33.230.122 (talk) 19:13, 18 August 2009 (UTC)

If that page becomes notable it can be re-created. Rich Farmbrough, 19:35, 18 August 2009 (UTC).

SmackBot

Hi Rich,

I added 2 books to line 151 (I think) for the Theory of Constraints. It disappeared so I pressed undo. Let me know if I needed to do that in another way. Also, I became a member after I made the change so it will not appear as Bob402.

Thanks,

Bob —Preceding unsigned comment added by Bob402 (talk • contribs) 22:17, 18 August 2009 (UTC)

Answered on user's talk page. Rich Farmbrough, 14:45, 19 August 2009 (UTC).

"Controversial deaths in UK police custody"

Hi Rich,

Was the delete of "Controversial deaths in UK police custody" necessary for "possible copyright infringement"? Could you not simply have removed the controversial element?

Thanks, Patrick Pftward (talk) 23:10, 18 August 2009 (UTC)

Answered on user's talk page. Rich Farmbrough, 14:45, 19 August 2009 (UTC).

SmackBot - Ref fix for 'Going Blind' documentary stub

Thank you for helping to fix the article stub for 'Going Blind' -- could you please tell me what you did so that I do not make the same mistake in future edits?

Sincerely,

Logan.schmid (talk) 14:44, 19 August 2009 (UTC)Logan Schmid

Answered on user's talk page. Rich Farmbrough, 14:51, 19 August 2009 (UTC).

SmackBot

In this edit I saw SmackBot continues removing spaces in headers. Could you please stop doing that. This is definitely not a sanctioned change. I remember we discussed this before, perhaps somewhere on WP:AWB. I will await your reaction on my talkpage. Debresser (talk) 11:57, 17 August 2009 (UTC)

I saw it again in another article. And I really would like to receive an answer. This bot is making untold numbers of edits every day, and this is not a sanctioned action.Debresser (talk) 16:10, 19 August 2009 (UTC)

OK this is fairly trivial, probably a line that regularises unbalanced headers like===XXX==. I'll look for it. Rich Farmbrough, 16:22, 19 August 2009 (UTC).

It was in Wikipedia_talk:AutoWikiBrowser/Archive_19#Wikipedia.27s_default_formats_being_changed_using_AWB. Debresser (talk) 16:31, 19 August 2009 (UTC)

I don't think it is a general AWB fix, is it? Debresser (talk) 16:33, 19 August 2009 (UTC)

No, it's probably a regex. Rich Farmbrough, 16:41, 19 August 2009 (UTC).

Could you please explain what this "regex" thing is. A decent explanation. I have seen the word often, but don't know what it is, or how to use it. Debresser (talk) 16:57, 19 August 2009 (UTC)

A regex is a regular expression - basically something that matches a string. In its simplest for it will be the string itself.

• "egg" matches "egg"

this is the sort of thing you use in editors, for finding and search and replace.

When you get "wild cards" you can match other stuff, for example file names often use "*" for anything so grep.* matches all files called grep, whether they are grep.txt, grep.exe, grep.cfg....

However "real" regexes are more powerful For example I can find all headings in a source by matching something like ^==+[^=]+==+\s*\n - this says a line beginning with (^) 2 or more "=" (==+) followed by one or more characters that aren't "=" ([^=]+) followed by 2 or more "=" (==+) followed by none or some white-space (\s*) followed by a carriage return. This is how most AWB custom functionality works. Rich Farmbrough, 17:17, 19 August 2009 (UTC).

And that must be how you write a bot. Thanks. Debresser (talk) 06:49, 20 August 2009 (UTC)

I hate dead AfDs

Would you mind commenting on Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/CVISION Technologies, Inc.? Please? Thanks! - CobaltBlueTony™ _talk 16:26, 19 August 2009 (UTC)

 Done Also listed at the computing section. Rich Farmbrough, 16:46, 19 August 2009 (UTC).

Flags and the like

No idea I'm afraid. I can imagine a lot of those are used in a huge number of articles. Have you detected a fault with one of them? P.S I'll be back on the Pakistan cleanup job in a day or two.. India is as bad check out this. Why would they think the local social worker or kiosk owner is notable?. Dr. Blofeld ^{White cat} 20:20, 19 August 2009 (UTC)

Nice work on the Jacques Dreze article

Thanks for the nice edits. (I shall have to learn about the AWB browser!) Best regards, Kiefer.Wolfowitz (talk) 14:18, 20 August 2009 (UTC)

AfD nomination of Bulbophyllum abbreviatum

An article that you have been involved in editing, Bulbophyllum abbreviatum, has been listed for deletion. If you are interested in the deletion discussion, please participate by adding your comments at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Bulbophyllum abbreviatum. Thank you.

