This is an archive of past discussions about User:John of Reading. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.
Greetings, Today I added Portal Vatican City to both Portal:Contents/Portals
and Wikipedia:Portal/Directory because it was missing from both. Next, I updated Template:Number of portals from 1404 to 1405. When I looked on page User:John of Reading/List of portals, I see Vatican City is already listed. Being somewhat new (March 2014) to Wikipedia, I am unsure how to resolve this issue (not knowing which number is correct) and am hoping that you or another editor might be able to solve this one. Regards, JoeHebda (talk) 21:14, 15 June 2015 (UTC)
@JoeHebda: I wouldn't worry about it. Although some editors add one to Template:Number of portals when creating a new portal, many don't, and there's no way to know which new portals have been included in the count. So the template isn't a reliable figure. When I compiled my list of portals I found it was off by over 200! I'll redo my list and put the count right again when I next download a database dump. -- John of Reading (talk) 06:21, 16 June 2015 (UTC)
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Hi! Have question about AWB, and not about enwiki, but that shouldn't matter. I'm really a newbie to regexp, so currently I need some help. Could you help write such find and replace functions? Here x is any 3 symbols
{{xh}} -> {{ih|x}} (for example, {{CANh}} -> {{ih|CAN}})
x -> {{ih|x}} (for example, CAN -> {{ih|CAN}})
And if it differs, also for such one (so, here x, y, and z are unlimited number of symbols)
{{flag|x}} [[y foobar|z]] -> {{ih|x}} (or to {{ih|z}})
I will most probably also be using other constant parts, but this would be wonderful start.
And one more question. How to do multiline replacing? Lets say I would like to replace this:
For the first one: find \{\{([A-Z]{3})h\}\} and replace with {{ih|$1}} - using these ingredients: backslash to turn off the special meaning of the following character; square brackets to define a range of characters; a number in curly brackets to insist on exactly three of them; round brackets to remember what we matched so that we can spit it out again; and in the "replace", $1 to spit out the first remembered text.
For the second one: find \b([A-Z]{3})\b and replace {{ih|$1}} - with the extra ingredient: backslash-b to insist that we're starting and ending at a word break.
For the third one: find \{\{flag\|([A-Z]+)\}\}\s+\[\[[A-Z]+\sfoobar\|([A-Z]+)\]\] and replace with {{ih|$1}} if you want "x" or {{ih|$2}} if you want "z" - with the extra ingredient that a "+" matches one or more times.
So far I've assumed that "any three symbols" means three uppercase letters, like your example. But if it is really "any three symbols" then instead of [A-Z] you want something like [^\s\{\}\|] - which matches anything except for whitespace (backslash-s), a curly bracket or a pipe character.
For the final question: in a find expression, backslash-n matches a newline, so you can search for \bfoo\nbar\b
i request you to create or let me create another page of sethi gotra for sikhs independently as the hindu sethis and sikh jatt sethis have no common ancient history .
i request you to create or let me create another page of sethi gotra for sikhs independently as the hindu sethis and sikh jatt sethis have no common ancient history . — Preceding unsigned comment added by Candyclair (talk • contribs) 12:22, 1 July 2015 (UTC)
i request you to create or let me create another page of sethi gotra for sikhs independently as the hindu sethis and sikh jatt sethis have no common ancient history .
