User talk:Oleg Alexandrov/Archive10

Mathbot + flag

Hi Oleg, I imagine you must have considered this before, but I think it would be helpful if User:Mathbot had a botflag, as I often see it in recent changes, and it looks pretty harmless. I imagine it would get speedy flagged as it has been running for such a long time. Martin 09:41, 21 October 2006 (UTC)

Good idea. I did that, see Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/Mathbot. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 15:47, 21 October 2006 (UTC)

Now, who says BAG is slow?! :) --kingboyk 16:17, 21 October 2006 (UTC)

Mathbot was overwhelingly speedily approved at Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/Mathbot, we're just waiting for a 'crat o flag it. — xaosflux ^Talk 17:16, 21 October 2006 (UTC)

Matbot has been humbled by the "speedy" community trust. Thanks! Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 03:12, 22 October 2006 (UTC)

SpeaK?

Ciao Oleg, I'm Olando, I0m italian, you speak the italian. You can give to me one hand to me with wiki.en. Thank you. You answer to me --Olando 09:56, 21 October 2006 (UTC)

Hello Olando. I don't speak Italian unfortuantely. But let me know if I can help with anything. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 15:47, 21 October 2006 (UTC)

Mathbot

Hi Oleg,

Your Mathbot updates this page: Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Germany articles by quality statistics. I made a few edits to it to fix some of the links, I hope that won't mess up the bot's work. Thanks, --Carabinieri^T_T^a_a^l_l^k_k 21:47, 22 October 2006 (UTC)

Today the bot will overwrite your changes. But from tomorrow it will do it right, I modified my script to effect. Cheers, Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 03:39, 23 October 2006 (UTC)

Mathbot again

Hi Oleg, Mathbot seems to be messing up WP:AFD/Old. It's returning all dates as "0 open / 0 closed / 0 total discussions" for some reason. --Sam Blanning^(talk) 17:24, 23 October 2006 (UTC)

For some reason the html source codes of sections changed, from

<div class="editsection">

to

<span class="editsection">

That was confusing the bot. Fixed now. Thanks for your report. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 03:13, 24 October 2006 (UTC)

Wow

Um, Mathbot, is amazing. The coding must have been Hell.

Thank you for your invaluable contribution to the Wikipedia. It makes my efforts at WikiProject Dallas feel so worthwhile when there's a pretty little table listing everything.. and.. ahh. its all just so seamless.

way. to. go. drumguy8800 C T 04:53, 26 October 2006 (UTC)

Also.. you might know the answer, why aren't articles showing up in Category:Dallas articles with comments? An example of a page that should is Talk:Oak Lawn, Dallas per Talk:Oak Lawn, Dallas/Comments and coding from {{WikiProject Dallas}}. Any help/advice would be great!! drumguy8800 C T 07:48, 26 October 2006 (UTC)

Thanks! :) About things not showing up in Category:Dallas articles with comments, I really don't know, it all looks right. Try asking at Wikipedia talk:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Index, some people over there really know these things. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 14:45, 26 October 2006 (UTC)

erasing external links

Please don't insert external links all over the place. I did not find them so helpful and you >seem to be way too insistent. If other people find them useful they will add them themselves, >without you doing that again and again. Thanks. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 03:04, 27 October 2006 >(UTC)

First of all, I am not adding links "all over the place". I am adding links where they seem to be appropiate. Secondly, I am quite sure you have not even read trough the contents of such links. You have not explained why you don't find them so helpful, so please, elaborate your remarks otherwise I will not understand your reasons for erasing some selected links. --unsigned

Yeah, I have read the thing the external links point to. Not helpful. And no, your insistence is not appreciated, in the face of at least three other people removing your links. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 15:53, 27 October 2006 (UTC)

>I agree with Oleg that they're not useful. The main problem is that the webpage seems to be >about a mathematical theory which is not published in a reliable source like peer-reviewed >journals.

There are hundred of links at the wikipedia which ARE neither published, nor sponsored, nor endorsed, by any peer-reviewed journals (and specifically within the same issues I posted my link) but you don't care about that but just about mine, and all we know the true reason: The true history of root solving shown in those web pages. The true about Newton's, Bernoulli's, Halley's and Householder's method. Of course, there could be many other reasons: I am SouthAmerican telling all the true about those superb Cartesian methods.

The real problem here is that the link I provided is a clear denuntiation of the way irrational numbers have been handled by mathematicians.

>Furthermore, there is no analysis of the new root-finding methods.

You have arbitrarily deleted SEVERAL other reliable sources which I included along with my link as for example: http://mathpages.com/home/kmath055.htm http://www.mathpath.org/Algor/cuberoot/cube.root.mediant.htm Dr. Sterven Finch, Generalized Continued Fractions and the Generalized Mediant

All those reliable sources along with many others are included in the link I provided.

All of them containing analysis on my the methods shown in my webpages.

Furthermore, in general terms, it is a real shame to read articles on root-solving from people who use to consider themselves as experts on roots solving but seem unaware about the crude fact that all those supposedly "advanced" cartesian-methods can be easily developed by means of the most simple arithmetic as shown in the link I provided. Furthermore, I am a civil engineer, structural engineer, and I think that if some mathematician consider himself as an expert on root-solving then he has the moral obligation to make whatever analysis should be made on those trivial methods. That's a moral obligation specially when considering that for mathematicians of past times it was almost imposible to compute a simple cube root. I don't have any reasons to post a complete analysis on those methods in my webpage, that's why I published my book which is mentioned there. The link I provided is just a brief summary.

Worst, almost all the links all over the wikipedia do not contain, at all, full demonstrations on the issued they deal about.

>The text is impossible to understand.

That's not true. You don't want to understand just because you don't want such denuntiation on the true history of root-solving. I bet you even have not read any single part of the link you want to let deleted. The proof of all that are the aforementioned reliable links where reknown authors have analyzed some of the methods even when they don't have to agree with my critics to Cartesian-System.

>You added the link to Newton's method, yet the web page is not at >all about >Newton's >method. That's why I am removing the link. -- Jitse Niesen (talk) 12:03, >27 October >2006 (UTC)

The link I provided show that Newton's, Bernoulli's, Halley's and Householder's methods can be easily stated by means of the most simple arithmetic and that ancient mathematicians has at han the elementary arithmetical operation needed for developing such "advanced" methods. I understand these is the main reason some of you don't want my link to appear here, however, as said may there be other reasons. Besides, there are some explanations on why Newton's method is just a crude and primitive geometrical artifice which is not a Natural Method at all and should not be considered as being part of any Natural Philosophy.

Finally, I understand that you have not read through any single part of my methods, you are not interested in doing so. You just want to get it deleted. I understand that, and I know it seems not sense to reply your message because the all of you have laid your wiki-cards on the table. The wikipedia is yours and not from others but only yours.

I only would ask you to allow me to save your comments and to pass them to some of my coleagues, and even use them as part of the next english edition of my book. I would deeply appreciate that, I think it is not so much to ask from the wikipedia editors specially when considering that you are experts on root-solving and endorse your own statements with so much courage.

—The preceding unsigned comment was added by Arithmonic (talk • contribs) .

This appears to be a duplicate of the message which User talk:Arithmonic left on User talk:Jitse Niesen's page. See my response there. JRSpriggs 07:57, 28 October 2006 (UTC)

re: Edit Summary

Will do, thank you Zero sharp 05:04, 29 October 2006 (UTC)

Style tips

Thank you for your advice. I promise I will cause no more trouble to you. ;-) Hwasungmars 12:31, 29 October 2006 (UTC)

I did not say you were causing trouble. :) Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 15:19, 29 October 2006 (UTC)

Geometrical programming

I came across the new article Geometrical programming. I don't know what's about, but given the title, it might be connected to shape optimization. Perhaps you could have a look? -- Jitse Niesen (talk) 05:05, 30 October 2006 (UTC)

Hi Jitse. Thanks for the note. That text seems to have been copied from http://www.stanford.edu/~boyd/gp_tutorial.html. There is more detail at http://www.glue.umd.edu/~azarm/optimum_notes/geometric/geo_intro.htm. It does not appear to be shape optimization, rather some kind of n-dimensional optimization in which the terms have some kind of geoemtric meaning, like area, volume, etc.

The above Geometrical programming article is incomprehensible. I know nothing about the topic and I would not attempt to fix it (I could learn that stuff of course, but these weeks I am really swamped in real life, and that would be a lot of work).

I will now slap a {{context}} tag on it, perhaps a kind soul would be willing to work on it. Cheers, Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 04:03, 31 October 2006 (UTC)

Ah, it's geometric as in "geometric mean". I'm not a fan of keeping incomprehensible articles, and I saw that the editor has also copied from another web page, so I slapped {{copyvio}} on everything. Thanks for your comments. I hope you're not too busy in real life, just fashionably busy ;) -- Jitse Niesen (talk) 06:26, 31 October 2006 (UTC)

Thanks, the copyvio tag is the right thing to do.

OK, I should be busy, as I am applying for jobs and that's a pain. But yeah, I still find time to check my watchlist. :) Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 16:05, 31 October 2006 (UTC)

Ouch, applying for jobs is not the nicest thing in the world. Good luck! -- Jitse Niesen (talk) 00:53, 1 November 2006 (UTC)

Taylor series

I responded at Talk:Taylor series. -- Petri Krohn 04:57, 1 November 2006 (UTC)

Error function of complex numbers

Regarding this edit; as far as I can see, the error function is well-defined for complex numbers, for instance by its Taylor series, and the article even says this. Perhaps there's something I've missed. Fredrik Johansson 16:12, 2 November 2006 (UTC)

You are right. I saw the integral from 0 to x and thought that x is a real number. But x of course can be complex, and then we just have a path integral. I reverted myself now. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 04:32, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for the tips!

I just wanted to thank you for the tips, especially regarding links! I appreciate your comments and will be sure to read the pages you suggested. Thanks also for moving the page - the capitalisation was annoying but I was unsure how to rename/move pages. Kind regards, Dan Pope 21:02, 2 November 2006 (UTC)

Hungarian community

Hi Oleg! We'd like to use a bot doing the same job as yours in the Hungarian Wikipedia. How could we solve that? Our bot owners ask you to give us the code of Mathbot. Or could you suggest something that would fit to you too, please. Thank you in advance. NCurse _work 20:04, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

I can surely give you all the codes, but I would like to give them to somebody who knows some Perl or some other programming language, so that they will have some idea about how to set it up. Note that setting the bot up could be some work, as it uses the WWW::Mediawiki::Client package which has a bunch of dependencies. Also, if you want to run the bot on a Windows machine (I run it on Linux) some tweaks may need to take place. So, as long as anybody knowlegeable is willing to put some work, I'll be more than happy to cooperate. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 03:46, 5 November 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for the answer. I ask them to contact you. :) NCurse _work 07:10, 5 November 2006 (UTC)

Hi Oleg! I'am Dami from the Hungarian Wikipedia, and I am the one NCurse has sent to talk to you :) First, I'd like to ask you about the easiest solution on my part: I know I am asking a lot from you, but would it be possible that You run Mathbot on the Hungarian Wikipedia, as the task would be similar, maybe simpler, just the pages different? If that isn't possible than please contact me, and start teaching me, how to run your bot, starting from installing the WWW::Mediawiki::Client on a Windows machine. Thank you very much. Regards --Dami 19:31, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

It will not be so easy for me to run the bot. First, I don't know which scripts you want to run. Second, many scripts would need to be modified for Hungarian keywords, and I don't know any Hungarian. Third, long term you may want to change things/add things, and you can't always rely on me to be around.

I never installed Perl on Windows. There is a tutorial here, and there should be more. You will need to install Active Perl I guess, if you don't have it installed already. Then, WWW::Mediawiki::Client has a lot of dependencies (you will see which if it complains and refuses to install).

By the way, do you know Perl at all? That would really help in installing stuff/modifying the scripts. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 05:19, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

Unfortunately, I am new to Perl. I was hoping it would be enough if we told you the names of the paths where your bot would have put the logs. Its true that we have slight changes, but nothing really that would warrant a totally personized script (the changes are that we have no importance rating (but would not mind an empty importance column), and two of the names of the ratings is changed ('stub' --> 'csonk' and 'FA' --> 'K'), also we don't have good article rating, but having an empty Good article row isn't a problem either at this stage).

Would that be possible that we provide you with either the modifed scripts (ie: where the English words are changed to Hungarian, and the templates are those used on huwiki (though the class parameter of it is same as here, with the above changes), and with the huwiki specific save paths)?

I will look into installing Perl and the WWW::Mediawiki::Client later today, and report back to you when I'm succesful. As I mentioned I'm new to Perl, but also confident, as I hope only the localisation of some strings is necessary for running the "assesment summarizer" program on huwiki.--Dami 10:01, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

Hi again! I'm having difficulty installing the Mediawiki client because of its dependencies (I have all but one figure out) :((( I would like to ask you to outline the principle behind your bot. Reading the userpage of Mathbot, I understand that we would be needing only the scripts associated with the Wikiproject 1.0 duties of your bot. Is it possible that you run a bot using the modified scripts I (and the Hungarian Community behind me) would provide. As I don't yet know the working philosophy of the bot but hopefully the changes necessary would only be localisations of the tables headers, the paths, the templates names, and minor changes to the table showing the statistics. Is it possible that you give me the files that contain these configurations, and then I localise it and send it back to you. Also I know that I'm this way a bit of a letdown, believe me before today I wouldn't have believed if someone told me I couldn't install a program, so I'm a bit disappointed in myself too... Of the three problems you mentioned I think my proposal would solve the first and the second (i.e. we modify the script or "teach you Hungarian" where needed), the third problem about you not being around all the time hopefully won't come up, we might bother you with the creation of some new projects but we might as well just create the templates and other pages for some future projects in advance (especially if your bot supports redirects...) if that's possible [and in the long run there has to be someone on huwiki who will eventually be able to install the mediawiki::client :)]. Thanks again for your help--Dami 21:19, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

Unfortunately that I may not be around could be a problem. Just last night the bot got confused by some server changes and started messing up hundreds of pages. Luckily I was online and killed it before it did further damage.

The short story is that bots break, and they need constant supervision and maintanance. I believe it would be too much work for me to supervise the Hungarian project in addition to the English one. I will be very happy to give you the code, but I would need somebody at the Hungarian Wikipedia who would know Perl well enough to run the bot, modify it if necessary, and take responsibility when it breaks. Sorry I can't help with more than that. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 03:23, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

Hello, Oleg! I successfully installed the WWW::Mediawiki::Client. I spoke with Dami, and he asked me to maintain the bot. I haven't used Perl before (I just started to learn it, and it seems not too difficult), but I have good knowledge in Delphi and Pascal and I learned PHP in short time, so I think that it won't be a problem, except if I have to make difficult modifications. Can you give me the code, and tell me what modifications I have to make? You can send me the answer in e-mail, too, my address is bdanee at freemail dot hu. --bDaneE 15:38, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

Great! I know that installing that package is a pain. I need to put together that script together with all dependencies and eliminate all Linux-specific parts. I will do that tonight and send you the code. We can communicate by email from now on. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 16:26, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

Did we crash Mathbot?

Oleg, we over at WP:AIRPORTS, assessed some 2,500 articles today. The bot looked like it was making its daily 04:00 UTC run of 1.0 WikiProjects. It got through 3 or 4 projects before it got to us, so I'm seeing the pattern for updates:

Statistics, then /1 /2 /3 etc, the parent of them, and finally the changelog.

Well, it got through the statistics, and then stopped at 04:17 UTC. It's 04:53 as of this writing and it looks like MathBot has crashed, as it hasn't finished our project.