Please contact me if you're unsure why you received this message. Gavin Collins (talk|contribs) 11:44, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

Nice work. Check my user page. Seeing those Pakistan, Indian and Bangladesh articles over the last weee or too and just the general poor quality of articles we should have fine articles on by now on really important subjects has made it time to change my priorities on here. I do hope the new intertranswiki project will find a way to generate new content much more efficiently than I ever could, that's all. If there was something in place which created new articles by the day using a good number of sources and making them a decent start I wouldn't have created new articles and would have concentrated on expanding. That was why I proposed that geobot thing also remember? Besides which I'm fed up of people moaning about them! So expanding/referencing articles like Ma-ubin will be on the cards for the future. I will still create new content when I come across notable articles missing but I won't me doing any mass creation anymore. Any stubs I do create will be fleshed out a little. There still remain the Argentine film problem. I had been going through the articles removing the redirects and replacing them with rather poor starter articles. I've reached 1981 I believe. Do you think we should nuke the redirects and remaining articles I haven't touched? Dr. Blofeld ^{White cat} 13:27, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

Can you correct the redirects then? See List of Argentine films of 1983 for instance. Click a film lower down e,g Espérame mucho and it will link to the wrong page. Could you ensure the remaining articles actually redirects to the actual list page then. The reason for the redirects was because most of the lists contain summary info on the films until an editor can write an article. I believe the remaining ones are from 1981 to about 2000 I think. Hardly any films in the 90s. Dr. Blofeld ^{White cat} 13:36, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

Seconding Dr. B.'s "nice work" comment - many thanks for helping to flesh it out. --Ser Amantio di Nicolao^{Che dicono a Signa?}_{Lo dicono a Signa.} 14:29, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for doing that, man you work quickly! The idea was that the tables are filled in and they provide info on the director/cast/genre and anything notable, then the article can be started once more info becomes available. You might however want to shut off the links in the 1981-1989 list of blue links which don't have an article. I did reactivate them the other day as I intended starting them but you can revert my edits. Oh no actually don't revert as such as I also sorted out the boldness linked titles into normal italics. Dr. Blofeld ^{White cat} 14:48, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

OK. Back on Pakistan related stuff. The amendments of the existing city box have been attended to see this. The gap at the top will be sorted shortly. I think we should now rid of the tehsil and union council templates currently up for TFD and replace them with these. However I would move the infoboxes to Pakistani location rather than city. If this is too problematic let me know but basically I want to rid of all the nasty tehsil/uc templates and replace them at least with something a little more standard. Dr. Blofeld ^{White cat} 14:59, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

Ah, actually are there any double redirects now to Template:Infobox Pakistani location. Did you redirect something else to Pakistani city? If you don't want to edit them at the moment I can revert the template move until you are ready. Just let me know what you are thinking.... Dr. Blofeld ^{White cat} 15:02, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

SmackBot - Orphan tag

Why would SmackBot remove this {{Orphan}} tag? [144] Article has 7 incoming links, but 5 are from User: and User talk: pages. [145] 58.8.212.181 (talk) 03:18, 23 August 2009 (UTC)

hm that's slightly odd. The critical numebr is 2/3 non lists, let me check with the devs. Rich Farmbrough, 04:21, 23 August 2009 (UTC).

Thanks. There were definitely only 2 "valid" links when I originally tagged it. Just wanted to be sure I hadn't missed something and that putting the tag back in again was the right thing to do. 58.8.212.181 (talk) 07:28, 23 August 2009 (UTC)

Cleanup

Let the fun and games commence. I wonder how long it will take me to remove all those lists from the Pakistani articles...Himalayan Explorer 09:12, 24 August 2009 (UTC)

Wasn't aware it needed fixing! It is actually one of the few settlement templates I actually don't mind! I quite like the pea soup color scheme... It makes the articles look unique..Himalayan Explorer 09:12, 24 August 2009 (UTC)

Any idea how long it will be before the confirmation thing goes away for "new" users. I keep adding infoboxes to articles like Răcăşdia and have to type in the annoying silly words because I have added an external reference. P.S. I will have lost my rollback and automatic New Page Patrol rights.Himalayan Explorer 09:12, 24 August 2009 (UTC)

Normally 4 days, but your are now WP:CONFIRMED (and got your other stuff back, too). Amalthea 19:44, 23 August 2009 (UTC)

Awesome, I couldn't move my old account as Vibber said it would conk out the system for several hour apparently! Hopefully now I will avoid wiki drama and get on with improving/cleaning up wikipedia which is my intention...
Himalayan Explorer 09:12, 24 August 2009 (UTC)

Rich, I've spotted a big category Category:Cities, towns and villages in Armenia. Any chance you could use AWB to sort them by province e.g split them into new categories like Category:Cities, towns and villages in Armavir Province. See Category:Armavir (province), the settlements can be found in that category, same for the others. See this for what needs doing.. Himalayan Explorer 09:12, 24 August 2009 (UTC)

Funny thing is that I've often thought the same. However, there is supposed to be a "consensus" that all sub divisions should have a capitalised name Province or District rather than district etc. I believe the only exception on here is India (how ironic that is given their love of capitals) who insist they have it in lower casing. The reason why the category is not just e.g Yerevan. Yerevan is city and a province. If you categorize it as "in Yerevan" with no province on the end it confuses the reader into thinking it is in the city. E.g there should be Category:Yerevan for articles within the city and Category:Yerevan Province for artiles outside the metropolitan area in the surrounding province. I've done enough work on geo categories on here to know what is generally acceptable. You do have a point though about the capitalisation..