the only problem is that some info. may not be cited due to unavailability — Preceding unsigned comment added by Candyclair (talk • contribs) 12:24, 1 July 2015 (UTC)
Hi, I am sorry for changing my username because I was going by my real name. Can you tell me when will the bot start archive. There are talks not archived of more than three months and talk page has become too long. Can you help me? [details removed] 17:24, 4 July 2015 (UTC)
@NextGenSam619: The archiving is done by Lowercase sigmabot III (talk·contribs). Looking through its contributions, it seems to fire up at 00:00 (UTC) each day and finishes its work at about 04:00 (UTC). So with any luck it should process your page in about 7 to 11 hours time. Oh - notice that your signature still shows your original name - you need to visit Special:Preferences to change that. -- John of Reading (talk) 17:30, 4 July 2015 (UTC)
I see you're replacing the word "deducted" with "docked", but I can't say I understand why. Can you enlighten me? Thanks, Bretonbanquet (talk) 17:01, 4 July 2015 (UTC)
@Bretonbanquet: I think it's a grammar error; I did a batch of these some months ago, and now it's reached the top of my "to do" list. There are more than I was expecting! Correct uses of "deducted" would be "Four points were deducted from team X" or "The league administrators (or whoever) deducted four points from team X". But if the sentence structure is "Team X was/were (verb) four points" then I think "docked" is the best fit. -- John of Reading (talk) 17:18, 4 July 2015 (UTC)
Thanks, I thought it might be something like that, although it's widespread in the media. I've churned out a vast amount of season articles and I now discover I haven't been all that consistent with my wording over the years. I generally use "Team X had two points deducted [for fielding an ineligible player etc]", which I think is OK. Cheers, Bretonbanquet (talk) 17:25, 4 July 2015 (UTC)
I'm pretty sure "team was deducted X points" is a very common expression in association football and I think it should've been better to discuss this at WT:FOOTY before proceeding with the task.-BlameRuiner (talk) 09:34, 5 July 2015 (UTC)
I read that you are using AWB to correct typos on an industrial scale. I have made a preparsed list of articles that contain (possible) typos that can be fixed with AWB. Would you like to help fix some of them? If so, please remove the ones you want to do from the list, so that other people don't have to look at them again. In total I have more than 40.000 articles on this list, so I've split it up per 10.000 articles: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. The Quixotic Potato (talk) 12:46, 17 July 2015 (UTC)
@The Quixotic Potato: Many of the latest typo rules just tweak commas or hyphens, so I'm not sure whether I would bother to save such small edits. But I'll grab a few hundred entries from one of your lists when I get to the end of my current list. -- John of Reading (talk) 13:00, 17 July 2015 (UTC)
Thanks a lot! I´ve checked the checkbox to skip articles if only cosmetic changes are made, so AFAIK things like commas and hyphens will be skipped if they are not combined with other, more substantial edits.Update: I just checked to confirm this, and unfortunately it isn't true. I am not sure why. The Quixotic Potato (talk) 13:12, 17 July 2015 (UTC)
Thanks again. If I understand the situation correctly I should make a feature request for AWB to have a checkbox to skip edits like changing commas and hyphens. Something like "Skip punctuation-only edits". Would you such a feature be useful to you? There are probably more of this kind of edits that feel like they aren't worth it if they aren't combined with more substantial stuff. The Quixotic Potato (talk) 13:29, 17 July 2015 (UTC)
@The Quixotic Potato: Don't make such a feature request just for me. I have my own list of corrections that I think are worthwhile - several thousand of them - and use the Find+Replace "skip if no replacement" checkbox to skip pages where none of these corrections apply. So I wouldn't usually need to use the extra skip option you propose. I think the regular contributors at WP:AWB/T would argue that the commas and hyphens are important; they wouldn't use this extra skip option either. -- John of Reading (talk) 13:39, 17 July 2015 (UTC)
Not just for you, it would be useful to me too, and probably for other people. If I understand you correctly then a "Skip punctuation-only edits"-checkbox would enable you to use not just the Find & Replace functionality, but the RegExp typosearch as well, without having to skip an enormous amount of edits that are just not worth it. Maybe the regular contributors at WP:AWB/T would argue that the commas and hyphens are important; but they would have to admit that importance is subjective. If we, and others who don't like doing punctuation-only edits, would like the ability to skip punctuation edits automagically because it is boring and tedious to skip them manually then it is a good idea to have such an option, even if not everyone is going to use it. Another option is to give us the ability to ignore certain regexps, that would fix the problem too (but we would be forced to continually update the list of typos we don't care about). It would also be nice if we were able to share the list of corrections you've made, so I should probably also do a feature request that enables us to import and export the Find & Replace table as a CSV file. The Quixotic Potato (talk) 14:00, 17 July 2015 (UTC)
You could propose these changes at WT:AWB and see how many would use them.
One difficulty I can think of is how to identify a punctuation-only edit. An edit that adds or removes a hyphen might be changing hyphenation, or it might be fixing the syntax of a wikitable; an edit that adds or removes an apostrophe might be fixing punctuation, or it might be fixing bold and italic markup.
Importing someone else's Find+Replace table is already possible; if you open the XML file in a text editor you will find that its structure is fairly simple, and it is possible to copy the F+R rules from one XML file to another. A version of my settings file is available in sections in these pages, or if you send me an email I could reply and attach the latest version of the whole thing. But please take great care, as the rules are by no means perfect. I've got used to seeing the kinds of false positives that my rules run into, and know which proposed edits need extra checking. -- John of Reading (talk) 14:19, 17 July 2015 (UTC)
Hello, my talk page is not being archived once again. I tried to tweak it to 60 days but its not working could you fix it with the time of archiving in sixty days and one question, if I tweak the days to archive will the archiving process stop working? NextGenSam619t@lk02:41, 22 July 2015 (UTC)
@NextGenSam619: You've got it set to 90 days currently; that's the "algo = old(90d)" line. Only two or three threads at the top of the page are 90 days old. In this edit you made it harder for the bot to archive old threads. "minthreadstoarchive = 5" tells it not to remove anything until there are five old threads that it can archive all at once - that's way the two or three old threads have not been archived. And "minthreadsleft = 7" tells it to leave at least seven threads on the page, no matter how old they are.