Just figured I'd inform you. Hopefully we didn't mess things up too badly for you. Thanks! thadius856_talk 04:51, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

The bot is still happily running. It is just that adding so many new articles at once causes the bot to fetch the history of each of them to create a fixed version link (see Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/A-League player articles by quality for an example). In short, the bot is not crashed, just busy. :) Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 04:57, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

Hi, the bot seems to be stuck on daylight savings time and runs an hour late everywhere (at least at wp:afd/old). Fix it if you can muster the effort. - Bobet 01:03, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

Thanks. I can't quite understand what is going on, but I scheduled the bot to run an hour earlier. (Remind me again in the spring to switch it back :) Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 05:19, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

Error on computer and video game articles by quality statistics

[[1]]. As you can see it's blank. RobJ1981 05:58, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

Bot went mad. The discussion (if any) is at Wikipedia_talk:Version_1.0_Editorial_Team/Index#Bot went mad. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 06:08, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

Second source for Mathbot

In response to the Hungarians, you said "Unfortunately that I may not be around could be a problem. ... The short story is that bots break, and they need constant supervision and maintanance.". This raises the question of what preparation have you made for the eventuality that you will be unavailable to maintain Mathbot at some time in the future. Do you have any under-study who can fill in for you? If not, we should try to recruit one or two such people. JRSpriggs 08:05, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

I ain't dead yet. :) Ultimately I will need to carefully polish the mathbot source code and make it public. Then anybody can take over the maintanance at any time. I just need to find time for that. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 16:34, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

Style tips, redirection

Thank You for the tips, I have just removed many oberlinking from the new mathematical logic articles (Signature (mathematical logic), Non-logical symbol…).

Thank You also for the solving a redirection problem, which made it possible to get rid of the

Signature (in mathematical logic)

trick.

Best wishes

Physis 11:11, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for your input. You're right. I'll be more careful. Stammer 16:54, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

Bot task?

Hey (again). I'm interested in either finding or creating a bot that would render a table (much like articles by quality) with a list of members in a WikiProject.. then their number of edits on pages in the project's master category (basically their edits to any articles in the project) in the last 30 days and in their tenure as wikipedians. I downloaded the pywiki thing hoping to quickly learn exactly how to build it, but I'm pretty stumped. Do you think this could be done by Mathbot or should I write the script, and if so.. should i be using pywiki? drumguy8800 C T 23:14, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

Perhaps I'm just kidding.. now that I see your response to the Hungarian thing, it looks like me doing this myself would be biting off way more than I could chew. I do not know Perl, but I do quite a bit of Java coding and of course HTML.. but I fear those are in different programming genres.. from a glance it looks like PHP (w/ all the $ signs) which I have never touched. drumguy8800 C T 23:14, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

Installing the Perl bot framework is a big pain indeed (I hope one day to fix that, but I don't know when).

Unfortunately I don't have the time to help write the script you suggest as real life keeps me rather busy at the moment.

If you want to become a bot writer, I would say that the Python framework is easier to use and many more people know it, but Perl is (in my view) a better language for text processing. Either way, learning to write a bot could be some work, but it is also great fun, so perhaps you could give it a try. :) Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 05:01, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

Edit history - minor vs major

Hi Oleg.

I've realised that I've marked a lot of edits as minor when they were adding new material to articles (predominantly the List of matrices article). Is there any way to reclassify these edits so that other editors won't ignore them in the recent changes? Not because I don't trust what I've entered, but simply as good practice. The list was already fairly long, hence my adding one or two entries now and then didn't seem 'major'. I've since re-read the definition! Keep up the good work. Dan Pope 09:57, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

Hi Dan. I don't think there is a good way to reclassify edits from minor to major. That would require hacking the database or something, and it is not worth it I would think. Besides, in the recent changes people look mostly at vandalism anyway. Usually it is people who have an article on their watchlist who look in detail at what you changed, and then they would look at both major and minor edits anyway I would think.

In short, I guess you can repent, swear to use the minor edit button only when appropriate from now on, and you are forgiven of your past sins. :) Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 16:25, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

There is an option in one's preferences to set the minor-edit flag by default. Make sure that is off. JRSpriggs 05:16, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

tips

Thanks for the tips. Are you related to the Alexandroff of "Alexandroff and Hopf" - I once read parts of that book? But your name has a v where the other has two f's

I agree that scalar variables should be italicized, even if they are in Greek or Hebrew (Aleph-0). (I am doing word play on nationalities - Italic for Italy, etc.) Sorry I missed putting italics - I just do my quick slapdash work. I mean to come back and fix it better, but I do not always remember to do so.

About the underscore in the link. I find it safest to open the page I want and copy the url using the mouse, then paste into the page I'm editing, nested in [[....]]. Sometimes there are percent signs, too - it works OK. They say "if it ain't broke don't fix it". But you are welcome to fix both items - italicization and stray underscores and % signs.

Best Regards 24.8.160.40 08:00, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

Mathbot

Has it seized up again? at about 10:45 am :: Kevinalewis : ^{(Talk Page)}/_(Desk) 11:19, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

The UCLA computers (on which mathbot is running) are down, I don't know why. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 16:07, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

Dog articles

Thanks for having categorized the WikiProject Dogs articles. With any luck, they'll show up now. I honestly haven't checked, so I don't know what happened with it, but you have my profoundest thanks. Badbilltucker 15:14, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

Maybe we should have a category for articles that are dogs.--CSTAR 02:15, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

What does "(top)" mean?

Sometimes I see "(top)" at the end of an edit summary, e.g. in "my contributions". What does it mean? JRSpriggs 06:08, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

That you've done the last edit to page, and that your revision is the current revision visible to everyone. Titoxd^(?!?) 06:10, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

Thanks. That makes sense. I should have figured it out myself. JRSpriggs 06:16, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

RfA thanks!

My brand-spankin' new mop!

My RfA done I hope to wield my mop well (Her name is Vera) I appreciate The support you have shown me (I hope I don't suck) Anyway, I just wanted to drop you a line (damn, haikus are hard)

EVula // talk // ☯ // 16:56, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

Another barnstar for the collection!

		The Original Barnstar
		Oleg Alexandrov is hereby awarded The Original Barnstar for doing so many great things that I can't decide what to award a barnstar for! -- Meni Rosenfeld (talk) 22:00, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

Wow, thanks! I am not sure what "great" things I did lately, besides fixing my bot when it started blanking hundreds of pages in the WP:1.0/I project, but I guess that was something. :) Thanks! Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 16:26, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

Just maintaining Mathbot counts as "many great things" :-) And there's the usual copyediting, helping other editors, and all those other things I probably don't even know about :) -- Meni Rosenfeld (talk) 20:46, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

Articles by class and importance

Is it possible for Mathbot to create a table showing the correlation of class and importance? For example:

Table Name Goes Here?		Importance
		Top	High	Mid	Low
Class	FA	#	#	#	#
	A	#	#	#	#
	GA	#	#	#	#
	B	#	#	#	#
	Start	#	#	#	#
	Stub	#	#	#	#

My thoughts are that it isn't really feasibly possible with the way Mathbot works. I assume it simply loads the categories instead of loading each page and implementing this would seriously convolute the code, require an entire rewrite and would cause massive load. But I figured I'd just ask anyway, in case I'm completely wrong. :) thadius856_talk 01:29, 14 November 2006 (UTC)

Continued at Wikipedia talk:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Index. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 03:13, 14 November 2006 (UTC)

WikiProject Meteorology

Hi there! I was wondering if your bot would be capable of a few things, and if you could possibly add a small job for it related to WikiProject Meteorology.

Well, the small thing first, naturally :). The meteorology project is somewhat dwarfed in part by one of it's subprojects (the tropical cyclones project). The subproject is run independently from the Meteorology project though, and so without messing up the 1.0 listings, we'd like a table that shows the the number of articles by quality in Wikipedia:WikiProject Meteorology minus the number by quality of Wikipedia:WikiProject Tropical cyclones. The current manually updated table we have for this is currently transcluded from User:Runningonbrains/Meteorology_articles_by_quality.

OK, now that the simple one is out of the way, I was wondering if Mathbot was capable of performing the kind of work mentioned in the discussion here, and if so, whether it might be possible for it to take on such a task once we've thrashed out the specifics of what we actually want done by a bot in the project?

It's all a bit hypothetical at the moment anyway (except for that first simple request for a subtraction I mentioned) as someone from the project may yet write a bot for us, but I felt it worth asking just for informations sake for now. Thanks, Crimsone 03:40, 14 November 2006 (UTC)

I am rather reluctant to have mathbot work on specific tasks for individual projects. That would be a lot of work on my part, and would not have that many benefits. I would suggest, as mentioned at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Meteorology that you get a bot writer to work on your projects specific needs. That also applies for the first requst above, about meteorology vs tropical cyclones. I think it should be easy enough to implement as a standalone script using the python wikipedia framework. Sorry. :) Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 03:52, 14 November 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for the reply. Having a rudimentary and somewhat deficient understanding of coding, I understand the reluctance. I kinda knew of the possibility that it could be a lot of work on your part before asking, I just wasn't sure. Thankyou very much for taking the time to reply though :) Crimsone 05:10, 14 November 2006 (UTC)

About Request for edit summary

Thank you very much for your advice that you wrote on my talk page. By the way, I love mathematics. --Meno25 05:00, 14 November 2006 (UTC)

Commutative diagram

hey, Oleg. sorry to bother you. hope you could help me. how does one make one of those and put it in an article? thanks. Mct mht 05:08, 14 November 2006 (UTC)

I don't know, really, but I know who knows. Try to ask at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Mathematics. Some algebraists/topologists hang around there. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 05:09, 14 November 2006 (UTC)

damn that was quick. thanks. i thought you were the graphics guy (didn't you make them pics at holomorphic functional calculus?). Mct mht 05:15, 14 November 2006 (UTC)

Mathbot running a day late

Hello. In case you haven't noticed, Mathbot seems to be running a day late - it's currently doing updates under yesterday's date (13 Nov). I'm guessing that the bot's a bit overworked... Mike Peel 12:20, 14 November 2006 (UTC)

It does that because of a few things. It started late on Nov 13 in Pacific time, which is already Nov 14 in Europe. By the time it finished, it was Nov 14 everywhere I guess. Does it bother you that things are a bit delayed? :) Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 15:56, 14 November 2006 (UTC)

Ah, I forgot about timezones. I was thinking that the bot was taking longer than 24 hours to get a run done, in which case I was going to suggest that it either runs faster, or has a period of every 2 days rather than 1. It doesn't really matter to me - the important thing is that the work gets done, not when it gets done. Thanks. Mike Peel 09:05, 15 November 2006 (UTC)

Actually I had some time to think about it and I realized that you are right. I converted my bot to GMT time, I think it is better that way. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 03:40, 16 November 2006 (UTC)

procedures for manual calculation of logarithms

Hi, I was taking a look at logarithms and was interested to know how the first table of logarithms were calculated. It would be very interesting to know how the table of logarithms of base 10 and base e were first calculated by hand as well as the trigonometric tables were also calculated by hand. Maybe you could add links to other topics in wikipedia that provides this information. Thanks. Dr mindbender 04:46, 15 November 2006 (UTC)

I don't know how to answer your question. Try asking at Wikipedia:Reference desk/Mathematics though, people who hang around there turn out to be more knowledgeable. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 05:38, 15 November 2006 (UTC)

Thanks very much. Appreciate it. Dr mindbender 05:50, 15 November 2006 (UTC)

I added a section on series for the natural logarithm to the article. You could use those series to calculate logarithms. How it was/is actually done by those who compile tables or write calculator/computer software, I do not know. JRSpriggs 08:14, 16 November 2006 (UTC)

Mathbot statistics chanegs

I just wanted to say many thanks for changeing Mathbot to do a table of qulaity/importance, rather than a straight list by importance. Shoudl be very useful :-) Tompw 13:13, 20 November 2006 (UTC)

Derivative

Thx for your comment on the above with your revert. I'll try to fix first part simply. The second part as written it is not correct (because velocity is speed & direction, not merely speed). My revision at least had the advantage of fixing that. I'll save other comments for the Talk Page of the article. Make no mistake, however, I did appreciate your critique. If my next revision of the article does not get it right, please fix or revert (with Talk Page or Edit summary rationale in mind I hope). I think a realistic objective of the lead should be to convey intuitively what a derivative is to someone who lacks that background knowledge. BW, Thomasmeeks 01:15, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

P.S. I put the rationale for second edit after your revert in the Edit summary only. Thomasmeeks 02:17, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

P.P.S. I did not have a clue as to what prompted your last remove until I reflected. I hope the revision fixes the lack of clarity to your satisfaction. Thx again. Thomasmeeks 14:53, 23 November 2006 (UTC)

Dear Mr. Alexandrov: On your recent Edit, I can see why you did what you did. You edited according to your best understanding. But you might consider whether the principle of charity might help your Edits. I have in mind only the last Edit,* whose summary reads:

so, direct relationship is a convoluted way of saying that the function is increasing

Not exactly. The name that I gave to the link was 'positive relationship' (not 'direct relationship'), which I think many readers would understand. The rest would get an accurate sense of the usage by following the link to a simple explanation. Your Edit, I think wisely, did not include a link to increasing function, possibly b/c that article might be a bit scarier to some readers.

My edit distinguished between a derivative representing a + or - relationship (expressing it in metric form) and derivatives determining (deriving) other properties. Your Edit eliminated that distinction. My guess is that some of the uninitiated would find the distinction useful and interesting & that you are sympathetic to the unitiated.

* The earlier ones, in particular the Edit summaries, though terse, were helpful & appreciated. Thomasmeeks 02:58, 24 November 2006 (UTC)

P.S. I do have in mind a simple Edit to address the above elimination, which I believe that you'd find helpful. If you'd consider reviewing it first, I'd be glad to send it to you. Otherwise I'll just post it in a couple days and hope that it meets with acceptance or improvement over the current Edit. Thomasmeeks 04:23, 24 November 2006 (UTC)

P.P.S. I appreciate your response. But, hey, come to think of it, nobody (with the possible exception of Jimbo Wales) owns any Wiki articles. Even your last Edit summary prepared me for a response to my latest Derivative edit (probably next-to-last such) and for the last 2 Talk Page entries, which I just completed. So, I'm way ahead from your edits. And please continue to Edit, or even revert, my (pathetic!) efforts if warranted in your judgment. By the way, if you could get someone to put in a partial derivative 'ό' among the Wiki Edit Inserts or Symbols and in regular font size, that would be amazing. BW, Thomasmeeks 16:46, 25 November 2006 (UTC)

In tex, one uses "\partial". For example, ${\frac {\partial x^{2}y}{\partial y}}=x^{2}.$ But perhaps you already know that. JRSpriggs 10:45, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

Table of mathematical symbols has what I was looking for. Symbols can be copied without Editing. With Underline, that gives a fair amount of regular-font-size flexibility. Thus, ∂GDP > 0.

∂M

By now, however, I'm hooked on TeX. Thomasmeeks 04:07, 27 November 2006 (UTC)

Typo in Houston categories by quality/importance

Hello..Thanks for your help..I wasn't sure what needed to be done to get the automated assessment going. I noticed that Houston was misspelled (Huston is incorrect) when the categories were created. How can this be fixed? Thank you Postoak 05:32, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

Sorry. I fixed my misspelling now and deleted the mis-spelled categories. Oleg Alexandrov (talk)

Thanks! Postoak 05:57, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

OK. :) When the bot runs tomorrow it will do the counting for the Houston project. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 06:05, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

Thanks again..looks great! Postoak 05:30, 24 November 2006 (UTC)

Needing your assistance please

Dear Mr Oleg,

Good morning!

I am a USER in Wikepedia by name Soosaiya.

Currently I am writing on a topic " A small introduction to Freud's INTERPRETATION OF DREAM". I have finished reading this 700 page book. Now I am very much interested in condensing Freud's writing into a smaller size say 50 pages in Wikipedia by contributing progressively every day. The reason for this is to encourage new readers in this scientific work; and for this, the volume needs to be condensed.First I loaded 2 pages work, then now I want to load the expanded pages( as I progress) to the previous day's contribution. Will u please help me how to do this revision on every day basis? So far I did not get the allocation; it still remains in image pdf category.

Further the Wikipedia rules and guidlines seem to too vast a pacific ocean to sail through and find what I want.