I don't have any objections to which way you want to do it. As long as we don't have double cats in the end!! RegardsHimalayan Explorer 09:12, 24 August 2009 (UTC)

Groan. For some reason Mr. Suarez has wrongly added the native name in with the main header to is make the pin maps on double lines. See this. Grrr the native name is supposed to appear where is says native name....Himalayan Explorer 09:12, 24 August 2009 (UTC)

I'm pretty sure there is something on WP:English on it. That is why we have seperate paramters for native name. For instance Beijing and Yangon don't have the lettering on the maps..Himalayan Explorer 09:12, 24 August 2009 (UTC)

Nice one. Thanks. I'll see if Carlos Suarez can make some provincial nav templates..Himalayan Explorer 09:12, 24 August 2009 (UTC)

Aruba

Yeah - that was back in my salad days. There was a site called fallingrain.com that I was using for a lot of things...turned out that it wasn't as reliable as I'd been led to believe, unfortunately. --Ser Amantio di Nicolao^{Che dicono a Signa?}_{Lo dicono a Signa.} 21:08, 23 August 2009 (UTC)

Falling rain bums again eh? Then again my 1988 Hutchinson Encyclopedia claimed Bulkur was a village! Himalayan Explorer 09:12, 24 August 2009 (UTC)

I'll bear that in mind if I ever return to it, thanks. Actually, I have used GNIS to stub communities in Virginia counties, only to be told by locals that "I've never heard of that town, where did you find it?" Awesome. --Ser Amantio di Nicolao^{Che dicono a Signa?}_{Lo dicono a Signa.} 21:17, 23 August 2009 (UTC)

Smackbot & Template reference list

Template:Template reference list already includes "==References==". Smackbot should not be inserting both as was done here. --Pascal⁶⁶⁶ 00:21, 24 August 2009 (UTC)

Yes I could never understand why it included that. I just revert to doing it the old way. Rich Farmbrough, 00:36, 24 August 2009 (UTC).

Preview date changes

Please preview the consequences of your date changes before saving to make sure that you do not change file names and thus remove images from articles as you did recently at Victoria, Crown Princess of Sweden and Prince Carl Philip, Duke of Värmland. Thanks. Law Lord (talk) 03:56, 24 August 2009 (UTC)

thanks for that. Rich Farmbrough, 04:26, 24 August 2009 (UTC).

My pleasure. Have a great day! :-) Law Lord (talk) 05:16, 24 August 2009 (UTC)

Kenneth Rush

Hey! Thanks for fixing up my article, Kenneth Rush. BejinhanTalk 11:31, 24 August 2009 (UTC)

Re:Talk pages at hi

Hi Rich, Thanks for your comments. I would initiate a discussion at Hindi wiki community portal and get approval from most of the active members. Please let me know what else information is required. It is indeed the same template you quoted. Thanks I would soon get back to you. Gunjan (talk) 05:48, 24 August 2009 (UTC)

Hi Rich, I have discussed the need for this bot at hindi wiki community portal and it has been acknowledged by all the active users. Can you please let me know how to proceed further. Thanks Gunjan (talk) 08:28, 26 August 2009 (UTC)

Thanks Rich, Smack bot has done splendid job. One of our editor has given some comments on Smackbot's discussion page at hindi wiki. Please have a look it would be useful to be implemented via Smack bot. Thanks again for the good work. Best regards Gunjan (talk) 04:20, 27 August 2009 (UTC)

TfD:Expand language template family

I noted your username in the template's edit history, and invite you to participate in this TfD discussion. Regards Skäpperöd (talk) 14:39, 24 August 2009 (UTC)

 Done Rich Farmbrough, 17:24, 24 August 2009 (UTC).

TopoFlight

There is a SmackBot posting at the top of the article saying that it doens't link to other articles, that too few link to it, and that it may need to be wikified. I believe I have corrected for these issues and was wondering if there was anything else that needed to be done to the article before that notice will be removed. Maurice J (talk) 15:18, 24 August 2009 (UTC)

Answered on user's talk page. Rich Farmbrough, 17:25, 24 August 2009 (UTC).

Canadian singles

The last few just need to be re-categorized by which chart they hit #1 on, then Category:Number-one singles in Canada can remain as the parent. Were you unsure on the last few in that category? Ten Pound Hammer, his otters and a clue-bat • ^{(Many otters • One bat • One hammer)} 00:30, 25 August 2009 (UTC)

Date delinking and redirects

Your should ignore redirects, such as Junes, when delinking dates. — RockMFR 02:44, 25 August 2009 (UTC)

Good point. I will skip them but they are best on the whitelist pages anyway. Rich Farmbrough, 03:31, 25 August 2009 (UTC).

SmackBot approved

I've approved SmackBot for task XVI. See the request page for more details. Cheers - Kingpin¹³ (talk) 06:27, 25 August 2009 (UTC)

Thanks. Rich Farmbrough, 06:45, 25 August 2009 (UTC).

SmackBot & Subpages

Please see these two edits: [146] & [147]. Subpages are not orphans and shouldn't be tagged as such. Especially since it causes the main page (Mexican general election, 2006 in this case) to also transclude the template.