I suggest you change these to "algo = old(60d)" if you want 60-day archiving, and to change the other two parameters back to 1 and 1. -- John of Reading (talk) 05:41, 22 July 2015 (UTC)
@NextGenSam619: The size of each archive is set by the "maxarchivesize" parameter. You have this set to "70K", which means each archive will contain about 70,000 characters. Depending on what turns up on your talk page, that could be one long discussion or dozens of small ones. -- John of Reading (talk) 05:31, 23 July 2015 (UTC)
My watchlist says it's time for round two of favor-asking. No rush on this at all, but if you have an hour of CPU time to spare, I'd love to know how many hits you get for this:
^There's a little fuzziness in the concept here: The first term is designed to reduce the workload, and I have arbitrarily decided to focus on pages that probably have at least one date in the 20th century. The regex search part then goes and looks for dates that are missing the second comma of the delimited parenthetical containing the year. The mistake however, need not apply to a 20th-century date. Here I'm allowing it to pick up errors in dates from the three previous centuries.
@JamesLucas: I can't easily use the ", 19" part of this search string with a database dump. I've run just the "insource" part against the July database dump, and the first ten percent of the search has found 21,000 articles. Would you like me to post that list somewhere? If you'd like the full list, you'll have to send me an email so that I can reply with an attachment, as it would be too big to save as a Wikipedia page. -- John of Reading (talk) 14:46, 27 July 2015 (UTC)
Skipping the first term is perfectly fine as it should be entirely redundant (barring any mistakes in my syntax). I'd gladly accept the full list. I'm still trying to figure out how much of a project I want to make out of this, but having the list would certainly be a useful tool for teaching myself more scripting and may lead to good things. An email will be coming your way shortly. With appreciation —jameslucas (" " / +) 15:43, 27 July 2015 (UTC)
reading quality
Thank you, " harmless drudge", for fixing typos such as "the the" and "do do" from the master list(example pictured), helping reading quality, for assistance at the help desk, for articles such as Castle of Park and cathedral singing, - you are an awesome Wikipedian!
Hi John, long time. Would you be so kind and help me link 2 images to 2 different portals? I want to link this image to the Serer people portal and this image to the Serer religion portal. Would you please show me how to do this? For example when you place Portal|United Kingdom to Wikipedia articles the UK flag appears. I need to know how to link the above images for portals Serer people and religion. Any help would be immensely appreciated. Also if you have time could you checkout the Serer religion portal for me please? In order to edit the portal, I have to go the relevant selected pages which is somewhat strange. If you have a look at the portal you will know what I mean. Thanks as always. Tamsier (talk) 17:13, 8 August 2015 (UTC)
How to add new religious portals to the {{religion browsebar}}?
Hi John, its me again with another portal related question, I hope you don't mind. I want {{Portal|Traditional African religion}} and {{Portal|Serer religion}} to show up on the {{religion browsebar}} (religious portals). How do I go about doing this? Also, I have submitted a request (as above) for Portal Traditional African religion. Thank you ever so much. Tamsier (talk) 02:32, 10 August 2015 (UTC)
Hi John,
What would you like to discuss about my portal. In fact, I have created this accidentally just to store this information as a back up in case the original draft article gets deleted.