Best Regards

A.Soosaiya Seoul

soosaiya@hotmail.com

I am kind of confused by your request. I am not sure if what you plan to do would result in an article which would fit into an encyclopedia. Also, 50 pages for an article is a bit too much I would think. I'd suggest you discuss with people who know more than me about these things, for example, at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Psychology. Cheers, Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 05:23, 24 November 2006 (UTC)

convex image

I was very happy for the "respectfully" in your reverting comment! :)
I tried my best once more, cehck out Image:Convex Function.png. What do you think now? Any other suggestion? I wanted an image with a source code (reproducable) and one with a (partly) falling function and one with now arrows.
Very curious what you think now , best de:Benutzer:Thire aka 128.130.51.96 15:41, 27 November 2006 (UTC)

Thanks, the image is great! Two more things which need to be done is I think to replace y(1-t) with (1-t)y (now you sometimes put the t's first, and sometimes last). Also, making variables italic, so y instead of y, would really help blend with the notation in the text. After that, I think you can put the image in, I have no more objections. By the way, why don't you make an account here? It is easier to deal with people who have an account. :) Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 17:00, 27 November 2006 (UTC)

I am busy this week at university, but I will try to incorporate your suggestions at the weekend. Thanks for those anyway! :)

I don't do much here in the english wikipedia, so I did not open an account here yet. Perhaps this occation (image) will let me enter in the english world of wikipedia. :)

You'll hear of me on the weekend, --128.130.51.96 08:31, 28 November 2006 (UTC)

...and I found some more work at Derivative... we'll see what happens!

I added your requests. And commons:User:AtonX added Image:Convex Function.svg. But anywhere I prefer mine ;) --128.131.219.28 11:24, 2 December 2006 (UTC)

Mathbot running not at all

Seems to have stopped yesterday morning and not a peep out of it's regular work since.! :: Kevinalewis : ^{(Talk Page)}/_(Desk) 08:46, 30 November 2006 (UTC)

See Wikipedia talk:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Index#Statistics - total number of assess articles decreasing? Some articles are misteriously disappearing. But it appears that it is not bot's fault. The bot will run tonight as usual. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 15:59, 30 November 2006 (UTC)

minor change to template:RfA

Okay, I'll bite. Is there any reason your bot would not be able to handle a change of "Ending" to "Scheduled to end" on Template:RfA? Both WP:WATCH and WP:BN seem to be handling the MrDarcy example fine so far. Crossposted to the other two BotOps mentioned there. -- nae'blis 23:25, 1 December 2006 (UTC)

I think my bot is not affected by that. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 06:34, 2 December 2006 (UTC)

This IP

This IP is located at the University of Rochester.... please do not ban it. Some of the changes it has made were not done by me, but by other students. 128.151.253.249 03:33, 2 December 2006 (UTC)

I think that if you become a registered user, you will not usually be affected by a block of your IP address. Just be on good behaviour, so that your user-id is not also banned. JRSpriggs 12:35, 2 December 2006 (UTC)

Edit summary calculations

re: http://www.math.ucla.edu/~aoleg/wp/rfa/edit_summary.html

I don't understand the results from calculations on that page. I have an edit summary for most of my edits (see [2]), but it says that I only have 66% for major edits. Many of my edits have just used the default section header as the edit summary, and it appears that your calculation of edit summaries is counting those as having no edit summary. I think that page needs an explanation of how you do the calculations. 05:47, 2 December 2006 (UTC)

Yeah, the bot does not count the default edit summaries. Edit summaries are most useful when the user actually writes something informative, while the default summary would just point out the section. I am not sure an explanation is necessary, I think the bot is doing what is expected. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 06:33, 2 December 2006 (UTC)

Mathbot for ArbCom

Well, not really. :P Any chance of getting Mathbot to provide an updated page, like it did last election? Titoxd^(?!?) 01:11, 4 December 2006 (UTC)

I see there already is a table of results, at User:Gurch/Reports/ArbComElections, but in a "me too" fashion I resurrected last year's script, which will be displaying hourly results at User:Mathbot/ArbCom Election December 2006. If data in the two pages coincide, it means we are doing something right. :) Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 05:35, 4 December 2006 (UTC)

Good thing you did, mine stalled for 9 hours while I was asleep. It's back up now, though. (And it has fancy colour-coding and sortable tables, too, though I've been getting reports they don't work properly in IE, which is a shame). The data probably won't coincide, though, since they update at different times – Gurch 22:14, 4 December 2006 (UTC)

OK, now the Mathbot ArbCom summary page has the same problem

Now User:Mathbot/ArbCom Election December 2006 has the same problem (blank page on IE 6.02 on Windows XP) as User:Gurch/Reports/ArbComElections. —Doug Bell ^talk 05:40, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

It was because I used a sortable table. I removed it now. That Gurch has it is enough I guess. :) Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 16:04, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

TeX tips

Hi Oleg, thank you very much for your tips and the link: I will surely use it as a reference guide. As you can see from my list of contributions, I have done several TeXing of voices or part of voices, and now I see that, in some cases, the result does not look very good from the point of view of indentation: unrestricted use of TeX makes the voice look "heavy", even if TeX itself looks far better than any other way of typing mathematical formulas. But at the same time. I see cases where mixing the two ways of writing mathematics gives the same "heavyness" result: so I try to follow an aesthetic criteria, choosing a uniform way of writing mathematics within a any single block of text. Harmonizing TeX within web text typing is surely a challenge: do you know if someone is trying to do this? Again thanks:) Daniele.tampieri 21:35, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

There is no good way, unfortunately, unless Wikipedia is made up of pdf files. :) Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 04:00, 7 December 2006 (UTC)

Better still is the MathML way. But recent updates to Dmharvey's user page suggest Real Life has distracted him from pushing blahtex at the moment. Maybe Jitse Niesen knows something of its current status? --KSmrq^T 05:46, 7 December 2006 (UTC)

Your input is requested

Your input would be appreciated at this Request for Comments. Kelly Martin (talk) 17:16, 6 December 2006 (UTC)

Mathbot bugs

I don't know if you knew this, but I just ran mathbot for WP:FILMS (the on-command version) and it worked... the statistics got updated and so did the log. Plus it gave me:

Done with Category:Film articles by quality!

Thanks for Mathbot! Cbrown1023 02:25, 7 December 2006 (UTC)

So, you meant to say "no bugs"? :) Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 04:00, 7 December 2006 (UTC)

Mathbot missing importance

There is a bit of a bug with Mathbot. Whenever it does quality stats boxes, like Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Canada-related articles by quality statistics, it doesn't link to the importance categories, and will infact remove the links if they have been added when it updates, like here. Just wanted to let you know so you can improve the bot. JQF • Talk • Contribs 15:33, 7 December 2006 (UTC)

Thanks. I am aware of this. In the last few days we dealt with bugs which caused the bot to remove articles from projects, so I did not have time to deal with this issue. It is on my to-do list, and I will work on it, perhaps in a week or two, after I fix a few more things which I think have a bit more of priority. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 16:13, 7 December 2006 (UTC)

I fixed that. The stats will have those links when the bot runs tonight. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 22:08, 16 December 2006 (UTC)

FYI, the Mathbot is calling the "Unknown importance" section "No importance", and is reflecting that in the linking. I realise I did this too when I tried to fix the problem, so you may have carried over my error. Sorry 'bout that. JQF • Talk • Contribs 20:57, 18 December 2006 (UTC)

It is not your error. Some projects use "No importance" and some others "Unknown importance". Can you specify where that "Unknown importance section" is? There should be no sections with that name I think. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 03:01, 20 December 2006 (UTC)

thanks

thank you for information —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Vssun (talk • contribs) 04:24, 8 December 2006 (UTC). --sunil 04:24, 8 December 2006 (UTC)

talk archive epinephrine -> speedy

Hi, I saw that mathbot tagged a talk-archive of epinephrine for speedy deletion, I guess that is a mistake. Could you have look? --Dirk Beetstra ^{T C} 07:58, 8 December 2006 (UTC)

It tried to speedy Talk:Magneto (comics)/Archive 1, as well: diff —Celithemis 08:12, 8 December 2006 (UTC)

There are many, please stop the bot, this will result in deletion of many archives. --Dirk Beetstra ^{T C} 08:18, 8 December 2006 (UTC)

Let me be the third to note that the automated creation of messes like this is extremely uncool. -- Visviva 08:19, 8 December 2006 (UTC)

Sorry! The bot was doing the right thing for a while, then I went to bed, then it started tagging a bunch of archives. Thanks for blocking the bot, my dumb script finished in the meantime, and I unblocked the bot. Sorry again for the trouble. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 16:22, 8 December 2006 (UTC)

Mathbot seems to be erroring on Bird articles

It is now playing a different game, going round and round as far as I can tell. :: Kevinalewis : ^{(Talk Page)}/_(Desk) 09:04, 8 December 2006 (UTC)

Speedy tagging of talk archives

As you have probably noticed, your bot mistakenly tags lots of talk archives for speedy deletion. Could you tag them with a template, perhaps one that says "This page carries a WP1.0 assessment template, but is not attached to an article" thingy instead that asks for removal of the problematic WikiProject template instead of suggesting to delete the not-orphaned talkpage? Thank you, and thanks a lot for your great work with the bot! Kusma (討論) 11:53, 8 December 2006 (UTC)

No grudges?

Hi Oleg. Having just discovered that MathBot is counting ArbCom votes here, I wanted it to know that I deeply regret these unkind perrsonal attacks here and here, especially the "silly little bag-of-bits" remark. I apologize and I hope it will find it in its code somewhere to forgive and forget. I wish it nothing but the best. Regards, Paul August ☎ 04:05, 9 December 2006 (UTC)

OK, OK, I'll make sure you score in the table is computed correctly. :) Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 17:39, 9 December 2006 (UTC)

Actually I was hoping you could get rid of those pesky 8 "oppose" votes? I'm sure Mathbot made those up. I don't think it is just a coincidence that "8" rotated is infinity. Paul August ☎ 19:11, 9 December 2006 (UTC)

Ooops, now it is 9. Very clever of MathBot. Paul August ☎ 19:15, 9 December 2006 (UTC)

The bot says it would count your opposes modulo 12. So, three more opposes, and you will be back to 0. :) Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 20:45, 9 December 2006 (UTC)

Edit summaries

I am now working with the article and make many changes. When the work is over i'll remove the underconstruction tag.--Planemo 17:38, 9 December 2006 (UTC)

WikiProject Architecture/Assessment

Hi, appreciate your adopting the assessment for architecture. Do you know a source of information about writing the code for the importance flag in a Project Banner template? Thanks —Dogears (talk • contribs) 02:43, 10 December 2006 (UTC)

See what you like from Category:WikiProject banners. For example, {{WikiProject California}} . Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 03:55, 10 December 2006 (UTC)

Self-references in List of mathematics articles

I noticed that you pointed out in this edit summary that links to a Wikiproject are not a self-reference. I disagree. According to Wikipedia:Avoid self references section "Community and website feature references": "do not refer to any Wikipedia project page or process". The "Examples of self-references" section lists "Any article in the article namespace that links to one in the Wikipedia namespace". If you believe these links should stay, they should at least be put in a {{selfref}} template. However, I still believe they should be removed. Khatru2 07:06, 11 December 2006 (UTC)

I see what you meant by self-reference now.

Actually, the better solution would be moving list of mathematics articles to the Wikipedia namespace also, so Wikipedia:List of mathematics articles, as really, such a huge list of articles which is bot-generated to start with, does not belong in the main namespace.

But I'd prefer to keep the status quo. The link to the wikiproject is very important, has been there for a while, and, I think policies should also be interpreted on a case-by-case basis. I think no harm is done in keeping the wikiproject link and I think it has good uses. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 16:16, 11 December 2006 (UTC)

I think that a move to the Wikipedia namespace should be seriously considered. The problem with this page is that, except for the {{MathTopicTOC}} template, the entire page is written as if the reader is an editor of Wikipedia. If this text were reused for some reason in another form, it would not make sense. I will leave a note on the article talk page. Khatru2 18:44, 11 December 2006 (UTC)

I think you should post the note of suggested move to Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Mathematics. Note that the move would be a lot of work (I did one such move earlier) and I would not agree with it, I think those lists look better in the main namespace. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 03:49, 12 December 2006 (UTC)

Using mathbot's progress bar functionality?

I've been looking at WP:MST and am very fond of the status bars that are there. I'm wondering if the status bar functionality is available for others to use, or if its is reserved for that project, or...? I'm trying to organize and create the collaboration page for WikiProject Airports.

It would likely come in handy if the project was to create what I'm hoping for: a list of links to articles which need to be created. It's simply too long to post on our requested articles page. For perspective, we are approaching 5,000 airport articles and I estimate that we have almost 5,000 more articles to create before all redlinks are gone from List of airports by IATA code and List of airports by ICAO code, as well the more specialized lists like List of airports in California and List of airports in Texas.

Is there any way we could harness Mathbot's raw power and cunning counting skills for this? Thanks. thadius856_{talk|airports|neutrality} 22:16, 11 December 2006 (UTC)

I think it should be easy enough to write a script to read all those articles and count the red from the blue. I'll try to work on it in the weekend. Where would you want that big list of redlinks and the status (percentage of redlinks out of redlinks and bluelinks) to be located? Note that that list may be huge, so it would need perhaps to be split into smaller lists, say by first letter of airport name. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 04:03, 12 December 2006 (UTC)

Well, I'm looking to create the department at Wikipedia:WikiProject Airports/Creation drive, so it'd probably be a subpage of that. I suppose the list would be fine at Wikipedia:WikiProject Airports/Creation drive/List: A (and B-Z as well, I suppose, if you wanted to break it into subpages). I don't think a list of both red and blue would be needed, as we have the project categories for finding the blues. The progress bar would probably go great at Wikipedia:WikiProject Airports/Creation drive/Status bar, so it could be used almost as a template.

For the lists to gleam the links from, I'd suggest using the following:

List of airports by IATA code

List of airports by ICAO code

List of airports in Alaska (and all other U.S. states - don't use List of airports in the United States as it's truncated)

That would get you all airports with either an FAA LID, IATA airport code or ICAO airport code (obviously with quite a bit of overlap).

Are you sure you want to do this much coding, Oleg? I was hoping that it was somewhat... standardized and available for use, just I hadn't seen the documentation. I'm not sure I feel very good asking you for so much work. :\ thadius856_{talk|airports|neutrality} 07:59, 12 December 2006 (UTC)

Something standardized won't work, since List of airports by IATA code and List of airports in Alaska use different format among themselves and yet different than what I did so far at WP:MST. I'll try to give it a try with List of airports by IATA code and List of airports by ICAO code which use a simple format. If that works well, I'll consider expanding it to List of airports in Alaska and all other states. Let us see how it goes. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 15:43, 12 December 2006 (UTC)

I'd be more than happy to build the list manually with AWB if that would make things any easier on you. Would a standardized, plain numbered list work if it was added to a category that Mathbot monitors? It's only 52 lists or so, so it wouldn't be too much work on my part. thadius856_{talk|airports|neutrality} 18:07, 12 December 2006 (UTC)

I wrote the script to extract redlinks from List of airports by IATA code and List of airports by ICAO code, see the results in Wikipedia:WikiProject Airports/Creation drive/List A, etc., and the status bar at Wikipedia:WikiProject Airports/Creation drive/Status bar. You may want to create some kind of navigational template to access those alphabetic lists, then the bot could add it to the lists.

A word of warning. I assumed in my script that the format of the lines in the lists List of airports by IATA code: B, etc, is of the form

* stuff – [[airport name]] stuff –

or

 * stuff – [[airport name]] stuff –

Any lines not of this form will be ignored in those lists. So, it is important that the lists have predicable format for the script to parse them.

I will deal with List of airports in Alaska, etc., perhaps next week. I just need to write a subroutine to parse the new format, that will be little work. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 22:29, 17 December 2006 (UTC)

Cut-the-knot

/* Request for edit summary */ -- Fair enough.

I was just starting on part of this list http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Spam#cut-the-knot.org by the way.