It looks like someone also objected to the DEFAULTSORT (see their comment when they removed it). I'm guessing for the transclusion reason also. In that case, the DEFAULTSORT could be embedded in <noinclude></noinclude>.

Can you please fix the bot to handle such pages? Thanks. -- JLaTondre (talk) 22:03, 25 August 2009 (UTC)

Advise sought from an experienced editor

Hi Rich,

I was looking at unsourced articles (i.e. those with the {{unref}} tag with no date) when I came across Accuphase‎.

I am amazed that there are no citations for this article, which was created at 22:47, 27 November 2004. I have left a message on the talk page talk:Accuphase asking "A query about sources of information about Accuphase", quoting the hits I found on Google News Search, Google Book Search and Google Web search - all of which are basically advertising hits, reviews of equipment, copies of the Wikipedia article, etc - but nothing that seems reliable, or proving the notability of the company. I just want to emphasise that I have looked for reliable sources (although I only looked at the first 500-600 hits on Google Web Search, I felt that if I hadn't found it by then, the chances were remote that I'd find any past that point).

Now, my question is - if no one can add relevant (i.e. reliable, independent) citations showing notability in a reasonable amount of time, is it considered bad wiki etiquette to put this article up for an AfD? (With such an established article, I'm assuming that a PROD would be quickly contested!).

I know that I am doing it the right way - starting a discussion on the talk page. But how long is a reasonable time to wait for someone to prove that this company is notable from Wikipedia's criteria?

I don't want to put anybody's nose out of joint, but I feel that just because this article has existed for almost 5 years does not mean that we ignore the criteria!

Any advice you can give me would be greatly appreciated!

Could you please leave me a talkback if you respond to this missive? Thanks -- PhantomSteve (Contact Me, My Contribs) 23:15, 25 August 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for your quick response! I couldn't find a suitable WikiProject (Electronics seems more about the components themselves). I'll look again though. Thanks once again for the advice. -- PhantomSteve (Contact Me, My Contribs) 00:00, 26 August 2009 (UTC)

SmackBot replacement of {inline} tags

Not a bug/error, but a question. I had thought SmackBot changed {{inline}} to {{morefootnotes}}; but today I found an article where it changed it to {{nofootnotes}} rather than morefootnotes. Has the behavior changed recently or has this pretty much been the operation for a while and I just had not noticed it before? Thanks for your work! and for SmackBot. N2e (talk) 04:48, 26 August 2009 (UTC)

Has a list of templates, it occasionally (when I tell it too, adn if I don't forget at least around the 1st of the month) goes off and finds all the redirects to those on the list. Therefore there are three states (probably more):

• a->b and SB knows about it
• a->b but SB thinks b->a
• a->b but SB thinks a->c

Really the only problems come from the third scenario, when someone decides to point a off somewhere else (including itself). IF there are new redirects added I pick them up in the end. At the moment ther are.. um about 300 templates and about another 1000 redirect I think. Rich Farmbrough, 05:05, 26 August 2009 (UTC).

Thanks Rich, but I'm still confused. What should SmackBot replace the {{inline}} tag with? I was thinking it was {{morefootnotes}}, but recently I've seen SmackBot replacing inline with {{nofootnotes}}. Is there a link you meant to send me to so I could learn more about it? I could not quite parse an answer from your reply. Thanks much. N2e (talk) 17:39, 26 August 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for you speedy answer on my talk page. I understand now. Is there a place I can look to see what automatic tag changes SmackBot will do now? Thanks. N2e (talk) 17:54, 26 August 2009 (UTC)

Infobox Pakistani city

Right, this edit has prompted me to renominate the template for deletion. Himalayan 10:57, 26 August 2009 (UTC)

Hmm and what was so wrong with that edit? I added back the template after you agreed to keep it (added back and updated with the correct info may I add) and then you renominate it. Pahari Sahib 12:59, 27 August 2009 (UTC)

When using AWB, please use the right edit summaries.

You have a big swath of edits here that have nothing to do with unlinking June. Makes finding errors such as this harder then it should be.

Well most of them have - in that they unlink June. If you find errors where it should remain linked please add them to the whitelist page per the edit summary. Rich Farmbrough, 18:31, 26 August 2009 (UTC).

Incidentally I will be avoiding redirects, but the whitelists are intended to be a general resource so that knowledge about the task isn't trapped in my infrastructure. Rich Farmbrough, 18:33, 26 August 2009 (UTC).

Spaces removed in Avionyx article

Hi,

I noticed that for the Avionyx article, you removed some blank spaces that I had before the "History" section. The reason I had those lines was for the title "History" to be placed below the Table of Contents (TOC). This was the only way I could find to place the "History" section below the TOC. Now that you removed the spaces, the title is at the same level with the TOC and the article looks a little weird. I was wondering if there is a way to place the "History" section above the TOC without having to insert those blank lines?

Esanchi 08/27/2009:

Rich,

Thank you very much for the modifications done to the article. That is just the result I wanted to acheive. However, my knowledge about wikipedia are very limited, this is the first time a write something on the wiki. Thanks. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Esanchi (talk • contribs) 15:28, 27 August 2009 (UTC)

--Esanchi (talk) 21:51, 26 August 2009 (UTC)

Tempate move?

