User talk:Mikeblas/Archives/2020/July

Cite errors

We have a bot to do this. Or has it been turned off? It was running regularly, so rarely worth the time sorting those errors out manually - there are far worse cite errors knocking around, especially on articles using sfn/harvard style. - Sitush (talk) 16:51, 2 July 2020 (UTC)

Indeed, I've seen some bots try to fix these. They seem to avoid many edge cases (like when references are defined among templates). And the bots often make mistakes, which need to be undone. Right now, there are more than 3700 articles with broken references (see Category:Pages with broken reference names). Since I don't know which fixes the bots will attempt (when, if ever), I fix some by hand each day. I'm not sure how you arrived at the prioritization that some referencing errors are worse than others, but I hope you think it's okay that I follow through on fixing what I see wrong. -- Mikeblas (talk) 19:41, 2 July 2020 (UTC)

Sure, do what you want. The bot I am referring to has always worked for me and usually within about three or four hours. Regardless, please don't ping me about it in the edit summary - it is pointy and pointless. - Sitush (talk) 19:53, 2 July 2020 (UTC)

I referenced you in the edit summary since I changed an edit you deliberately made. This is collaboration: you've done something, I think it should be done a different way, so I let you know with a ping. Of course, I don't think deliberately adding referencing errors to an article is a good idea, but it shouldn't matter to you if a human or robot ends up cleaning up the problem you've created. Either way, the error you've added has been fixed. -- Mikeblas (talk) 19:58, 2 July 2020 (UTC)

AfD 2nd nominations for TI DSK 6713 and TI DSK 6416

Hi, I've submitted a 2nd AfD nomination for these two articles, for the same reason you did before. Thought I would let you know and hopefully get your support. I tried bundling them together on the same nomination since they are so similar, hope that works. Alan Islas (talk) 14:29, 3 July 2020 (UTC)

I'll stop by. But you'll want to make sure you complete the nomination for TI DSK 6416, which doesn't have a discussion page at the moment. ---- Mikeblas (talk) 15:06, 3 July 2020 (UTC)

I've added TI DSK 6416 to the Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Log/2020 July 3 list for you, but you'll still need to create hte discussion page with your reasoning to complete the nomination. -- Mikeblas (talk) 15:18, 3 July 2020 (UTC)

Done. Now I think I should have not attempted to do a bundled AfD with both articles together, but instead do separate submissions. I probably don't have enough experience in AfD so it seems messy and confusing. And I assumed wrongly that two discussion pages were not needed for a bundled submission. Thank you very much for your help! --Alan Islas (talk) 17:34, 3 July 2020 (UTC)

Happy First Edit Day!

Happy First Edit Day, Mikeblas, from the Wikipedia Birthday Committee! Have a great day! ~SS49~ {talk} 08:34, 10 July 2020 (UTC)

Help Me

Hi, Thanks for editing. I wanted to write about the big live house music scene in Tokyo and great venues but I was disencouraged by someone saying it was not important, even though big venues in the US are on Wikipedia, so I am not that good at Wikipedia. I was using magazine article interviews and information from the band websites and posts for the source information about that band so maybe the style was not the best. I usually look at the big band sites and try to copy their style so I am not sure what to change. Could you edit what is not acceptable or give examples of what needs to be changed and I will get it changed. Your help would be appreciated in making the page as good as possible. Thank you. (Fujimama101 (talk) 13:44, 9 July 2020 (UTC))

Happy to help! But it seems best if I can answer specific questions for you rather than just "make an article better". It can be difficult to edit Wikipedia because of the technology, but it can also be difficult becauseo f the people and policies. I think the main thing to do is to write clearly, and make sure whatever you change is well-referenced. -- Mikeblas (talk) 17:10, 10 July 2020 (UTC)

2018 FA Cup Final refs

Hi Mike, thanks for fixing that. I'm guessing that section of the article is referenced by one or more other articles so the refs need to go where you've put them so they're properly transcluded in the other articles? How do I find out which articles are using this subsection? Cheers. The Rambling Man (Stay indoors, stay safe!!!!) 17:22, 11 July 2020 (UTC)

No sweat. Unfortunately, there's no good way to see what other articles include a section. We can look at "Links Here" for the article, but that's all references to the article -- regular links, and section trnsclusions too. For this article, it's a huge list since it's well-linked, so it would be arduous to find the references. We do get a bit of a clue in this article because there's an <onlyinclude> tag around a certain area of the article. That means that something is probably including that section, so any references in that section need to apear within that same section in order to appear correctly in the including article. -- Mikeblas (talk) 18:44, 11 July 2020 (UTC)

Cool, the noinclude is the key clue I guess. Thanks for clearing up any mess I made over those linking articles, much appreciated. The Rambling Man (Stay indoors, stay safe!!!!) 19:46, 11 July 2020 (UTC)

Happy to help :) Inclusions are useful, but kind of fragile and a bit dangerous. There are a couple of other ways to include text from other articles, see WP:SECT. So you might want to look out for some of those markers in addition to <onlyinclude>. -- Mikeblas (talk) 21:51, 11 July 2020 (UTC)

replace undefined references with fact tags

I'm astonished to see an admin doing edits like these, which verge on vandalism. Please stop. Johnbod (talk) 18:16, 12 July 2020 (UTC)

Please see Talk:Anglo-Saxon_settlement_of_Britain#Fixing_references. -- Mikeblas (talk) 18:55, 12 July 2020 (UTC)

My edit? I think not!