The links are a bit mixed but some aren't very useful

--BozMo talk 15:55, 12 December 2006 (UTC)

I found those links to be useful and I know the guy who inserted them, he does a careful job of where he puts them. Do you check what the links are about before you remove them? Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 15:57, 12 December 2006 (UTC)

Careful maybe but 405 links to a commercial site is quite a few. I did have a look through them and checked if they were specifically relevant to that page rather than another WP page. I took about 7 of the 400 links to this site out, also checked if there was additional content not in the WP article. I think it is worth you joining the discussion on the Wikispam page though because although I am fairly selective about removing lnks there is a risk that a rapid removal by other people will follow. --BozMo talk 16:01, 12 December 2006 (UTC)

I joined the discussion. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 16:05, 12 December 2006 (UTC)

Mediation please

Since you are an administrator, could you please evaluate whether I was correct to revert a change to Job hunting (see Talk:Job hunting for the other side). I felt that the edits by Joewski (talk • contribs • logs • block user • block log) constituted sneaky vandalism because he talked about using extortion and murder as job hunting techniques. As is usual with vandals, I reverted all of his change to that article once I decided that part of it constituted vandalism. JRSpriggs 04:04, 14 December 2006 (UTC)

I haven't been much online lately. I see that the conflict there did not escalate, and I agree that Joewski's text is controversial. I put Job hunting on my watchlist, so if I am around and problems develop, I'll try to interfere. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 04:21, 16 December 2006 (UTC)

Thank you. JRSpriggs 11:10, 16 December 2006 (UTC)

I really like your advice....!

Dear Friend , Hi

1. I really like your timely excellent advice.

2. I will do my best to follow it to improve my writing .

Thank you once again .

Coolcoolcoolest 13:00, 16 December 2006 (UTC)

Template:FA-Class

Just wondering if you could revert your changes to this template ([3]), and it's brother templates (GA-Class etc.), as it is breaking it's usage in a lot of places. Cheers, Daniel.Bryant ^{[ T · C ]} 03:59, 18 December 2006 (UTC)

Can you specify where it is breaking the usage? Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 06:14, 18 December 2006 (UTC)

0^0 and log

0^0 = 1, and log denotes the natural logarithm. As a mathematician myself, I'd like to say that these really are the conventions chosen by pretty much all mathematicians everywhere, and it is only really due to failures of the educational system and historical coincidences that any other notations or definitions are ever used.

"ln" versus "log"

Contrary to one of your recent edit summaries, "ln" is not THE established notation for natural logarithm, but merely AN established notation for natural logarithm. It is certainly also commonplace to use "log" for natural logarithm. I prefer the latter notation because "ln" often seems to lead students to think that "natural logarithm" means something different from, albeit related to, the word "logarithm", rather than simply being one important instance of a logarithmic function. Sometimes I have been asked "Do you mean logarithm or natural logarithm?", and I answer "Yes". Michael Hardy 20:20, 19 December 2006 (UTC)

OK. :) Oleg Alexandrov (talk)

To Michael: I think you are talking about Oleg's reversion "revert, ln is the standard notation" of User:74.114.58.144's edits at Logarithm on 19 December 2006.

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Logarithm&diff=95360803&oldid=95334765

I feel that the edits Oleg reverted were arrogant in changing all "ln"s to "log"s contrary to the will of the authors (including myself) of the material he was changing. And it misrepresented "ln" as a rarely notation which is false. JRSpriggs 11:16, 20 December 2006 (UTC)

Graham, Knuth, and Patashnik, in Concrete Mathematics, 2/e (Addison-Wesley, 1994, ISBN 978-0-201-55802-9), begin their list of possibly unfamiliar notation with ln x for natural logarithm, lg x for binary logarithm, and log x for common logarithm. Now, many years later, their conventions are more familiar, but not yet universal.

When it comes to notations, mathematicians seem more concerned with convenience than with convention; unfortunately, what is convenient (and common) in one context may be less so in another. Every mathematics editor should be made aware that notation conflicts are inevitable, that confusion and agitation are a common result, and that there is rarely a perfect solution. So, here we are again. --KSmrq^T 10:56, 23 December 2006 (UTC)

If I had to choose, I would get rid of "log" rather than "ln". The reasons for using logarithms other than the natural logarithm are practical and historical, not mathematical. Any expression using them could be replaced by an expression using a ratio of natural logarithms. Using other bases is like changing the units of temperature from Kelvin to Fahrenheit say. JRSpriggs 12:47, 24 December 2006 (UTC)

(Sorry, Oleg, to again borrow your talk page for a moment.) One of the reasons notation clashes are "so much fun" (NOT) is that often all parties have convincing reasons (at least, in their context) for why the notation they favor is The Right Thing. And sometimes we freely admit that standard notation is contradictory and confusing, but it is standard and we aren't in the business of fixing standards. Good notation is a welcome aid to insight and computation when we have it, but we must hope that good thinking is able to compensate when we don't. If it helps, think of these discussions as a cultural exchange program. :-) --KSmrq^T 06:24, 26 December 2006 (UTC)

very poor quality article

Oleg, regarding "very poor quality article" for solver (algorithm), I completely agree. I started the stub article because it's a topic that needs attention. —Ben FrantzDale 03:34, 20 December 2006 (UTC)

About the binomial

I'm sorry about that, but I think a proof with a mathematical induction is a farely simple way to proove a theorem.

Did i do something wrong when I expanded the binomial? I really don't know what I did wrong. Also don't you think that going from the binomial to the sum is a better way to demostrating it?

Chuchogl 04:21, 20 December 2006

You did all fine. But there was no need for one more proof. And the proof you put in was rather messy, with a huge amount of formulas. Above all, the dedication ($\ My\ love\ for\ you\ goes\ far\ beyond\ proofs$) was not necessary.

This is an encyclopedia, proofs should be avoided unless they really add a lot of value to the concepts in the article. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 15:30, 20 December 2006 (UTC)

I'm sorry, just read the wikipedia rules, im very sorry about the dedication. And yes, i could well avoided the pascal's triangle sequence and expanded the binomioal from the start, i'm sorry i'm an amateur.

Any more tips for doing a proof? something I need to study before doing a proof? proofs you want to recommend for me to doing to get experience please? any article that needs a proof?

next time I'll do better (and above all, having respect for the rules).

thanks!

Chuchogl 21 December 2006

Chuchogl, if you need more explanation of when to use a proof, I'd look at the 0.999... article, as it appears (to an aviation major with a business minor) well-done and fairly explanatory. thadius856_{talk|airports|neutrality} 02:21, 21 December 2006 (UTC)

Actually, no; that's a controversial example. We have a small number of proofs as separate articles; proofs of Fermat's little theorem is a helpful example. Browsing through list of mathematical proofs should give some idea of what's been done, though not necessarily what's preferred. Our Manual of Style for mathematics gives slightly more explicit guidance. --KSmrq^T 11:08, 23 December 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Old

Is it possible to change the code of the old deletions page from

 * [[Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Log/2006 December 14]]
 * [[Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Log/2006 December 15]]

to

 </noinclude>
 * [[Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Log/2006 December 15|15 December (Friday)]]
 * [[Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Log/2006 December 14|14 December (Thursday)]]
 <noinclude>

without disturbing the MathBot? There were a few attempts to extend the list of current daily logs on WP:AFD because some of the older logs weren't fully closed yet, but they're technically no longer current (they ran for longer than 120 hours), so I'm considering transcluding the relevant parts of the Old discussion site into WP:AFD. ~ trialsanderrors 05:17, 21 December 2006 (UTC)

I am a bit confused at your request. I don't quite see how adding the weekeday would help with what you have in mind. If you "transclude the relevant parts of the Old discussion site into WP:AFD" that would not affect the bot, it deals only with WP:AFD/Old. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 22:31, 21 December 2006 (UTC)

Well the format of the daily listings on WP:AFD is currently "* 15 December (Friday)", so for the sake of consistency the old days should be listed in the same way. But that's only the secondary issue. The key issue would be to add the noinclude tags, so that only the open daily logs are being transcluded to WP:AFD, and not also the other information that's on WP:AFD/Old. I added a sketch of how the Old page would look like here. ~ trialsanderrors 23:03, 21 December 2006 (UTC)

The bot will not mind the noinclude tags, as long as the comment <!-- Place latest vote day above - Do not remove this line --> (which you will see if you edit WP:AFD/Old) is not separated from the links to the pages for deletion. So, if you edit WP:AFD/Old to the form

 </noinclude>
 * [[Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Log/2006 December 15]]
 * [[Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Log/2006 December 14]]
<!-- Place latest vote day above - Do not remove this line -->
 <noinclude>

then the bot will always stick any new day right above that comment and not mess up with noinclude tags.

Another question I have is, did you get any discussion about transcluding WP:AFD/Old onto WP:AFD? I don't mind either way, but it would be nice that some more people know about what you suggest and agree with that. Wikipedia talk:Articles for deletion/Old would be a good place to start such a discussion I would think.

One of these days I will modify the script to add the date of the week. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 04:42, 22 December 2006 (UTC)

Done. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 19:11, 1 January 2007 (UTC)

Thanks, I brought it up at Wikipedia talk:Articles for deletion#Transcluding WP:AFD/Old. ~ trialsanderrors 06:28, 22 December 2006 (UTC)

Noahide Laws

Hi! Would you be able to assist in translating Noahide Laws into Romanian? I am currently rewriting it and will be moving it to Seven Laws of Noah, and then hope to get it featured. Please let me know, thanks. frummer 06:08, 22 December 2006 (UTC)

Quality statistics output is missing an expected link

On the page Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Louisville articles by quality statistics (and possibly other similar statistics outputs) that is generated by the Mathbot, the "None" importance heading should have a link to Category:Unknown-importance Louisville articles but doesn't. Fixing this isn't critical, but having this link there would be helpful to me and others in WikiProject Louisville. Thanks! Stevie is the man! ^{Talk • Work} 20:12, 23 December 2006 (UTC)

Thanks! The bot expected Category:No-importance Louisville articles, but now I made it understand Category:Unknown-importance Louisville articles also. It works now. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 04:14, 24 December 2006 (UTC)

External links

Hi,

Can you please help me get this right?

Basically, why should we prevent people from going to an URL that is outside and provides some useful info - perhaps not in best publishing quality?

And why MS format is being prevented, when most of people have Windows tools? Is it really open or people like you are just making a close circle of information gate keepers? Lets not the freedom of Internet be ruined by a good site but having a touchy volunteer!

Sunil

I reverted this edit you made because what is at that external link, even if formatted well, is not very valuable. (And no, I am not part of any conspiracy limiting the flow of information :) Besides, linking to your own pages (repeatedly) is not considered a good idea. You can also read Wikipedia:External links for more on external links. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 14:52, 24 December 2006 (UTC)

Gurchbot 2 messed up our archives!!!!!

GurchBot 2 (talk · contribs) moved all archives with non-standard names to standarized names. E.g. changing "Archive12" to "Archive 12" and leaving a redirect behind. By so doing, GurchBot 2 has messed up the archives at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Mathematics and Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Physics and probably many others which use Werdnabot to archive their talk pages. It did not change the Werdnabot invocations to show the new file name for the current archive so Werdnabot added the archived material to the redirects which were left behind. Also, a minor point, GurchBot 2 did not change the archive lists to point at the new file names so they are now all going thru the redirects. This is a real mess. JRSpriggs 03:58, 26 December 2006 (UTC)

Fixed for two talk pages mentioned above. Notified Gurch and Werdna and Administrator's Notice Board. JRSpriggs 06:32, 26 December 2006 (UTC)

I have enough complaints about mathbot. :) If you have a gripe against Gurchbot, you could for a change complain to Gurch. :) Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 07:05, 27 December 2006 (UTC)

It has all been settled. Sorry to bother you. JRSpriggs 07:20, 27 December 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Old problem with Mathbot

Mathbot doesn't seem to be working completely right now on this page. When I "Refresh the number of open discussions," the refreshed page contains links to closed discussions on the line for December 17, like this:

• 17 December (18 open / 117 closed / 135 total discussions; Open: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18)
  • Open: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

Most (I haven't checked all of them yet) of those are links to closed AfDs, and Mathbot shouldn't be counting them. I've even purged the page, but it doesn't seem to be updating correctly. Will you take a look at it and see if you can figure out what Mathbot is doing here? It's even throwing in an extra line which shouldn't be there. Thanks! ···日本穣^{? · Talk to Nihonjoe} 00:37, 27 December 2006 (UTC)

I was about to leave a message on the same thing. Template:Afd top was changed a bit, so it's probably because of that. - Bobet 01:25, 27 December 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for the note. The problem was caused by this edit to {{at}}. The edit by itself was reasonable, but the bot did not expect it. I fixed it now. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 07:03, 27 December 2006 (UTC)

Thanks! Also, the extra line was added by someone else, not Mathbot. That said, I think I like the formatting of the extra line (as shown above) instead of linking the remaining open discussions at the end of each line. What does everyone else think? ···日本穣^{? · Talk to Nihonjoe} 18:35, 27 December 2006 (UTC)

I like it more than way it is now (so not going to a second line). If anything, perhaps there are too many discussions linked to, I may need to trim it back to a max of 20 from the current max of 30. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 03:42, 28 December 2006 (UTC)

Okay, I can accept that. I think trimming it back to 20 instead of 30 would be good. ···日本穣^{? · Talk to Nihonjoe} 18:27, 28 December 2006 (UTC)

I did that. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 05:58, 29 December 2006 (UTC)

Sorry about that. I was going to write you but didn't when I saw Mathbot was already working again. —Quarl ^(talk) 2006-12-27 08:22Z

Riemann sphere

I noticed that the Riemann sphere page had no renderings, so I added one - is there any other graphics that you'd like (related to the RS or otherwise)? Metlin 05:49, 29 December 2006 (UTC)

Thanks! I am a bit confused however as to how the shape you drew represents a Riemman sphere.

If you would like to make more pictures, see Wikipedia:Requested pictures#Mathematics 2. Cheers, Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 05:56, 29 December 2006 (UTC)

Actually, it is a spiralling loxodromic representation of a Riemann sphere. Figured that it would better help visualize the sphere. And thank you for the tip on article headings. Cheers. Metlin 06:51, 29 December 2006 (UTC)

Maybe you could specify in the caption of the picture that it is a "loxodromic representation", perphaps with a relevant link somwhere. It is not obvious otherwise what that curly shape has to do with the sphere. :) Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 16:44, 29 December 2006 (UTC)

Done! :) Thank you for pointing that out -- should have done that right at the beginning. Happy Holidays! Metlin 16:53, 29 December 2006 (UTC)

Mathbot's parsing of {{AircraftProject}}

Note: this comment is part of a synchronised thread. You can reply by clicking the [edit] link next to the comment's heading, or following this link. To ensure that you can see any further responses I make, add this page to your watchlist. Once you have replied, feel free to remove this boilerplate.

Hello, Oleg. At WT:AIR, at least one user has complained that when articles are tagged with {{AircraftProject}}, no one ever leaves a note at the comments subpage to explain their ratings. Someone suggested that a |comments= parametre would significantly increase the amount of comments that are left; I agree vehemently. If I could include my comments in the same edit that I rated an article, I would almost always leave comments.

The problem is, of course, that the Mathbot's parsing system is currently based on the assumption that comments are left on the subpage, rather than on a template parametre. If we were to implemement such a system for the comments, would you be willing to change Mathbot's code to accommodate our system?

Cheers, Karl Dickman ^talk 23:18, 29 December 2006 (UTC)

Something like this came up before too, and the idea is good. The problem is, I don't know how to implement this efficiently. Currently, the bot goes through categories, reading info for 200 articles at once. With what you suggest, I think the bot will have to visit each page individually, and now there are 463084 of them, which is infeasable. I would suggest you post this at Wikipedia talk:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Index which is watched by more people, and see if there are any ideas. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 00:22, 30 December 2006 (UTC)

Category:WelcomeBotResearch

Please can you plz see the above category and its talk where a number of us are taking part in researching new user trends. I would appreciate if you could insert this cat into {{welcome}} so as to assist. frummer 14:39, 2 January 2007 (UTC)

plz can you comment on the above. frummer 20:31, 6 January 2007 (UTC)

I commented at Template talk:Welcome. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 21:50, 7 January 2007 (UTC)

The Mathbot

Hi, The mathbot recently added categories for the importance of articles here, and that is very useful, but I decided to change the unknown importance category to no importance (because there are no unknown importance articles, and since the unknown and no importance categories are grouped together, I figured it would be too confusing to list unknown as opposed to none). However, the bot keeps changing it back to unknown importance and I was wondering if there was any way to stop it from doing that. Thanks for the time, Scorpion 04:35, 3 January 2007 (UTC)

I you want the bot off your back :) you should delete Category:Unknown-importance The Simpsons articles. That won't make the bot link instead to Category:Unimportant The Simpsons articles however. For that, you need to rename that category to Category:No-importance Simpsons articles.