You moved {{Infobox Mountain}} to {{Infobox mountain}}. I think standardizing case is great if that was the reason. I'm not questioning the move I'm just curios. –droll [chat] 22:30, 26 August 2009 (UTC)

Request of assistance

AutoWikiBrowser says {{Infobox Protected area}} is transcluded on 3180 pages in the main space. Shouldn't it be protected? Also as Infobox mountain was move shouldn't this be moved to Infobox protected area. I know I could do the move myself but I'm not that bold. Thanks. –droll [chat] 22:46, 26 August 2009 (UTC)

Thanks. –droll [chat] 01:01, 27 August 2009 (UTC)

Cleanup

Good work, though a couple of editors have reverted your changes at WP:OR (there's now some discussion that, of course, isn't being addressed with nearly the same speed as the reverts). You should check out Wikipedia:PROJPOL. I noticed that you edited Wikipedia:Administrator_policy - you might want to leave the redirect as is, and try a subpage of the policy, like WP:ADMIN/proposals or whatever. But really, it's way more effective to just revise the page directly. Also, if the big block removals don't go through, consider shortening and clarifying things.    M   03:28, 27 August 2009 (UTC)

Help Undo Move

Please help!

how to undo a move, some one had moved Jhelum Tehsil to Jhelum (city), but these should have different articles like all other cities and tehsils of Pakistan which have saperate articles. Template:Tehsils of Punjab (Pakistan) --Talha^{Discuss ©} 11:28, 27 August 2009 (UTC)

Also i have moved Jhelum to Jhelum (disambiguation) as it is a disambiguation page. now i request you to please delete Jhelum page so that Jhelum (city) page can be moved to Jhelum as all the other cities of Pakistan are without this (city), you can see this here: Template:Pakistani cities. Regards --Talha^{Discuss ©} 11:55, 27 August 2009 (UTC)

Can you move the article back to the correct location i.e. Jhelum Tehsil, if you look at all the districts and tehsils of Pakistan they are all in title case, hence we have Attock District rather than Attock district, during the colonial era this was known as Jhelum Tahsīl, the spelling has changed somewhat but it still needs to be in title case. This was an erroneous move by one editor - you have moved it to an incorrect location. Pahari Sahib 12:57, 27 August 2009 (UTC)

Actually I moved it back to where it came from hidden under a redirect. Rich Farmbrough, 12:59, 27 August 2009 (UTC). 12:59, 27 August 2009 (UTC)

Ah okay, you must have been doing that while I was posting on your page then ;-) Pahari Sahib 13:02, 27 August 2009 (UTC)

One more thing, can you move the talk page back too. Thanks. Pahari Sahib 13:05, 27 August 2009 (UTC)

34 edits to sort that out. Rich Farmbrough, 13:10, 27 August 2009 (UTC).

Thanks for solving this problem. The way you work on wikipedia, you are the real Burnstar. thanks again. --Talha^{Discuss ©} 13:12, 27 August 2009 (UTC)

Really? - thanks :-) Pahari Sahib 13:13, 27 August 2009 (UTC)

YOu are very welcome/. Rich Farmbrough, 13:14, 27 August 2009 (UTC).

Dear this is the actual talk page:Talk:Jhelum (city) instead of Talk:Jhelum, so please fix this problem. Thanks. --Talha^{Discuss ©} 13:36, 28 August 2009 (UTC)

Template:Infobox Portuguese Royalty styles

During your cleanup of a considerable number of royalty-related articles (good work by the way!), one small mishap occurred. This edit[148] replaced the redirect Template:Infobox Portuguese Royalty with Template:Infobox royalty as intended, but also Template:Infobox Portuguese Royalty styles with the non-existing Template:Infobox royalty styles. I've reverted this particular edit, but not yet shoveled my way through all the Portuguese monarchs to see, if anything similar occurred elsewhere. Just wanted to tell you in case it's a symptom of a problem with the script you use to carry out the edits. Regards, Favonian (talk) 13:18, 27 August 2009 (UTC)

TY. Rich Farmbrough, 13:19, 27 August 2009 (UTC).

British Columbia

Hi. I was wondering if you could use AWB to switch maps as here. Basically its just to remove the old maps and replace them with a higher quality one... (no rush...., Pakistan permitting...) Himalayan 15:32, 27 August 2009 (UTC)

thanks from hindi wikipedia

Dear Rich jee,
I would like to give you thanks on behalf of all members and administrator of hindi wikipedia for your contribution. Please continue the good work. Thank you.--Munita Prasad (talk) 15:58, 27 August 2009 (UTC)

Death date template

Just noticed this edit [149] where you among other things standardize the date format to "date first". One small thing, which your script overlooked is the "date of death = {{Death date|1014|2|3|mf=y}}" resulting in a date format inconsistency. I've corrected this particular article, but there are probably others, considering how popular this template and its siblings are. Favonian (talk) 22:23, 27 August 2009 (UTC)

Thank you, was a bug, so I'm getting them now, need to do another pass to pick up any stragglers though. Rich Farmbrough, 23:05, 27 August 2009 (UTC).