Please check before you name people in edit summaries as you did here. The error you corrected was not caused by my edits. Kerry (talk) 22:39, 20 June 2020 (UTC) Sorry! Indeed, it was caused by Find Bruce's edits, in a batch of changes before yours. -- Mikeblas (talk) 22:43, 20 June 2020 (UTC)

Ditto here. Though thank you for fixing the errors. Renata (talk) 23:28, 12 July 2020 (UTC)

Looks to me like the definition of the "luftwaffe.de_09" reference was removed in this edit several months ago. Am I incorrectly reading the diff? -- Mikeblas (talk) 23:46, 12 July 2020 (UTC)

That was just a revert of a disruptive edit (part of watchlist monitoring). The actual edit causing the issue was before by user:Davidsmith2014. Renata (talk) 00:02, 13 July 2020 (UTC)

Year in Vietnam pages

Rather than you deleting my additions please raise it on the relevant Talk Page and I will address it. As you will have seen I am adding a lot of different content from different years and sometimes assume that a reference is there when it isn't. Mztourist (talk) 03:08, 20 July 2020 (UTC)

Please consider reviewing the article after you make changes. The "References" section will include a very visible error message when a reference is used without having been previously defined. I can indeed see that you're making lots of changes -- but they must be referenced. I prefer to remove newly added material that's unreferenced; the removal is easy to undo, and frees me (or anyone else) from having to track the problem until it is actually fixed. -- Mikeblas (talk) 04:03, 20 July 2020 (UTC)

Reference problems

In this edit you said I caused referencing problems, I don't see anything I caused. I did mark two locations where the same name was used, but I didn't introduce those. I can't see anything else you can be referring to though. Jerod Lycett (talk) 20:33, 25 July 2020 (UTC)

Hi! The version of the page before your edits renders without errors. Note that it has, at the end, a "Further reading" section, followed by a succession table. The succession table has some references in it, but it appears after the use of {{reflist}} to make the references table. So the rendered page spints out two more references, which are footnotes only for the references table. Thisn't pretty, but it's working.

If we look at the version of the page after your edits, we see that the second reference block at the end of the page now has a big red error: "Cite error: The named reference Annual Report 1975 was invoked but never defined (see the help page)." This error appears because you tried to combine references where the definition of the reference was before the {{reflist}} invocation, and the usage was after. {{tl|reflist} seems to clear the list of references defined, so it's not possible to have the page correctly render this way.

It's goofy to declare and use references after the references section, so my fix was to move the succession table to appear before the "references" section. That way, the references aren't cleared and the re-used reference is fine. Thing is, a new reference was also declared in that succession table, and it used the same name as another reference declared earlier in the article. That worked before because of the way that {{reflist}} clears the defined references.1

It looks like your edit was to cosmetically fix up a few things, but it ended up damaging the article functionally -- by removing a needed reference definition and causing a new rendering error in the article. My fix is a bit of a compromise because of the way the {{reflist}} template clears the references. It would be nice to have the referenced succession table at the bottom of the article, but I can't think of a way that it would be possible without causing a goofy second references table. -- Mikeblas (talk) 20:57, 25 July 2020 (UTC)

I Believe I've Fixed That Bug with the References

Hi, I think I've fixed that bug with the references, i.e. the script should now properly replace the references it was deleting before. Sorry for the trouble these past few months. DemocraticLuntz (talk) 21:01, 26 July 2020 (UTC)

Great! Thanks!! -- Mikeblas (talk) 22:26, 27 July 2020 (UTC)

DemocraticLuntz, looks like your script is still causing problems. In this edit, it pretty directly created a duplicate reference definition. -- Mikeblas (talk) 15:53, 29 July 2020 (UTC)

MikeBlas, I'm actually going to view that as a salutary problem, in that it was caused because CodyHoward1285 [1] messed up the page pretty badly in his questionable revert attempt (it basically doubled the page). We wouldn't have caught it otherwise. DemocraticLuntz (talk) 18:01, 29 July 2020 (UTC)

Lebanese constituencies referencing

Hi. The refs can be found in the edit history of the 2018 Lebanese general election article (May 2018 versions should have them all). --Soman (talk) 21:31, 29 July 2020 (UTC)

The references need to be in the article that's using them. Reference definitions are local to an article, not global throughout the whole encyclopedia. -- Mikeblas (talk) 22:00, 29 July 2020 (UTC)

I know. In the past there used to be a bot that rescued refs transplated from an article to another. I'll go through the articles in due time, when I have more time. --Soman (talk) 22:05, 29 July 2020 (UTC)

This article has had errors since 2019-09-07‎, so I don't think we can expect help from any robots.-- Mikeblas (talk) 05:00, 30 July 2020 (UTC)