In short, the bot recognizes only two forms: No-importance and Unknown importance, and it links to whichever it finds. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 05:47, 3 January 2007 (UTC)

I'm reluctant to delete the Unassessed category because then it will not be as easy to find un assessed articles. What would happen if I just changed the name of the unimportant category? Thanks, Scorpion 15:53, 3 January 2007 (UTC)

Well, if you don't want the bot to link to Category:Unknown-importance The Simpsons articles, then this category should not exist. That's how things are implemented in the code, and it works very well for most projects.

You could rename Category:Unknown-importance The Simpsons articles to Category:No-importance The Simpsons articles, and modify {{SimpsonWikiProject}} so that the line

      |#default=Unknown-importance

becomes

      |#default=No-importance

Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 03:14, 4 January 2007 (UTC)

Thanks

Just to say thanks for your guidance on headline style and the reminder to annotate edit summarys. It is appreciated. DaveApter 13:49, 4 January 2007 (UTC)

Quality statistics output (reprise)

Sorry, but I just renamed "Unknown-importance Louisville articles" to "Unassigned-importance Louisville articles", and this format will also be used for Kentucky. "Unassigned" just makes more sense for the purposes of these projects. Please adjust the Mathbot accordingly (at your earliest convenience). Stevie is the man! ^{Talk • Work} 22:58, 6 January 2007 (UTC)

I did that, see here. Cheers, Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 21:34, 7 January 2007 (UTC)

PD article template

Just changed the PD symbol from 100px to 40px, so it should be better now. JBogdan 22:30, 7 January 2007 (UTC)

Style note

Thanks. Countersubject 22:32, 7 January 2007 (UTC)

Parzen window

Hi. You moved Parzen window to Kernel density estimation by cut&paste, which is not a good idea since it destroys the page history. For now, I undid your move. I wonder if you could comment at talk:Parzen window as to why Kernel density estimation is a better name for that article. Thanks. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 15:48, 8 January 2007 (UTC)

Sorry I did not know. I added a comment on the page parzen window. If you do not see any problem about my suggestion, I will move it with the move button. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Gpeilon (talk • contribs).

Talk:Economics#Economics as social science (in this & some other articles)?

For-what-it's-worth dept.: I had y'all (U.S. Southern dialect, (not CA)) in mind for the above. BW, Thomasmeeks 19:18, 8 January 2007 (UTC)

I am a bit confused as to what you are trying to say. :) Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 03:15, 9 January 2007 (UTC)

What are these entries all about

17:22, 9 January 2007 (hist) (diff) User:Mathbot/Most recent admin (Edit summary usage for AzaToth: 100% for major edits and 100% for minor edits. Nomin page: Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/AzaToth.) (top) 17:12, 9 January 2007 (hist) (diff) Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Novel articles by quality statistics (Statistics for January 9, 2007) (top) 17:09, 9 January 2007 (hist) (diff) User:Mathbot/Most recent admin (Edit summary usage for AzaToth: 100% for major edits and 100% for minor edits. Nomin page: Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/AzaToth.) 16:52, 9 January 2007 (hist) (diff) User:Mathbot/Most recent admin (Edit summary usage for AzaToth: 100% for major edits and 100% for minor edits. Nomin page: Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/AzaToth.) 16:37, 9 January 2007 (hist) (diff) User:Mathbot/Most recent admin (Edit summary usage for AzaToth: 100% for major edits and 100% for minor edits. Nomin page: Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/AzaToth.)

the admin related work here seems to be changing a time stamp on these pages and that is about all. So why are they taking approx. 20 mins each and appearing to then do it again, but do so little. Mystified :: Kevinalewis : ^{(Talk Page)}/_(Desk) 17:30, 9 January 2007 (UTC)

I think you are referring to the recent history of User:Mathbot/Most recent admin, [4]. The reason is that Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/AzaToth has been speedy deleted in the past. The package I am using to upload stuff to Wikipedia (not written by me) has problems updating such pages. So, the bot tries and fails to write to that page. I now did the job by hand, that will stop the bot from trying again and again. Thanks! Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 18:55, 9 January 2007 (UTC)

Style Note

Thanks for the welcome message. It was very helpful, I wish I have been welcome much earlier; that would have saved me much more time. Sdudah 06:53, 11 January 2007 (UTC)

Architecture assessment

Hi, your bot updates the statistics for WP:ARCHA at Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Architecture articles by quality statistics. On the 11 January it changed the link from Category:Unassessed Architecture articles to Category:Unassessed-importance Architecture articles - why's that? --Mcginnly | Natter 14:20, 13 January 2007 (UTC)

Now Category:Unassessed-importance Architecture articles shows up both in Category:Architecture articles by quality and in Category:Architecture articles by importance. That is confusing the bot. If you remove the "Unassessed importance" from the "quality" category where it does not belong, the bot will revert to normal behavior. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 19:54, 13 January 2007 (UTC)

mvs and protected pages

Hi, you're probably aware of this, but mvs has problems updating protected pages, because the server responds with "View source" rather than "Editing $pagename" as the first heading. Easily avoided by skipping the "error message from server" test, but that's not really the best possible fix (IMHO, mediawiki should probably just say "View source for $pagename" in the title, but it doesn't).

Anyway, just a heads-up, not sure it affects mathbot much.

(Philosophy is currently protected, if you need a testcase).

RandomP 18:06, 13 January 2007 (UTC)

Thanks. My biggest gripe is however that mvs fails to update wikipedia articles which were "speedy deleted" in the past. At least that's a problem with the version of mvs I use, which is kind of old. I wonder if you also encountered this problem. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 19:38, 13 January 2007 (UTC)

Sorry, for some reason I was thinking you'd written mvs, too.  ::Haven't encountered that yet (but probably will), but so far I'm using mvs up only to download stuff, not to update it. Do you have a test case?

Any page is a test case, as long as it has been speedy deleted in the past (you can tell by looking at the history of a page, admins at least can see a "view or restore deleted versions" link then. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 21:21, 13 January 2007 (UTC)

IIRC, the mediawiki server software now has a more direct way of actually downloading pages, and updating is just an HTTP POST request, so I'm not sure whether mathbot really needs anything but wget.

RandomP 21:06, 13 January 2007 (UTC)

I don't know how to do post requests with wget. Is it simple? Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 21:21, 13 January 2007 (UTC)

Sorry for leaving this a bit long — I'd totally forgotten where I saw the direct way of downloading the wikicode, until it caught my eye today whilst I was stealing the Mediawiki stylepage for a pet project :-)

it's ?action=raw, appears to work with Wikipedia, and POSTing is easy enough with wget: --post-file=<file>, though there's a note that <file> cannot be stdin.

wget also claims to handle cookies, so it seems to me to probably be a better way to go (for said toy project, at least) than mvs. It's also faster, for some mysterious reason ...

RandomP 00:18, 26 January 2007 (UTC)

Thanks! I will give it a try soon. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 03:05, 26 January 2007 (UTC)

Adding a project

Greetings. How can we get the bot to start doing a log of a new project that has joined the Editorial team, like this one: [[5]]. Thank you. Chaldean 05:33, 15 January 2007 (UTC)

Hi. See the instructions at Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Using the bot. Cheers, Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 16:53, 15 January 2007 (UTC)

Thank you for that. I got it working now, but I have a problem. I'm trying to add the importance row Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Assyrian articles by quality statistics, but the bot keeps reverting it when I update it. What do I have to do? Chaldean 22:39, 15 January 2007 (UTC)

The bot is trying to not show table columns which are empty. Those columns will automatically show up if you populate Category:Assyrian articles by importance, by assigning importance values to some Assirian articles and by creating the Top-importance, Mid-importance (etc) categories. See Category:Aircraft articles by importance for an example. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 02:52, 16 January 2007 (UTC)

You see, I have that page linked in the template [[6]], but for some strange reason, when I put the template in talk pages [[7]], it shows something totally different. Notice how the project's importance scale. is linked to something else. But its not like that in the template page. I dont know what to do. Chaldean 03:42, 16 January 2007 (UTC)

Ok now of all the sudden its fixed, nevermind. Thank you for your time. :) Chaldean 03:51, 16 January 2007 (UTC)

Akhhh, at least I thought it was fixed. I dont get it, why isn't the template automatically adding pages to the Category:Assyrian articles by importance? I got it linked in the template, so what should the problem be? Chaldean 03:58, 16 January 2007 (UTC)

Ok, now I think I got it figured out for sure. :) Thanks again. Chaldean 04:03, 16 January 2007 (UTC)

The relation between norm spaces and metrics spaces

We know about statement every norm spaces is metric space. That's true. If I say every metrics space is norm space, that's true or not. If the statement is false, what is the counter example. Thank's. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 64.110.141.54 (talk) 00:22, 17 January 2007 (UTC).

(sorry for jumping in, I'm monitoring the page for another conversation)

The statement, as you made it, doesn't really make sense (or is rather obvious): in a normed space, for example, "every point looks the same" (which means, in particular, for any given point and any positive real, there is another point with distance to the first point the given real number - unless the normed space is a single point); for metric spaces, that need not be true. For example, the metric space consisting of two points, at distance 1, is not a normed space.

It's a different question whether every metric space is a subspace of a normed space, and I believe that is actually true. RandomP 02:04, 17 January 2007 (UTC)

Another example, the interval [0, 1] with the absolute value is a metric space but it is not a normed space. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 04:08, 17 January 2007 (UTC)

Metrics, norms, and inner products are closely related, but we do have distinctions. For example, from an inner product on vectors, ⟨u,v⟩, we can always define a norm, ‖v‖ = (⟨v,v⟩)^1/2. However, the Jordan–von Neumann theorem states that a norm ‖·‖ corresponds to an inner product if and only if it satisfies the parallelogram identity, ‖u+v‖²+‖u−v‖² = 2‖u‖²+2‖v‖². If we do have a norm on a vector space, we can always define d(u,v) = ‖u−v‖. If we do not have a vector space, we do not have a norm; but we can still have a metric. In fact, for any set we always have the discrete metric, which defines the distance from a point to any distinct point as 1. --KSmrq^T 12:54, 18 January 2007 (UTC)

Just wanted to add the observation that any bounded metric space X is isometric to a subset of the normed space of bounded, continuous functions on X endowed with the supremum norm: Just map any x∈X to the function which maps y to d(x,y). (Details left as an exercise.) I cannot see any obvious way to extend this to the unbounded case. But since any metric is equivalent to a bounded metric, we can do it if we drop the requirement on isometry. Hanche 18:47, 31 January 2007 (UTC)

Headings in RfA

Hi Oleg, thanks for your message on my talk page, and sorry for the late reply. I've replied to your message as requested on my talk page; please take a look. Cheers, Tangotango (talk) 10:05, 17 January 2007 (UTC)

Thank you!

Hi, Oleg. Yesterday I started a new article, but I was too tired to add the title to the list of mathematics articles. This morning, when I went to do that, I found I didn't have to, because your "tireless herdsman" had already done the job for me, based on the "complex analysis" category tag. Thank you for mathbot! DavidCBryant 11:48, 18 January 2007 (UTC)

You are welcome. Nice article by the way, and it also filled in two redirects in the Wikipedia:Missing science topics, which is great. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 16:10, 18 January 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for the compliment. The article isn't done yet. This morning (for me – I notice it's already evening, GMT=UTC style) I was working on one section and, when I went to edit the "Extensions" section, it wasn't there! Then I looked at the page history and saw you had come through and cleaned my new section out before I had a chance to write anything in it. No big deal, but I wonder if there's a convention for this. I kind of like to put some section headings in when I start, to serve as an outline of the article I'm aiming to write, then fill in the content a piece at a time. I guess I could work on a new article in my own userspace, but when it's entirely new, with very few links to it, it seems unlikely that anyone else will try to read it or edit it before I'm done with it. I guess you proved me wrong!  ;^> DavidCBryant 18:06, 18 January 2007 (UTC)

I don't know if there are any conventions about that. I was not aware you were still working on the article, and in a finished article empty sections don't look so good I think. Anyway, sorry for stepping on your foot. :) Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 02:38, 19 January 2007 (UTC)

Series expansion for Cos(x). Valid for all x?

Hi there, in your page on taylor expansion you say that the series expansion for Cos(x) is valid for all x, but it is not of course. Firstly Cos is a periodic function, and so Cos(x) = Cos(x + 2 \pi), which is not true of the series expansion. Secondly, for x > 1 the expansion does not produce the correct value. Try inserting x = (\pi / 2) + 0.1. Cos(x) for this is negative, however the expansion doesn't produce a negative number. The expansion is therefore only valid for "small" x around 0. Surely? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Taoy (talk • contribs).

Well, as it happens, the series expansion is valid for all x. It is not obvious at all of course as to why that series expansion should be periodic with period 2pi.

Why do you think for x = (\pi / 2) + 0.1 you don't get cos x to be negative? I think if you put three or four terms in the expansion, you will get something negative. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 16:14, 19 January 2007 (UTC)

Oh my! You're right! It is valid for all x! (I'm totally don't understand why).

Mathbot editing while logged out?

I just wanted to let you know that I believe that your bot, Mathbot, was editing while logged out ( see these contributions ). Just thought you might like to know about it. I hope you have a good day, and happy editing. Kyra_~(talk) 19:04, 20 January 2007 (UTC)

That's so weird, the bot always logs in in before doing anything. I guess something weird either on the server or on my computer logged it out. I won't interrupt it now, but I hope it is a singular occurrence. Once logged in, the cookie should stay in for a month. Thanks for the note! Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 19:08, 20 January 2007 (UTC)

Constants to recite and amaze your friends with

It's on Rfd. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Math Maniac (talk • contribs) 20:17, 20 January 2007 (UTC).

Thanks. Since Constants to recite and amaze your friends with has been deleted in the past (for good reason) there was no need to keep its talk page, Talk:Constants to recite and amaze your friends with. I deleted it on your prompt. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 20:20, 20 January 2007 (UTC)

Constants to recite and amaze your friends with was deleted. It was probably deleted for being page move vandalism. When a vandal moves a page, it should get reverted. Then, the redirect should be deleted. However, Talk:Constants to recite and amaze your friends with was missed. Math Maniac 22:42, 20 January 2007 (UTC)

Trillion

Hi. Just a note. You moved Trillion to Trillion (disambiguation) by cut and paste. That is not a good idea, since it destroyed the page history of trillion. You should move things with the "move" tab on top which preserves the page history.

I moved back Trillion (disambiguation) to Trillion. There is no need to use the name Trillion (disambiguation) for the disambiguation page, Trillion is more appropriate. (I also restored the page history.)

Also note that "trillion" is not the same as "trillian", so there was no need to merge the two pages.

You can reply here if you have comments. Cheers, Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 19:20, 20 January 2007 (UTC)

Hello! Re: Your message. Sorry for using the wrong command.

Edit - Ah, I see now from the history, I didn't get it wrong !

The rationale I used was based on two things (though I understand your viewpoint, and the changes don't bother me) - i) trillion & trillian are effectively homonyms, so, as there was a disambiguation page, it just as useful to put trillian there, as a mis-spelling of trillion. After all, the disambiguation page is meant to be for such things when users are unsure how to spell the word correctly in the search box. & ii) the 'Trillion (disambiguation)' page was meant to parallel the 'Billion (disambiguation)' page. Please I beg do not change the general format of the 'billion (disambiguation)' page, as it has taken many users to come to an agreement (sort of) on how to handle the word 'billion' (in the English language it has two numerical meanings, 10^9 & 10^12), and there have been many arguments & edit wars over the word - see the billion & long and short scales talk pages & the histories! (it is also why there exists 1000000000 (number) and 1000000000000 (number) pages.) 'Trillion' similarly has two numerical meanings.