New dated template

Template:Cleanup-university could do with some simplification along the lines of {{DMCA}}, and you will want to add it to SmackBot's list. Debresser (talk) 08:59, 28 August 2009 (UTC)

Infoboxes

If you have a chance, could you have a look at {{Infobox Pakistani location}}, {{Infobox Tehsil Pakistan}}, {{Union councils of Pakistan}}. I converted them to use {{infobox settlement}} and the next step is to have a bot do the substitution, which will do all the necessary parameter conversion and replace these with the settlement infobox (as per the TFD). Thanks! Plastikspork _―Œ^(talk) 19:14, 28 August 2009 (UTC)

My only question on the tehsil one is why is tehsil_map assigned to image_skyline? Rich Farmbrough, 22:30, 28 August 2009 (UTC).

Thanks for the feedback. I didn't see that there were slots for two maps in {{infobox settlement}}, I moved the second map to image_map1 and move the tehsil_map to image_map. Let me know if you see any other problems. The only potential difficulty with substituting the templates is that it will allow for more freedom, since there will be more visible parameters. An alternative could be to merge the three into one template which uses the infobox settlement as its backend. I really don't care either way. For example, infobox Pakistan settlement or something, which would already have a few things filled in. Thanks again. Plastikspork _―Œ^(talk) 22:41, 28 August 2009 (UTC)

Do you have any thoughts on merging these to {{infobox Pakistani jurisdiction}}? This would match {{infobox Indian jurisdiction}} in terms of convention, but would still use the {{infobox settlement}} backend. It seems as though either we match the convention used on the Indian articles, if that means creating a new merged jurisdiction template, or removing infobox Indian jurisdiction. I can just imagine the crys of why does India get its own and Pakistan doesn't. I have asked Dr. Blofeld/Himalayan for input as well. This is the only reason why I am currently hesitating to have a bot finish the substitution process. I personally wouldn't be opposed to it so long as it used the infobox settlement backend, with the same parameter names so that it could be easily substituted at a future date. If you have any thoughts on this it would be great if you could let me know in the latest thread on my talk page. Thanks. Plastikspork _―Œ^(talk) 15:24, 29 August 2009 (UTC)

I don't think creating a Pakistani jurisdiction is necessary, otherwise I wouldn't have placed the city one of for deletion after some effort to merge them. Standard is the way to go. P.S. are you still speaking to me, you haven't replied since I made a remark about you having a well deserved kip! Himalayan 16:21, 29 August 2009 (UTC)

Himalayan – yes, thank you, I'm just a bit busy running the script. On the Pakistani ones, watch out for malformed numbers, especially in the population and area sections. I had to convert a few of those (e.g., population = 35.000 or area = 95,00). It would be great if RF could make a second pass to clean these up, and other dangling logic, if it's possible. Otherwise, I could write a short script to do it instead. Thanks again. Plastikspork _―Œ^(talk) 19:24, 29 August 2009 (UTC)

Interesting regex to catch the #ifs... {{#if(?:[^\|{}\[\]]*|\[\[[^\|{}]*\|[^\|{}]*\]\])+\|((?:[^\|{}\[\]]*|\[\[[^\|{}]*\|[^\|{}]*\]\])*)\|((?:[^\|{}\[\]]*|\[\[[^\|{}]*\|[^\|{}]*\]\])*)}} ... Rich Farmbrough, 19:53, 29 August 2009 (UTC).

Thanks, that's pretty close to what I have been using in my script, which I went ahead and ran on the 1000 or so pages. Here's mine: {{#if:[ ]*(?:\[\[[^\[\]]*\]\]|{{[^{}]*}}|[^\|{}])+[ ]*\|((?:[^\|{}]|\[\[[^\[\]]*\]\]|{{[^{}]*}}|{{{[^{}]*}}})*)}}. There may be bugs in it as well, but it worked for this latest task. I may have missed one or two, but I believe I got almost all of them. Thanks for doing to initial substitution. Plastikspork _―Œ^(talk) 23:22, 29 August 2009 (UTC)

AWB crashed and I swapped to the equivalent of s/{{#/{{subst:#/ which worked beautifully. Rich Farmbrough, 23:57, 29 August 2009 (UTC).

Curious

Hi Rich. I was curious about this edit, and if that was the intended result. Perhaps I'm missing something (always a possibility), but it looks like the edit had the effect of blanking a large portion of the page. — Ched :  ?  06:27, 29 August 2009 (UTC)

Just a delayed edit - very delayed - that didn't seem tot get an edit conflict message. Rich Farmbrough, 15:39, 29 August 2009 (UTC).

Barnstar for amigo Rich

		The Pakistan Barnstar of Excellence
		Awarded to Rich Farm. for his awesome edits towards cleaning up Pakistan location articles at lightening pace. Your contribution to wikipedia in this area is greatly appreciated, not to mention elsewhere every day on here. But your work with infoboxes and categories and cleaning up these articles is especially appreciated... Keep up the good work! Himalayan 10:19, 29 August 2009 (UTC)

Many thanks! Rich Farmbrough, 20:45, 29 August 2009 (UTC).