Hi! Need some help with regexp, I'm stuck. In short. Want to replace pmē and pmē. (yes, it's not English) with p.m.ē., but such regexp doesn't work well: \bpmē.*\b (I replace it with p.m.ē.). Because for pmē it returns p.m.ē. (OK), but for pmē. it returns p.m.ē.. (not OK). --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 08:49, 6 August 2015 (UTC)
@Edgars2007: Two comments and then my suggestion. (1) In a "Find" string, a dot has a special meaning, "match any character" - so \bpmē.*\b will match anything up to the next word break, such as pmēSomeLongWordStartingWithPME. To match a real dot, you need to stick a backslash in front of it. (2) Having done that, you'll find that \bpmē\.*\b doesn't work properly either. Faced with pmē., the word break is between the "ē" and the dot - the only way to match "zero or more dots and then a word break" is to stop matching before the dot. So my suggestion is to use two separate rules here. First, \bpmē\.+ to find "pmē" followed by one or more dots, plus a second rule to deal with the other case, \bpmē\b. It might be possible to do it in just one rule, but I don't know how. -- John of Reading (talk) 09:13, 7 August 2015 (UTC)
Thanks for the comment on my two signature possibilities. I think youre right about the contrast so Im gonna choose the one you suggested. Wikipenguin 8 (talk) 17:03, 11 August 2015 (UTC)
St Patricks College Goulburn and sourcing of court appearances
Hi John. Every court appearance had the court and date of appearance listed. Thus they are referenced to the primary source: you can walk into the courthouse, pay your money and obtain the transcript. What *exact further information* did you require to fully source the material? Thanks, Glen. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Gdt (talk • contribs) 06:36, 13 August 2015 (UTC)
Thanks for the barnstar for my efforts on Portal:Bristol. I'd like to get this up to featured portal status and if you had any comments for improvement that would be great.— Rodtalk20:46, 30 August 2015 (UTC)
Dear Jhon,
What i wanted to say is that the character name in the movie mentioned in your note is Harilal but in correct logic the name in the film is Pannalal. There are many such mistakes I have come across and want to share but do not know the procedure to do so. Kindly let know. If my e-mail id will be of any assistance to you I am mentioning it : [details removed]
Another editor has removed the entire plot summary as a probable copyright violation, so I'm afraid there's not a lot left of the article. For general advice on editing at Wikipedia, you could try Help:Getting started. I have removed your email address to protect your privacy. -- John of Reading (talk) 12:24, 7 September 2015 (UTC)
Henry Masta Abenaki
My grandmother was Florence Masta, she was full blooded Abenaki. She had a sister whose last name was Tahamont. I was wondering if you could tell me if she was related to Henry Tahamont. My middle name is Henry. Just curious. Thanks! AbenakiLloyd (talk) 04:12, 7 September 2015 (UTC)
@AbenakiLloyd: I'm afraid I can't help you with this! I don't know anything about the subject myself, as this was just one of the thousands of articles where I've fixed a spelling or grammar mistake. But there are some books listed at the foot of the article - if you have access to a decent library, they might be able to track down a copy of some of them. -- John of Reading (talk) 05:54, 7 September 2015 (UTC)
I will revert most of your changes because it is very difficult to have readers comprehend that until WW II many European manufacturers did not provide all the bodies for their cars.
Manufacturers like Rolls-Royce made and sold only a (radiator shell, motor and mudguards and) chassis.
So when illustrating the art of the great coachbuilders the subject is a drophead coupé or whatever. Source of whatever is under the skin and the radiator upfront is a great deal less than secondary.
John, I apologise. I should read more carefully. Please have a very nice rest of your day! I admire what you do, thanks, Eddaido (talk) 07:22, 8 September 2015 (UTC)
your reply to recently edition by me
Hi Jhon,
It seems that i will never try to provide information again because according to your message it states that i will be blocked from editing. I used to give information because it read in your columns that correct information is welcome and now you are only not justifying the statement made. Anyways, I dont find any need to provide information as that i did for no monetary gains and it was just socially. Sorry for the inconvience. I understood wiki is for reading whatever is described in it,, no matter even if it lacks something.
Your edits at Yaarana (1981 film) both left the article showing a red error message and some nonsense text. You are welcome to continue editing, but I suggest you work through the Wikipedia:Tutorial so that you can edit more accurately, or just use the "Show preview" button before saving your edit to see whether your edit is going to work. -- John of Reading (talk) 12:40, 9 September 2015 (UTC)
Review of Portal:Catholic Subpages
As it seems you may have an interest in the subtopics presented on the Portal:Catholic article page, I would like to know if you would be able to visit the DD/MM/YYYY areas and to remove along with report the false Saints listed? Twillisjr (talk) 14:05, 12 September 2015 (UTC)
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Originally I though Orgin was spelled Origion which would lead to Originally being spelled Orgionally but apparently that aint right! Thanks for the assistance with my poor spellin! I am a product of the Clintion Education System here in Arkansas. Aleutian06 (talk) 13:24, 6 October 2015 (UTC)
Six months on, I'm a lot better. Main problem is that writing is hard. I think Wikipedia have to carry on leave without me. Unbuttered parsnip (talk) mytime= Wed 21:09, wikitime= 13:09, 7 October 2015 (UTC)
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Adherence in a religion must be depend the IMAGE OF GOD & HIS GOOD WORK to fallow or worship; where our spiritual process get fulfills: within our wisdom to participate in the HUMANITARIASM!