I guess that English is probably not you first language (but your English seems extremely good nonetheless), and so this dual number usage of 'billion' and 'trillion' may not not be immediately obvious, particularly outside of mathematical use, but it does cause many confusions, and so the whole long & short scale terminology and the Wiki links around them needs careful editing to allow consensus! (I mean no insult to you by this, should this come across clumsily). Ta. The Yeti 22:38, 20 January 2007 (UTC)

I do not dispute that trillion and trillian are very similar. Yet they are not the same, and I think it is better to keep them on separate pages (but obviously mentioning "trillian" in the page for "trillion" and vice versa).

I am not happy with the 1000000000000 (number) article, but I won't get into an argument about it. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 23:00, 20 January 2007 (UTC)

If it were 10^11 or 10^13 I'd agree, but 10^12 has a word (or two) meaning this number, and, as you've seen, links into the billion/trillion long/short scale ambiguity. The Yeti 23:34, 20 January 2007 (UTC)

Re - billion. Not really bothered by your change, but can the 'Note to editors' section in the talk be put back at the top. I know generally new talk should be at the bottom, but in this case, so many people have edited the page with a bias, that, with a note at the top, it is at least it is the first thing people read, and so may help stop the unnecessary editing. The Yeti 23:34, 20 January 2007 (UTC)

OK, I put it on top. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 23:35, 20 January 2007 (UTC)

Trial category intersection

You participated in an old thread about this at the assessment project. Please see here for a suggestion to use the trial category intersection to combine article importance and ratings. Carcharoth 16:08, 21 January 2007 (UTC)

Newyorkbrad's RfA

This is to thank you for your early support on my RfA, which closed favorably this morning. I appreciate the confidence the community has placed in me and am looking forward to my new responsibilities. Please let me know if ever you have any comments or suggestions. Best regards, Newyorkbrad 17:31, 21 January 2007 (UTC)

Possible problem with Mathbot and special characters

Articles such as Valentin Ceauşescu and Włodzimierz Trzebiatowski have been removed from the physics article lists (see the log). They haven't been removed from the physics categories, from what I can see. Has Mathbot taken a disliking to them? Mike Peel 22:08, 22 January 2007 (UTC)

That is so strange. Note however that some physics articles were not affected, such as Tōkai, Ibaraki. Tomorrow I will try to investigate what is going on. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 05:13, 23 January 2007 (UTC)

I know what the problem is. If an article with special characters is at the beginning of the "next page" in large categories, then such an article may be missed by the bot. But I won't have time to fix it today, I'll get to it latest by the end of the week. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 04:11, 25 January 2007 (UTC)

I think I fixed that. Thanks a lot for the note! Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 21:41, 27 January 2007 (UTC)

space

<spc> after ",", ".". got it! thnkx for the tip... never really noticed that before. hakuunamatata. Msreeharsha 11:15, 24 January 2007 (UTC)

Edit summaries

Hi. Could you explain when your bot decides to leave a note about missing edit summaries on a user's talk page? Thanks. Xiner (talk, email) 19:58, 24 January 2007 (UTC)

The bot no longer does that, due to some criticism it received from a few users. It used to do it randomly really, it was fishing for editors based on inspecting the recent changes. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 03:24, 25 January 2007 (UTC)

Statistic for wikiprojects

Hi, I'm trying to get WP:CITY moving, but I lack experience in how to collect article statistics. Would you please review the assessment department page and post a note on my talk page as to how I get the templates to show the current article values? Alan.ca 21:40, 24 January 2007 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Using the bot. Let me know if you have any questions. (I will also post this on your talk page). Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 03:22, 25 January 2007 (UTC)

• Oleg, I'm confused. I just ran the bot [8] and unfortunately it does not prefix Cities with WikiProject. Another editor set this up originally, but I wanted to add the WikiProject prefix to make the category more appropriately named. I followed the instructions, but it isn't working. Please help. Alan.ca 13:16, 25 January 2007 (UTC)

• Thanks Oleg I was able to get the figures updated. I'm not sure exactly how I achieved this, but it works now on the manual test. I'm just going to assume if the manual test worked that it will update nightly automagically. Alan.ca 20:00, 25 January 2007 (UTC)

Great. I deleted Category:Cities articles by quality and its subcategories since it appears that Category:WikiProject Cities articles by quality is preferred instead. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 03:05, 26 January 2007 (UTC)

why singapore math deleted?

textbook is frequently cited as one of top 2 recommended non-fuzzy math texts, why was entry deleted? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 170.35.224.63 (talk) 03:16, 25 January 2007 (UTC).

I don't know what has happened here, although I'm guessing that page was speedy deleted. Let me butt in here with a few remarks. There probably should be an article on what is generically referred to in the U.S. as "Singapore math", but it needs to be written carefully to comply with Wikipedia policies. In particular, there's a tendency with these education articles for editors to just write from their own conception of what the terms and even facts are. An example of this is traditional mathematics, which is a mess as far as WP:RS, WP:V, and WP:NOR, the core policies are concerned. --C S (Talk) 07:20, 25 January 2007 (UTC)

I don't know what happened either. The redlink singapore math does not show signs of being speedied. I remember prodding something vaguely similar a while ago, but I don't remember now what it was. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 03:05, 26 January 2007 (UTC)

Mathbot out of service?

I've noticed that it hasn't run for the Louisville or Kentucky WikiProject assessments yesterday or today. Will it be running again soon? Stevie is the man! ^{Talk • Work} 14:42, 25 January 2007 (UTC)

Never mind. I notice that it's running today. Stevie is the man! ^{Talk • Work} 14:49, 25 January 2007 (UTC)

Yesterday the bot did not work because my school's network was down. Cheers, Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 03:05, 26 January 2007 (UTC)

Mathbot and RfB

When Mathbot notices a new RfB, it gets the name of the nominee wrong (probably because it's looking for a {{user}} tag rather than a {{admin}} tag); example diff: [9]. As this doesn't affect the RfB page itself, it's probably not a major problem, but I thought you ought to know anyway. --ais523 18:17, 25 January 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for the note! That was a bug. I fixed it now. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 03:05, 26 January 2007 (UTC)

Oleg Alexandrov (talk · contribs · blocks · protections · deletions · page moves · rights · RfA) JRSpriggs (talk · contribs · blocks · protections · deletions · page moves · rights · RfA) It seems to produce the data even for users like me who are not administrators. JRSpriggs 10:06, 26 January 2007 (UTC)

Yeah, {{admin}} is not smart enough to check if you qualify to be used with it. :) Now guess what the template for Oleg Alexandrov (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · nuke contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log) is. :) Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 16:36, 26 January 2007 (UTC)

I have used the templates "IPvandal" and "vandal" enough that I would recognize them even if I had not read this in your talk page's revision history diffs (as I usually do) before I read it on your talk page itself. JRSpriggs 05:46, 27 January 2007 (UTC)

Toolserveraccount

Hello Oleg Alexandrov,
please send your real-name, your prefered login-name and the public part of your ssh-key to . We plan to create your account soon then. --DaB.

Euclidean geometry and non-Euclidean geometry

Like I said on my talk page I do not think that the article offered a good description of the differences between the concepts of Euclidean geometry and non-Euclidean geometry. That is why I wrote that section. For example, the parallel lines issue which is central to both geometries was not really discussed in the article. NikolaiLobachevsky NikolaiLobachevsky 0:1:07:50 1/29/2007 (UTC)

Edit summary checks

Hi, your nice tool don't work with me or others Italian Wikipedia users(http://www.math.ucla.edu/~aoleg/wp/rfa/edit_summary.cgi?user=F._Cosoleto&lang=it). Does it hate Italians? It's work fine with fr.wiki! ;) Can you fix this please? Thank you. Regards, --F. Cosoleto 10:47, 29 January 2007 (UTC)

I will look into this soon. Thanks. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 29 January 2007 (UTC)

I found the bug. Until recently all Wikipedias used "Special:Contributions" to find one's contributions, now they translated even that into individual languages, which in Italian is "Speciale:Contributi". Hopefully now the code is independent of language-specific constructs.

(I will also reply on your page.) Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 20:00, 3 February 2007 (UTC)

Removing math textbooks

Why are you removing math textbooks that are notable? Isn't there a rule against removing notable content from WP?? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 170.35.224.63 (talk • contribs).

Could you be more specific about what you are referring to? I intersected with you only here as far as I can tell, and there were no textbooks there. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 03:23, 30 January 2007 (UTC)

edit to surface normal

i was curious as to why you later restricted your comment to only 3-D sets. is it just that it's late, and i'm not seeing why this doesn't hold in higher dimensions?  :) thanks, Lunch 03:53, 30 January 2007 (UTC)

Well, that article is about the normal to a surface. In higher dimensions, the boundary of a set may not be a surface anymore, so while there would exist a normal, it would be a normal to a hypersurface. What do you think? Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 04:02, 30 January 2007 (UTC)

aaah. i s'pose i'd be lazy and let "surface" refer to a hypersurface (those pesky two syllables...), but it might confuse a less experienced reader. maybe, "For a (hyper)surface which is the topological boundary of a set ..."? or is that just getting unnecessarily jargon-ish? Lunch 04:08, 30 January 2007 (UTC)

I doubt there's much to gain in being more general in that article I think. People who already know the stuff won't learn more, and people who don't know about that stuff, would be confused I think, as you say. (Besides, if somebody understands the particular case of a surface, it does not take much imagination to think in higher and lower dimensions, like inner normal to a curve or to a 3D hypersuface surrounding a 4D body, I think). Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 04:28, 30 January 2007 (UTC)

Thank you!

For the editing of "multi-compartment model". --Puekai 05:56, 30 January 2007 (UTC)

User:Mathbot/List of mathematical redlinks (L)

This page shows the same list as for letter K. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 87.64.65.184 (talk) 10:51, 30 January 2007 (UTC).

That's so odd. I guess it was some kind of server error. I reran the script and it updated it correctly now. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 16:07, 30 January 2007 (UTC)

From Kathryn Cramer

Nice to talk to you on the phone. I created three pages for math-related people: Theodore Gray, Ed Pegg, Jr., and Kovas Boguta. In the case of both Theo Gray and Ed Pegg, I noted via Google that they were frequently referenced in Wikipedia and yet had no pages. In the case of Kovas Boguta, I had the idea to create the page for him when I saw that he was referenced on Stephen Wolfram's page. Kovas is the most up-and-coming young researcher in the Wolfram Science Group. He holds essentially the same job position that Matthew Cook (who proved rule 110) did. The deletion-oriented adminstrators pounced and deleted the entry before I could get ahold of his publications list and make a better case for "notability".

Both the entry for Theo Gray and the entry for Ed Pegg have been substantially cut back, I think by people without background in the subject area. Pleasantville 21:21, 30 January 2007 (UTC)

Also, I added the category New Kind of Science as a repository of pages relevant to the concept. This page is mark as being being considered for deletion, by Lesnail, a college student studying mathematics: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:New_Kind_of_Science

It seems to me that the math area could do with more of that kind of thematic linking, not less. Pleasantville 22:12, 30 January 2007 (UTC)

It was quite a surprise to receive a phone call at my work on Wikipedia-related business. That was an interesting conversation though.

I see that Ed Pegg, Jr. and Kovas Boguta have been speedy deleted as non-notable. As an administrator I was able to access the deleted text and previous versions, and I must say I agree that those people are not notable enough to have Wikipedia articles. If you wish, I can restore one of them and have it go through the more lengthy process at articles for deletion, but I doubt it would survive.

I happen to agree that Category:New Kind of Science is not necessary also. Yes, a college student nominated it for deletion, but please note that one of the people who voted to delete was Pascal.Tesson who is a professor of mathematics knowledgeable of the topic dealt with in the category (see his user page). I'd trust his judgment.

I understand your frustrations with Wikipedia (I read your user talk page). I'd suggest you take it easy. I understand your passion for things related to Wolfram's company, but really, most Wikipedians are well-meaning people, and I think after spending some more time here and learning how things are working and what the principles of the community are, you may change your opinions for the better. Cheers, Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 03:52, 31 January 2007 (UTC)

I haven't seen the articles, but I'm slightly familiar with the name of an Ed Pegg, Jr., who is fairly well-known for puzzles, such as this MAA collection. If you restored his article I would ask to keep it. Three years of regular puzzles for a solid mathematics organization, by itself, establishes notability; and a little searching should show more, since '"Ed Pegg"' (in quotation marks) turns up tens of thousands of hits. --KSmrq^T 05:11, 31 January 2007 (UTC)

OK. I restored the Ed Pegg, Jr. article and nominated it for deletion at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Ed Pegg, Jr. to see what community's opinion would be. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 16:11, 31 January 2007 (UTC)

Seems like the right thing. I can see how it might have set off an itchy trigger finger, though perhaps it's asking a bit much of a stub. I added what I hope will be enough to establish notability, and contributed my keep. Thanks for the restoration. --KSmrq^T 19:35, 31 January 2007 (UTC)

kathryn, why dont you disclose you have a contract with wolfram before you argue for inclusion of a wolfram employee....disclosure of motives is standard christine dolan february 1 2007 9:40am (—The preceding unsigned comment was added by 4.156.57.153 (talk • contribs).

Ms. Dolan is mistaken. I did disclose. Further, she has no background in this subject area. Pleasantville 17:01, 4 February 2007 (UTC)

Request for edit summary

Your request for edit summary has been denied. This is because you claim to be a math expert but do not know your calculus (u + me = us). --TheTruthiness 03:53, 31 January 2007 (UTC)

I don't quite follow the humor in here. But oh well. :) Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 03:55, 31 January 2007 (UTC)

thanks

for the info on section headers Kborer 13:38, 31 January 2007 (UTC)

WP Dallas -> WP DFW

Hey there. WikiProject Dallas has been renamed WikiProject Dallas-Fort Worth.. along with most of the categories and related pages and such. I'm not sure if your bot automatically recognizes this or there's something else that has to be done? Let me know drumguy8800 C T 22:37, 31 January 2007 (UTC)

All that is needed is to delete all the categories related to the old project and to move the bot-generated pages to the new names. At least I think so. :) Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 02:59, 1 February 2007 (UTC)

Stub-class or stub-class

Should the initial cap be significant? I added "stub" in Template:WikiProject_Switzerland, to allow this to categorize articles in addition to "Stub", but possibly this conflicts with your bot. Feel free to reverse the change to the template. -- User:Docu

I think it should not matter. The bot would accept anything starting with "Stub-". Let's see for sure after the bot runs. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 15:35, 1 February 2007 (UTC)

It works. It just didn't log the earlier articles that had "stub-", but only got categorized when I changed the template. -- User:Docu

Steinhaus theorem

Thanks. It does look better. Are there any other important stuff we want in that category? mousomer 07:37, 1 February 2007 (UTC)

I don't quite know. If you are looking for things to write on, see Wikipedia:Requested articles/Mathematics and Wikipedia:Missing science topics. Cheers, Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 15:35, 1 February 2007 (UTC)

Edit Signing and welcoming

Thank you for letting me know, sometimes I sign it and sometimes I don't and I cease to know why and thank you for welcoming me, I've been on this wiki for some time now and no one has done so, apparently there is no bot for that. In the future please leave new comments at the bottom of my userpage, again thanks. Oh yeah, and if you have the time, can you review me on the editor review page. Thanks for your help.