SmackBot

Since you sort User:SmackBot/References Log in Category:Pages with missing references list, perhaps you could sort it under "!", just like the other 4 pages that are permanently there. It's completely trivial, but will look nicer. Thanks. Debresser (talk) 22:02, 29 August 2009 (UTC)

Thanks. That was very considerate of you. Is there anything you can do about User:Philaweb/Gadget-refToolbar.js, or are these pages offlimits for admins too? Debresser (talk) 23:36, 29 August 2009 (UTC)

Hm dunno did look briefly, will again. The "correct" solution is, I realised, to move those pages to Category:Pages relating to pages with missing references list, which would be a parent of Pages with missing references list, then run the process on the parent category, recursively. But.. <pfft> .. also <meh>... Rich Farmbrough, 00:02, 30 August 2009 (UTC).

Defnite <meh>! I have a small suggestion for you to make SmackBot even more effective in dealing with articles on Category:Pages with missing references list. Teach him to change any occurances of </ref and <ref/> to </ref>. It happens once in a while and no other bot does this (not even AnomieBOT). Debresser (talk) 00:18, 30 August 2009 (UTC)

Of course the reason it was end-sorted was so that it would be the last entry processed. Foolishly I had been alphasorting, so it was right at the back but not the last. But back to tau now, which is where templates are supposed to go anyway.

I will look at </ref... but <ref/> is arguably valid mark-up, equivalent to nothing. But maybe I could make some reasonably safe assumotions. Rich Farmbrough, 00:52, 30 August 2009 (UTC).

In my experience <ref/> is always a mistake for </ref>, so that is all assumption you need. If you want to be on the safe side, restrict it to when you are fixing articles from Category:Pages with missing references list, as opposed to making it a general SmackBot fix.

Now what is the problem with sorting under "!"? That it writes the log a few minutes earlier than finishing the articles? Not a big deal, is it? Debresser (talk) 06:05, 30 August 2009 (UTC)

There is no guarantee that it ever finishes the run, of course. Added to which having it as the very first page written to means there is more chance of it being written before the bot goes onto automatic, which may "never" happen. Furthermore the standard sort for templates is "τ" - although I can see a dozen problems with doing this they mostly apply as much to "!" . Rich Farmbrough, 06:09, 30 August 2009 (UTC).

Ok, but I'll change the other ones back to "!", because that is what we use in other error categories, and that is the way MediaWiki will sort any other templates etc. that will show up. Debresser (talk) 06:13, 30 August 2009 (UTC)

As you wish, and if you are sure. Rich Farmbrough, 06:14, 30 August 2009 (UTC).

I was involved in making it so. Debresser (talk) 06:19, 30 August 2009 (UTC)

What I didn't know was that you changed MediaWiki:Cite error group refs without references today... Now what should we do? Did you change the other ones sorting to "!" as well, or just that one? Debresser (talk) 06:22, 30 August 2009 (UTC)

And the reason we didn't add user here, or elsewhere, was that 1. we are not looking for extra work 2. users don't usually look favorably on other editors making such trivial edits on their userpages. Better wait until they put them in mainspace (if at all). So if you'd care to undo those last 2 edits there (the page is protected)... Debresser (talk) 06:24, 30 August 2009 (UTC)

Now SmackBot started "fixing" the category pages. Which is a mess... Better undo something here. Debresser (talk) 06:37, 30 August 2009 (UTC)

BTW, no problem it should stay on "tau", but in any case you don't need the DEFAULTSORT parameter for that, because Media Wiki sorts that by itself. Adding it explicitely to the page will only make it hard to change that sorting symbol, if the need would ever arise, instead of doing it on MediaWiki. I've been there before. Debresser (talk) 10:06, 30 August 2009 (UTC)

Yes so I saw. But there were "unexplained mysteries" at the time, relating partly to the mediawiki message, but mainly to database lag - nothign seemed to want to cahnge sort order so I was trying everything. Rich Farmbrough, 11:22, 30 August 2009 (UTC).

So we agreed upon "tau", but in MediaWiki and not on the pages. If I got you wrong, use my talkpage. Debresser (talk) 12:18, 30 August 2009 (UTC)

Please change that in MediaWiki:Cite error refs without references as well, which is still at "!". And please remove userpages from the detection in MediaWiki:Cite error group refs without references, as before. Debresser (talk) 12:25, 30 August 2009 (UTC)

Whatever you're doing with the changing of {{# stuff...

It's not working. See here where the change you did made the explanatory footnotes disappear. I tried a format tweak to make the "notes" section have quote marks, but that didn't do it either. Ealdgyth - Talk 22:07, 29 August 2009 (UTC)

Answered on user's talk page. Rich Farmbrough, 00:02, 30 August 2009 (UTC).

MediaWiki:Cite error group refs without references

User and talk pages were deliberately excluded from displaying the error and from inclusion in the maintenance category. There are editors monitoring the maintenance category and the consensus was to not monitor and fix problems in those namespaces. Sorting was worked out by those editors doing the cleanup. Please discuss at Help talk:Cite errors.