Religion is depend the way of GOD, where cultural is our act of behaving within the humanitarianism; upon the freedom of THINKING: where rituals need to maintain the unity in the mundane world and ETERNAL.
As a outlook of outcome NOW we face towards a BRIGHT FUTURE!
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Hi, I´am so sorry for answer at this time (almost 5 year later). I am more actively on spanish wikipedia, and for that reason I never check this.
In Austria-Hungary the german people were not "reichdeutsch" or "imperial germans" whom were from Germany not from Austria, those germans from Austria-Hungary were called "austrian" or "austrian germans" Luis Castro Soto (talk) 21:48, 2 November 2015 (UTC)
I am a decedent of Samuel Aaron Joseph. He also had a family in New Zealand. His wife was Ngarino and she was from the west coast of Waikato district (she had lots of land), His son was Whitinui Joseph, grandson Te Aupouri Joseph, great grandson Patrick Tana Pukukohatu Joseph, great X2 George Joseph and great x3 Joshua Joseph (me). He left in a hurry our family story goes and know he ended up in Australia. Just wandered if you had any more info? Joshj1142 (talk) 11:58, 7 November 2015 (UTC)
bias has nothing to do with it - if the citation had said it "rained" but it was a hurricaine would you then say "but they said it rained" - fact of the matter is that by definition what the government did is now described as such in my edit - i have no opinions and attempt to make no opinions - that would damage my reputation on wiki and would haunt me with the sock editors who then could endlessly drag the biased edit up ad infinitum--68.231.26.111 (talk) 01:21, 19 November 2015 (UTC)
if the source that says rain says sustained winds above 85 mph then by definition its a hurricaine no matter what words the source editor chooses--68.231.26.111 (talk) 11:25, 19 November 2015 (UTC)
Virginia Tech Project Invite
As a current or past contributor to a related article, I thought I'd let you know about WikiProject Virginia Tech, a collaborative effort to improve Wikipedia's coverage of Virginia Tech. If you would like to participate, you can visit the project page, where you can join the project and see a list of open tasks and related articles. Thanks!
@Go Hokies: Sorry, I won't be joining the Virginia Tech project - but I promise to fix spellings and grammar errors in these articles whenever they turn up in my work lists! -- John of Reading (talk) 08:46, 23 November 2015 (UTC)
Wikiproject Zoo
Thanks for corrections of Portal:Zoos and aquariums. Im actually alone active member of the Wikiproject Zoo, is there any way I could inspire you to join the project and help me keep it alive?Dan Koehl (talk) 22:35, 21 November 2015 (UTC)
Hi. Thank you for your recent edits. Wikipedia appreciates your help. We noticed though that when you edited Rancho Bernardo High School, you added a link pointing to the disambiguation page Texas rangers. Such links are almost always unintended, since a disambiguation page is merely a list of "Did you mean..." article titles. Read the FAQ • Join us at the DPL WikiProject.
American Old West history image files subject to deletion
The file File:WellsSpicer.JPG has been listed at Wikipedia:Possibly unfree files because its copyright status is unclear or `disputed. An editor believes that because the photo taken before 1885 does not have an author or an initial publication date, it should be removed. This is true of many, many Old West images about events and individuals. If the file's copyright status cannot be verified, it and many others like it related to Old West history may be deleted. You may find more information on the file description page. If you want to help retain images like this, you are welcome to add comments to its entry at the discussion. Thank you. — btphelps(talk to me) (what I've done)22:55, 28 November 2015 (UTC)
A gentle survey for research purpose
Hello John of Reading,
I am Bowen Yu, a computer science PhD student at the University of Minnesota - Twin Cities. Currently, we are working on a project studying the main article and sub article relationship in a purpose of better serving the Wikipedia article structure. It would be appreciated if you could take 4-5 minutes to finish the survey questions. Thanks in advance! We will not collect any of your personally information.
Thank you for your time to participate this survey. Your response is important for us!
Done -- John of Reading (talk) 16:00, 14 July 2015 (UTC)
You are invited to join the discussion at Velaga Venkatappaiah. Participate in AfD Discussion Thanks. KCVelaga ☚╣✉╠☛ 15:36, 15 October 2015 (UTC)
This e-tea's remains have been e-composted SwisterTwister talk 06:22, 22 October 2015 (UTC)
Fixed -- John of Reading (talk) 09:58, 24 November 2015 (UTC)
._19th_Century._Jung-Jung_From_The_Kingdom_of_Sine_(in_modern_day_Senegal).jpg){kind=link}