-Steptrip 01:12, 3 February 2007 (UTC)

Re {{numbers}}

Dear friend i found that adding template to the sub articles is informative thats why i added. if there is any agreement on this topic i have no problem. --Raja Hussain 05:56, 3 February 2007 (UTC)

LaTeX command \scriptstyle

Hi, Oleg. Recently I have seen used the LaTeX command \scriptstyle (e.g. in the voices Pincherle derivative and Delta operator) in order to reduce the font size of the LaTeX text and let it fit well into inline text: this is very useful when you need to use the blackboard bold (fields and algebras), fraktur (group theory), calligraphic (sheaf theory). What is the administrator's point of view about it? I have searched the mathematics manual of syle and I found nothing about it. Daniele.tampieri 11:36, 3 February 2007 (UTC)

Thanks. \scriptstyle does help, but it does not fundamentally solve the problem of text and pictures appearing of different sizes on different computers. (Text size depends on browser's font size, while picture size depends on screen resolution.) Ultimately there is no good solution to this problem. I guess each of us can use whatever we please, and mass conversions from one form to another should not be attempted. Maybe MathML will save us one day. Cheers, Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 20:07, 3 February 2007 (UTC)

Pointclasses

OK, I made a start on the pointclass page. You might look it over and see which parts are especially confusing. --Trovatore 11:01, 4 February 2007 (UTC)

Thanks! The article appears to be carefully and well written, but I must confess I am not familiar at all with descriptive set theory (nor with why people work on such things), so I can't give much of an opinion. By the way, maybe the article on descriptive set theory could use some expansion, adding in motivation, examples, and applications (which would in turn make -- at least for me -- the pointclass article more enlightening). Thanks for filling in the pointclass redlink! Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 16:15, 4 February 2007 (UTC)

Ackermann function

Perhaps you could review this article, which is an FFA article with equations in it. When you are done, please feel free to initiate a PR or GAN process on it.--70.231.149.0 19:17, 4 February 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for your note. But I don't know much about recursive functions. Perhaps you can post your request at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Mathematics. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 20:45, 4 February 2007 (UTC)

edit summary

Yeah my bad. I was having some connectivity issues. Of course usually I use an edit summary (if you check my history you can clearly see this). That being said, your request was kind of snide. You include a picture of the edit summary bar as if I had never edited wikipedia before. Again I apologize for my negligence, but give the benefit of the doubt.--Ioshus^(talk) 19:41, 4 February 2007 (UTC)

You may be right. That's the default message though, it comes in handy for people who don't know what an edit summary is. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 20:42, 4 February 2007 (UTC)

Help requested for the spanish version of Military History

Good day Mr. Alexandrov, my name is Ricardo Fuertes (Richy) and I'm a wikipedist on the spanish edition. The reason I'm contacting you directed by Mr. Kirill Lokshin is that I really admire the awesome organization work and production system implemented on the Military History wikiproject, and I'm determined to try to mimic it on the spanish version; more exactly, the bot system used by the Assessment department.

I've started the translation and adaptation of the project some months ago, working my way up through all the material you've got on the project while getting more wikipedists on it. What I find really awesome (and out of my current reach) is the use of bots in the assesment department. I think the use of a project banner to help identify and categorize articles needing work is a really clever idea, and well implemented. But here's where I hit the wall; I have no previous experience with wikibots. I've found some spanish bot users who are kindly tutoring me on the subject, but it's a very slow process. Working with the real think, instead of doing it again from scratch, would be quicker. So this is why I came to you.

Is there any way that I can see the working code of the classification bot used in the Assessment department?

If that is possible at all, I plan to produce a working version to use at es.wikipedia.org, and then produce (or at least think about) a more generic version that could be used there with other projects. Also, the spanish edition don't have yet a working assesment model like Wikipedia 1.0. I've talked to some admins there, and consensus seem to be that a working assessment model used internally on a wikiproject would be a perfect "proof of concept" to promote creation of such a system for all the .es content.

Whatever your reply (y/n), any comment or suggestion, including direction to any other people I should talk with, will be warmly received. You can send me your reply to User talk:Richy, or es:Usuario Discusión:Richy, as you prefer. Thank you for your time and patience. At your service, --Richy 07:01, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

Hi. (I reply here but I will notify you on your talk page that I replied here.) You can surely view the code. It is written in Perl, and is supposed to work on both Linux and Windows. It is available at here. If you decide to use it, try to first click on the link "wikipedia_perl_bot" on that page, and install that package. Installing that package is the main challenge. If you manage to do it successfully, I still need a day or two to clean up the two codes "run_wp10.pl" and "wp10_routines.pl" from that page which is what you want.

I will be very happy to work with you on a version of the code to work on any language. That can be challenging, but is doable. My code has already been made to work on the Hungarian Wikipedia, see hu:Wikipédia:Cikkértékelés műhely/Index. Cheers, Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 16:32, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

Many thanks for your fast reply and your kindness. I'll download the code asap and get a look at it, and then get back to you. It's been quite a time since I programmed anything worth looking at in Perl, but I guess it's like riding a bike, you never forget it completely :-) I'll message you as soon as I get a functional install. You can use my discussion page in the english wiki if you want, now I'll check it more often. Cheers, --Richy 12:04, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

Mathbot and {{db-blank}} in WP1.0 comments

Wikipedia:Version_1.0_Editorial_Team/Virginia_articles_by_quality/4 is currently one of two articles that show up as speedy deletions. The only thing I can think off is the already redlinked Talk:American Foxhound/Comments on the page which previously contained a speedy template. Agathoclea 09:16, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

Right, Wikipedia:Version_1.0_Editorial_Team/Virginia_articles_by_quality/4 had a {{db-blank}} template on it because it was transcluding Talk:American Foxhound/Comments which had a db-tag on it. Now Talk:American Foxhound/Comments was deleted, and the db-tag disappeared from both. I think what you saw was that Talk:American Foxhound/Comments was already speedy deleted but the speedy tag did not disappear from Wikipedia:Version_1.0_Editorial_Team/Virginia_articles_by_quality/4. That's I think because of server caching issues. I don't know if there is much we can do about these things. Wikipedia:Version_1.0_Editorial_Team/Virginia_articles_by_quality/4 and other lists are supposed to transclude the comments page, whatever is in comments pages also shows up on these lists. Cheers, Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 16:11, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

Editing BV functions

Hi, I replied you on my talk page. :) Daniele.tampieri 13:12, 5 February 2007 (UTC) (talk)

My RfA

Hey Oleg,

I just would like to thank you for your support in my recent request for adminship, which passed with a final tally of 54/13/11. I appreciate the trust expressed by members of the community, and will do my best to uphold it.

Naturally, I am still becoming accustomed to using the new tools, so if you have suggestions or feedback, or need anything please let me know. - Gilliam 20:43, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

A proposal for the structure of the "Bounded variation" voice.

Hi Oleg.As I told you in our previous communication, here it is the plan for the BV voice as I thougt some time ago

• Informal definition
• History

1. Camille Jordan for one variable.
2. Leonida Tonelli and Lamberto Cesari for several variable.
3. Cacioppoli, De Giorgi, Smoller, Conway, Vol'pert and other for the applications.

• Formal definition

1. One variable
2. Several variables

• Subclasses of BV functions (particularly Special Functions of Bounded Variation, i.e. $SBV$ functions)
• Applications

1. In maths
2. In physics and engineering

• See also
• References
• Bibliography
• External links

Let me know if you have ideas on how to improve this structure. Thank you. :) Daniele.tampieri 22:26, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

That looks great to me! Note that a few days ago I moved the "Several variables" section up in the intro because it was just one sentence. I agree that if it is a big section then it should be after history, as you suggest above. Enjoy working on that. (I'll keep that page on my watchlist). Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 05:05, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

Hi Oleg. First of all I have to tell you that I forgot the

• Examples

section in the above scheme (sorry!! :)): obviously I think to enhance that section too. Second, I have a proposal for the introductory section: I see that much of the material there coincides with the content of the voice Total variation so I am thinking of substituting it by a more discoursive explanation. This would imply to enhance the contents of Total variation, by adding the definition for functions of several variables: do you think it is a good idea? Daniele.tampieri 07:36, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

That sounds good. Enjoy working on it. :) Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 15:54, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

Re: Account

Okay account made, although I don't plan to contribute much at the moment: I just saw an incorrect proof and wanted to patch it up.

Oops, forgot to sign.Geometry guy 12:46, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

Thanks. Hope you like it here. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 15:54, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

Hmmm, having said that I don't plan to contribute much, I have been looking at a few articles closer to my area: Differential geometry and topology, manifolds, differentiable manifolds, topological manifolds. I can see that there is quite a bit of work to be done before these become a coherent, accessible and comprehensive selection of articles (although the manifolds article is already pretty good). I've left a few comments on the talk pages (and on the pushforward talk page), but would like to know if you or others are pursuing these ideas, and if there are any articles or project pages I have missed. Geometry guy 22:06, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

Good luck. :) Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 03:01, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

Spanish Milibot getting ready

I've installed the Perl package, ran the test, and so far everything seems to be working just fine at first try.

I still have some work to do before starting to adapt the bot; I 've to study the code, adapt the Project template, and put it on some articles to prepare the run & test phase, so I'll get back to you asap. I'm very happy and grateful for your kind help so far, I've been thinking on implementing this system for many months. Cheers, --Richy 12:52, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

Gosh you are fast. I still need more time to adapt the code so that it is mostly language independent. Hopefully I'll finish that today, then I'll let you know. Cheers, Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 15:57, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

It appears that making the code language independent is a lot more work than what I thought. I will do that by Sunday. Sorry for delaying you, I thought that only a few changes to the code would be necessary but I was wrong. I'll let you know when I'm done. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 04:53, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

Don't worry, Oleg, I have at least a full week before I get time enough to sit down and learn how the functions fit together, and then I wanted to document it; I didn't told you, but my secondary goal is to build a generic bot usable in any wikiproject, so a solid documentation is a must. If you find it useful, I can write this documentation in english, too. Anyway, don't feel pressed to anything, it seems I've been fast just because everything worked up flawlessly at first try. --Richy 07:34, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

A few remarks. In order for the code to function one must have a category tree as described in the instructions, with Category: Wikipedia 1.0 assessments at the bottom, then subcategories "by quality" and "by importance" for each project. One should also create a bunch of templates, like {{A-Class}}, {{FA-Class}}, also a project template like {{WPBeatles}}, then {{assessment}}, {{process header}}, {{assessment index header}}, {{assessment index footer}}, {{assessment header}}, {{assessment footer}}, and {{Log}}.

If you can make such templates in the Spanish Wikipedia that would be awesome. One suggestion. I think it is good to translate to Spanish only the things which the user actually sees on the page, for example, the templates name themselves and their parameters (which the user does not see) better be kept in English.

Cheers, Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 16:33, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

OK, I modified the code so that it should work on languages except English, after a few translations. At least I hope so. My hope was to split completely the language-dependent part, but I did not get that far. Still, now the code should be much easier to adapt to other languages with some work.

You need to download an updated version of wikipedia_perl_bot, and translate a module there into Spanish (see that page for more info).

Then, download the two WP 1.0 codes, "run_wp10.pl" and "wp10_routines.pl".

You should translate the keywords at the top of "wp10_routines.pl" (they are many).

There are a few more messages within the code of "wp10_routines.pl" which would need translation, but they won't affect the code functionality (those messages are about printing to log files and edit summaries).

You are very welcome to hack the code in any way. But if you want us to create a unified code which can be easily adapted to other languages, I'd like to be consulted on big changes.

Let me know how it works. I suggest you write to me by email since that's a more convenient way of exchanging messages.

Lastly, I am not a professional programmer. I tried to make the code as readable as possible, but it is a huge code and you may find it not very professional. I'll be happy to answer any questions about it though. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 22:30, 11 February 2007 (UTC)

WP 1.0 bot error?

Hi Oleg

I noticed today that your bot updated both the quality log and the list of articles for the WP:Denmark project, but it didn't update the quality statistics page. I have no idea why it skipped the last page, but would you mind taking a look? Happy editing. Valentinian ^{T / C} 13:13, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

I think it did not update the stats page because no changes happened, see Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Denmark articles by quality log. Usually, when in doubt, you can also try to run the bot again for your project using this tool. Cheers, Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 16:04, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

Sounds sensible. I know it is a new bot, but I just remembered Mathbot as updating everything on a daily basis. Regards. Valentinian ^{T / C} 19:00, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

It is a new bot just in the name. Since updating WP 1.0 takes many more edits than all the other work of Mathbot, I decided to fork that job to its own bot. The code is the same. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 02:15, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

Bot logged out

Your bot is running while logged out. See Special:Contributions/128.97.70.155. Flyingtoaster1337 15:26, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

Thank you for the note. The bot logs in each day, and the cookie is supposed to last for a month. It is most likely some kind of server problem which made it log out.

I now modified the bot so that it logs in each time it starts updating a new project for its Wikipedia 1.0 work, meaning that it will now log in more than 200 times a day. Hopefully that will lessen any such weird behavior. As for today's run, there's not much I can do about it except stopping the bot, which probably is not worth it. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 16:04, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

Algebra of systems

I noticed your edits to Algebra of systems. In your comment you say it's not about algebra. Why is this not about algebra?

An algebra can be a defined as set plus a set of operations on that set which are closed over the set. Is this incorrect? I realize that the article is a stub, but I was planning to expand it further over time.

If I am misusing the terminology, please let me know. --Willardsimmons 01:44, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

Well, just having some operations is not enough. If they are say associative, or perhaps distributive, commutative, etc., then we may talk about an algebraic structure. So far the article indeed has little if anything to do with algebra in particular or math in general. I can take a look at it if you wish once you add in more stuff. Cheers, Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 02:13, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

Correcting a web page: http://www.webgraphing.com/examples_transcendentals.jsp

Oleg,

Thanks for the note. I am not sure exactly which issue you are referring to, but I can address two issues.

It turns out that the web page--as well as the rest of the website--does not use java, but it does use javascript, which I believe most browsers are able to handle.

There was a problem with the javascript on that web page (http://www.webgraphing.com/examples_transcendentals.jsp) and it went unnoticed (for about 6 months, with an average of 1,000 visitors per day to the main web site) until you mentioned it. The error occurred (using IE) when you clicked on a link to graph the function and it did not deliver the graph together with the calculus analysis. Despite the error, the web page worked fine in Firefox, but IE was not able to handle the error.

The error has now been corrected so that the web page works fine in both IE and Firefox.

If that was not the problem you encountered, the only other possibility I can think of is that you tried to access the web page when we rebooted the system. We reboot 4 times every 24 hours so that the site is down for about 90 seconds each time we reboot. The reason for reboot is that Mathematica, which is the engine for doing calculations, can cause technical issues that are difficult to catch, so we reboot to minimize the technical glitches.

If you would check the site out again, I'd appreciate it, and if you are agreeable, I would put the reference back again.

Thanks for your consideration.

Barry —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Bcherkas (talk • contribs) 02:34, 8 February 2007 (UTC).

New Harmony links

Hi. I removed many of the links and references to your work you put in articles (I left some of them though). While I think you mean well, to an external observer your edits look like self-promotion, and that is discouraged on Wikipedia, see Wikipedia:Self-promotion. I would suggest you stop doing that.

While obviously you know many things about elementary geometry, etc., I would suggest that if you want to add references you cite more primary sources. I do not mean to say that your own work is less relevant, but citing your own work introduces an appearance of bias. If somebody else thinks your work is really good, they will refer to it anyway.

You can reply here, under this comment. Thanks. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 02:57, 7 February 2007 (UTC) (originally on Clark's talk page)

---

Oleg,

Thanks for the note. I'm concerned about the deletion of the external links related to New Harmony, Indiana.

I read the Wikipedia guideline-material you suggested - quoted here:

Self-promotion Conflict of interest often presents itself in the form of self-promotion, including advertising links, personal website links in articles, personal or semi-personal photos, or any other material that appears to promote the private or commercial interests of the editor adding the material, or of his associates.

Examples of these types of material include:

Links that appear to promote products by pointing to obscure or not particularly relevant commercial sites (commercial links). Links that appear to promote otherwise obscure individuals by pointing to their personal pages. Biographical material that does not significantly add to the clarity or quality of the article.

Will you please review a few of those biographical links that you deleted, and tell me in what way they are "self-promotional"? Please refer specifically to the Wikipedia guidelines quoted just above.

If it is the appearance of my name that is objectionable, I don't mind if my name is deleted. What is important is that those external links cover much valuable information about historic New Harmony people, information that is not easy to access any other way.

Clark —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 192.195.230.10 (talk) 23:33, 8 February 2007 (UTC). User:Clark Kimberling

I object to the links you add per "personal website links in articles or any other material that appears to promote the private interests of the editor adding the material". Bases on my rough counting, you added at least 78 links in New Harmony, Indiana pointing to your personal website. That is more than a 10 to 1 ratio to other external links. I believe this is not appropriate regardless of your intentions.