On a related note, you left a comment at Help talk:Cite errors that I did not understand. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 02:47, 30 August 2009 (UTC)

Accidental creation of duplicate audio file page. One updated. Merger needed to remove accidental duplication

Hi Rich. I have inadvertently created a duplicate page for an audio file. I see from Help:Merging, that "Merging is a normal editing action, something any editor can do, and as such does not need to be proposed and processed", especially if such a merger would be uncontroversial, in which case no proposal is necessary, and one can be bold and simply do the job. In the current case, such a merger would indeed be uncontroversial, as the duplication was entirely accidental and unintended. Since it is a normal editing function, and since it is my error, I was of a mind to fix it myself. However, since merging the files requires the pagename, the very first problem I've encountered is the question of the name of the page. While I've successfully named and linked pages within other articles, I can't seem to find the name of my two files. Any ideas on this? I'm assuming that it's 'common knowledge' to more experienced editors.

How I came across yourself was courtesy of a referencing edit from your smackbot. I didn't bother completing the reference for the second, duplicate page, for two reasons. Firstly, I was of a mind to merge it with the original page. Secondly, the red inked error message helped me to see which page was which.

Since your smackbot edit, I've updated the duplicate page to be the correct one. This includes improved references, and downsizing the audio clip so that it is within the 10% copyright limit. However, the above problem remains. That is, I can't identify the pagenames in order to complete the mergers. Can you help please? Conversely, if you or someone else would care to do the merger, please be my guest. It's easy to spot the updated, more correct one. It has a smaller clip for starters (3m 57s). And my apologies for the error. I was doing okay up until this point. By the way, I was originally simply trying to create an audio clip to go alongside the relevant text in Last Goon Show of All. So even my original file page was unintended. But at least the clip was available until I figured out how to get it into the article. However, a duplicate page is too much, and I'd like to clean it up and be more careful in future (like use the sandbox more often) Wotnow (talk) 03:47, 30 August 2009 (UTC)Wotnow

Update. Minimised clip uploaded. Source file page updated using template. Still the problem of the duplicate page

Hi again Rich. Thanks for replying so promptly. I see your point, and that of Drat's. I have now managed to reduce the audio clip to minimum requirements, and uploaded that to Last Goon Show of All. I've also utilised the audio file template from the All Along The Watchtower example cited on the Wikipedia:Music_samples page. There remains now the issue of the duplicate audio file page, and the merging of it with the updated one. Your thoughts? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Wotnow (talk • contribs) 07:13, 30 August 2009 (UTC)

Final update re duplicate file page. Issue resolved

With the feedback and kind cooperation of yourself (and the initial feedback from Drat), the problem regarding the Last Goon show of All clip appears resolved. I commend you both. Wotnow (talk) 09:40, 30 August 2009 (UTC)Wotnow

Smackbot and {current related}

In this edit, SmackBot replaced a {{current related}} template with {{current}}, causing some nonsensical text. I'm not sure if SmackBot was reprogrammed to do this on purpose after this change to {{current related}}, but anyway I have since undone the change (I believe there is still a use for {{current related}} separate from {{current}}, but at the very least there is not consensus either way). Just thought I should let you know so you can make any changes to SmackBot accordingly, if necessary. rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 04:00, 30 August 2009 (UTC)

That is exactly what happened. SB picks up changes to redirects intermittently. Rich Farmbrough, 04:07, 30 August 2009 (UTC).

SmackBot on Hindi Wiki

Hi Rich, SmackBot is of great help on hindi wiki. I am not able to see it for last few hours. Has the task complete. I have one request can we schedule SmackBot such that it is invoked periodically (say every Wednesday night). Thanks Gunjan (talk) 15:45, 30 August 2009 (UTC)  DoneRich Farmbrough, 20:07, 1 September 2009 (UTC).

Austrian templates

Eeesh, I just discovered this. The templates are written in German!!! Should they be written in english and maybe coverted to standard? Himalayan 15:52, 30 August 2009 (UTC)

HI. What are you doing at present? Could you use AWB to restore the following template to all of the articles linked within it. You see I did split them all by district but it seems the people working on them are happier with the merged template. As it is closed to default I don't see a problem. Could you replace all of the District templates with this again?

Like this. I'd do it manually but it would take me probably an hour. Perhaps we should rename the template as it is a pretty long name, perhaps it could be shortened and then added under a difference smaller name?

Template:Palestinian Arab villages depopulated during the 1948 Palestine War Himalayan 20:26, 30 August 2009 (UTC)

Let me know what you think. Himalayan 20:33, 30 August 2009 (UTC)

That's cool. Yeah with Austria they still have that tiny map alongside the coat of arms with a huge locator dot. I understand France, Germany and Austrian municipalities were started by copying templates from the other wikipedia, Now though there is no reason why they need seperate templates.... Italy too. Anyway if you could take care of the Palestinian templates and restore the merged one and delete the district ones I created that would be a kudos to you as I think they say... Himalayan 20:59, 30 August 2009 (UTC)  DoneRich Farmbrough, 20:07, 1 September 2009 (UTC). User talk:Rich Farmbrough/Archive/2009 September