If you strongly feel your links are appropriate, please post them on the articles talk pages. Let other people judge that with an unbiased view and decide if to add them in or not. Cheers, Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 02:51, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

Oleg - so, if I understand correctly, it would be okay to add to the New Harmony external links just the one address for the overall-website (and not show all the biographical pages at the site) - or may I also include six of the most important pages (Robert Owen, William Maclure, Robert Dale Owen, David Dale Owen, Thomas Say, and C. A. Leseuer). —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Clark Kimberling (talk • contribs).

I will leave it up to you. My only concern was that the links were too many (and whether this was according to the policy). I can live with six of them in that article :) But I am not sure I would agree if you again add many links to math articles. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 22:55, 10 February 2007 (UTC)

And note that you can use four tildas, like this: ~~~~ to sign your posts. Cheers, Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 22:55, 10 February 2007 (UTC)

WP 1 bot log of today (February 8)

The log doesn't include "as Stub-Class (Mid-Class)" anymore. Is this a new "feature"? -- User:Docu

I hoped nobody would notice. :) I've been doing a code cleanup and I thought those things were not so important. I'll put them back soon. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 15:56, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

Yes, they are important for two reasons, sometimes the bot confuses renames etc and removes and then adds (this then hides a reclassification possibility), also where projects are using "importance/priority" it is very important to see what is being assigned. :: Kevinalewis : ^{(Talk Page)}/_(Desk) 16:01, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

Thank you for reactivating it. Currently (February 10/11) it works for "Importance", but not for "Quality". A series of stubs I added were all logged as "Unassessed-Class". -- User:Docu

That was a bug. I fixed it now. Thanks. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 16:40, 11 February 2007 (UTC)

WP 1.0 bot running while logged out

WP 1.0 bot appears to have been running while logged out. Please see its contributions. Just thought you'd like to know. Hope you have a most wonderful day, and happy editing! Kyra_~(talk) 08:36, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

The re-login in at every project seems to work. But the cookie seems to be lost a few edits into every project. Agathoclea 10:09, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

I have the bot login at every edit operation now. This should plainly be unnecessary, but should help keep the bot logged in. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 16:22, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

Redundant categories

While I agree on some redundant categories in Pervez Hoodbhoy, I would disagree on removal of specific categories of 'Nuclear physics' and 'Mathematical physics' as they are two different subjects. Keeping them would be in accordance with Wikipedia:Categorization of people. cheers. --IsleScape^Talk 15:29, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

OK, I put the guy in Category:Nuclear physicists. I'd argue that this is a more narrow category than the two above. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 15:51, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

Seems good. Thanks. --IsleScape^Talk 15:55, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

Question

Hi, you may remember me from this post. I was wondering if there is a bot that can go through entire categories or subcategories (ie. Category:The Simpsons) and tag articles that haven't previously been tagged with a WikProject tag, because if there is, it would be helpful. Thanks, Scorpion 01:53, 10 February 2007 (UTC)

I think AWB should be able to do that. But note that such automated tagging still needs to be checked by hand since not all articles in a certain category may end up satisfying the requirements for inclusion in a given wikiproject (that's because sometimes categories can be too broad and people not always categorize things very well).

If you have no luck with AWB, I can write a script to do that, but then one should (as mentioned above) go and check if tags were appropriate for each page. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 02:27, 10 February 2007 (UTC)

It's not that big a deal. We've recently had problems with people creating random NN articles and since category changes can't be seen, I figured having a bot that tagged every article in a category would be helpful. I'll try out AWB, thanks! -- Scorpion 02:30, 10 February 2007 (UTC)

See also Wikipedia_talk:Version_1.0_Editorial_Team#Using_bots_for_tagging. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 22:38, 11 February 2007 (UTC)

Page moves

I was talking about page moves a few weeks ago. I just noticed that your page was moved to User:Oleg Alexandrov on Wheels (see here). However, there is a red link for contributions. However, Remove has contributions. Remove moved your page on Wheels. Why is the link red? Math Maniac 16:49, 11 February 2007 (UTC)

As far as I know, it goes as follows. If I edit an article, that article shows up in my contributions. If that article gets deleted (becomes a redlink), the article disappears from my contributions. User:Remove has a lot of contributions, but they were all dumb page moves. All of his contributions got deleted (e.g., User:Oleg Alexandrov on Wheels was moved back to User:Oleg Alexandrov and then User:Oleg Alexandrov on Wheels got deleted). So it appears that User:Remove has no contributions. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 17:06, 11 February 2007 (UTC)

The link is blue in the history. Math Maniac 17:16, 11 February 2007 (UTC)

I give up. :) This must be odd database stuff I don't know much about. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 17:18, 11 February 2007 (UTC)

Hafner-Sarnak-McCurley constant

Thanks. Math Maniac 18:54, 11 February 2007 (UTC)

Anonymous user blanked your contribs page

So I reverted it. I assumed it was vandalism. --Matt J ^User|Talk 20:22, 11 February 2007 (UTC)

Thanks! Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 21:24, 11 February 2007 (UTC)

Re: Request for edit summary

I always try to add edit summaries except when there is a possibility for the edit summary to become needlessly bigger than the net changes made :-) May I ask which of my edits were lacking summaries. Thanks! Szhaider 02:36, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

This one. Yeah, you are right, you do use edit summaries most of the time. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 02:39, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

Here is a little history behind this. I heard this astronaut's name on radio. I began to search the article about her with different spellings of her last name. All of my guesses were in vain. I tried Lisa; did not find any luck. I found her name's right spellings from google, after confirming the presence of an article about her, I made above mentioned change. Szhaider 03:37, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

You are right, that history is too long to fit in the edit summary. :) Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 04:34, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

Oddness at J._Michael_Steele

This article was created by User:Alfred Legrand. The article's style and "Alfred Legrand" user page and contributions make suggests to me this is actually User:MathStatWoman. Legrand's actions seem to be a kind of harrassment against User:jmsteele (aka User: Fred T. Mathematician?). --C S (Talk) 11:02, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

Simon's favorite factoring trick

Hi Oleg. I find it rather hard to believe that you edited this page, with the comment "this page needs work to look good. Also links.", rather than putting it up for deletion. It seems contrary to your earlier opinions in various AFDs. Anyway, I've put it up for deletion at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Simon's favorite factoring trick. --C S (Talk) 16:23, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

I was going in rapid fire succession through a bunch of new additions to User:Mathbot/Changes to mathlists being concerned primarily if a given article is even mathematical or not. I should have paid more attention indeed, the article in question does appear rather useless. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 16:31, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

Statistics updates

Is the bot really updating the statistics when both class and importance have been updated? I have some articles that were so and that aren't still showing in the statistics. For example V-1 fails to show up on the quality list--MoRsE 17:28, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

As far as I can tell, V-1 flying bomb does show up in Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Aircraft articles by quality/4, as it should. Talk:V-1 flying bomb does not show up there, because talk pages are not listed. Perhaps I am misunderstanding something. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 03:52, 13 February 2007 (UTC)

I'm sorry if I was a little unclear. I meant that although I updated the "Assessment" value of that article (and some other too) some days ago, the bot doesn't seem to notice it. It remains unassessed in the table, although having a value. Other articles work fine, which perplexes me. --MoRsE 05:35, 13 February 2007 (UTC)

Well, I can see the {{AircraftProject|class=b|importance=top}} value in Talk:V-1 flying bomb. However, at the bottom of Talk:V-1 flying bomb I see that it still shows up in Category:Unassessed aircraft articles instead of Category:B-Class aircraft articles. I guess something's not right with {{AircraftProject}} or the way you used it. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 15:54, 13 February 2007 (UTC)

Thanks

Many thanks for your help and input. swannbridge

You are welcome. :) Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 03:52, 13 February 2007 (UTC)

Enrolled Actuary

I restored the capitalization of Enrolled Actuary that you removed. It is a title, not a description. It is analogous to Enrolled Agent, which is also capitalized. Also, see the Joint Board for the Enrollment of Actuaries, which refers to both "actuaries" and "Enrolled Actuaries." Malik Shabazz 03:56, 13 February 2007 (UTC)

OK. Thanks. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 03:57, 13 February 2007 (UTC)

Thanks

Thanks for the edits you made to my Talk page. I had been looking for the information you posted for a long time and I really appreciate you helping me find it. I also apologize for the edit I made to the logarithms page. I had never realized that logarithms could be done with decimal bases. I suggested on my talk page that the ability to use decimals with logarithms probably should be clarified to avoid further corrections from ignorant undergraduate students like myself. Also, since you are a math person, I would like to mention that an article on lunes is absent from Wikipedia's collection. I am not qualified to comment on the topic, so I figured mentioning it to you would be a good idea. Shining Arcanine 05:09, 13 February 2007 (UTC)

You're welcome. I replied about lune on your talk page. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 15:55, 13 February 2007 (UTC)

Sorry for my mistake.

I hope that I am replying to your comment in the right place, Alex. If not, then please direct me to a more appropriate place to reply. I was suprised to find what appeared to be an error in the formula on the Fundamental theorem of calculus page. In my calculus studies we had not had the variable in the integral, only the bounds of the function. (I learn calculus in Hebrew so I am still building my English-language calculus vocabulary.)

If I do see what appear to be errors in such a page again, I will consult with the page's moderator before applying changes. Thanks. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Dotancohen (talk • contribs) 06:40, 14 February 2007 (UTC).

That was not an error indeed. It is OK to have integrals with variable bound of integration, $\int _{a}^{x}f(t)\,dt$, and that's how the antiderivative is defined. No problem though, I just reverted your edit. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 15:45, 14 February 2007 (UTC)

I've looked up the material in the university today, and lo and behold that is how the integral is defined. I asked some knowledgable people, but none were able to tell me how this: $\int _{a}^{x}f(t)\,dt$ differs from this: $\int _{a}^{b}f(x)\,dx$ in a practical sense. Although x is defined in [a,b] I see no mention of b in the first example, does that mean that b is arbitrary? Although I understand that this is probably not the most appropriate place for this type of discussion, could you maybe enlighten me as to the wisdom of the first example, and how itg differs from my example (interal from a to b on f(x)*dx )? Thanks, Oleg. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Dotancohen (talk • contribs) 13:06, 15 February 2007

Pick some b bigger than a. Then you get an interval, [a, b]. Keep it that way. Now, if you find just $\int _{a}^{b}f(x)\,dx$, what you get is a number, the area under the curve. If you let however t vary inside of [a, b], what you get is $\int _{a}^{t}f(x)\,dx$, this is a function of t. For t=b, you of course recover $\int _{a}^{b}f(x)\,dx$, but that's not so interesting. What is interesting is that $\int _{a}^{t}f(x)\,dx$ as a function of t is an antiderivative of f.

I don't know if I explained it well. The point is that when you allow the upper bound of integration to vary you obtain a function, not just a number when the upper bound is kept fixed. That function is very important, it is the antiderivative. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 04:13, 16 February 2007 (UTC)

Thanks. I think that my problem is that I don't understand the difference between the antiderivative and the integral. I'll spend some more time on it. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Dotancohen (talk • contribs).

Non integers

I have no wish to get into the mathematics of modulo, but I am a programmer who wants to know if there is any legitimacy in decimal numbers in such an operation and what rules would apply. 71.146.96.90 07:17, 14 February 2007 (UTC)Neil H Murphy

I think the modulo operation describes the issues you mention. Let me know if you have more questions. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 15:48, 14 February 2007 (UTC)

(Please Help) | Wikipedia:WikiProject_Business_and_Economics

Bettacommand said me to cantact you:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Bot_requests#.28Please_Help.29_.7C_Wikipedia:WikiProject_Business_and_Economics

Could you please respond there? Please. --Parker007 10:16, 14 February 2007 (UTC)

I replied there. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 15:56, 14 February 2007 (UTC)

Could you please tell me what this means?

Edit summary usage for MoodyGroove: 95% for major edits and 90% for minor edits. Based on the last 150 major and 150 minor edits in the article namespace. Thanks, MoodyGroove 17:06, 14 February 2007 (UTC)MoodyGroove

That means that out of the last 150 major edits, you used an edit summary 95% of the time. The same for minor edits. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 02:48, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

Ah. Thank you! MoodyGroove 03:32, 15 February 2007 (UTC)MoodyGroove

How do you get the edit summary please? Jmath666 19:08, 17 February 2007 (UTC)

See here. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 21:18, 17 February 2007 (UTC)

math-italics

Oleg,

Regarding math-italics, is there a way to make $T'$ look more like T ' ? In math-italics, the prime mark ( ' ) is too close to T. Perhaps there is a way to put a bit of space between the T and the ' ? (It's not just T, but other letters, too.)

Also, is there an efficient way to make $A_n$ look more like A_n? ($A$_$n$ works, but this takes 39 characters - is there something shorter?)

Clark —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Clark Kimberling (talk • contribs) 13:58, 15 February 2007 (UTC).

You can use math tags for A_n, like

<math>A_n</math> which gives $A_{n}$

Note that there is a toolbar on top of the edit box which has a symbol for the <math></math> tags.

About the prime, you can try the following

<math>T\,'</math> which shows up as $T\,'$

Cheers, Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 15:52, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

I would hope we will not start using $T\,'\,\!$ inline, as it does not share a baseline with the surrounding text. But HTML primes are too tightly kerned, so T′ (''T''&prime;) and f′ (''f''&prime;) can be a problem. We can force spaces in wiki syntax as well as TeX; for example, T ′ (''T''&nbsp;&prime;).

The question about "<math>A_n</math>" mixes apples and oranges. Either use pure TeX, $A_{n}$ (<math>A_n</math>), or use pure wiki, A_n (''A''_''n''); I strongly recommend the latter. But putting tags inside TeX will never work. --KSmrq^T 07:14, 16 February 2007 (UTC)

Wikiproject

I don't understand how to add an article to a wikiproject, could you explain it to me? Prb4 17:48, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

Well, I am not sure I understand what you are trying to say. Could you be more specific? If my guess is right however, maybe Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Using the bot is what you are looking for. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 04:15, 16 February 2007 (UTC)

Perhaps he is talking about getting it to be counted by Mathbot as part of a project? In that case, the key is to include the article in a category (see Wikipedia:Categorization) which is considered by Mathbot to be under the purview of that project. Or maybe he wants to know how to get one of those templates (such as {{maths rating|class=GA|importance=high}}) on the talk page saying that it is subject to the project? JRSpriggs 10:06, 16 February 2007 (UTC)

Thank you & need more help please

Thank you for making the categories and the box which I wanted. I really appreciated your help.

This box has the categories in relation, but the numbers are not correct? Could you please fix it, I would really appreciate it.

--Parker007 10:43, 16 February 2007 (UTC)

The table is being filled up as server cache is clearing and more articles complete the migration after my mass category rename. When the bot runs in 12 hours the table will become more complete. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 16:08, 16 February 2007 (UTC)

Edit Summary

I rarely do anything but minor edits. Could you tell me which article specifically you think needed a better summary, so that I will know for next time? Eassin 01:40, 17 February 2007 (UTC)

Many of your edits are actually not minor (that is to say, you have not checked the "minor" checkbox), see Special:Contributions/Eassin. As far as I can see, you don't use edit summaries for most major or for minor edits. While edit summaries are not mandatory, they are really helpful in letting others understand what you changed. So, if you could put in some effort in putting edit summaries more often that would be a good thing. Cheers, Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 03:15, 17 February 2007 (UTC)

LaTeX to Wiki translator wanted

Is there a LaTeX to Wiki translator, please? I know I can do with some amount of hand editing because the math formulas are largely compatible, but having the structure (paragraphs, sections, crossreferences, citations,...) and tables translated automagically would be great. Jmath666 19:09, 17 February 2007 (UTC)

I don't know of any. Besides, the output of any such program would not look so good on Wikipedia I think. I suggest you use a text editor to replace dollar signs with <math> </math> tags, and then do everything else by hand. Not pretty, but works. :) Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 19:11, 17 February 2007 (UTC)

Thanks. It should not be hard to write a Perl script to do that and also replace \section{X} by ==X== and do citations and so on. I could rework some introductions from my papers and proposals into useful articles and such translation as the first step would save a lot of work. (I am aware of the need to steer clear of copyright issues.) But my Perl is rusty. Maybe one day if I can find the time. Is there a place to post such codes on Wikipedia? Do you think it would be useful to the community? I am not sure I would bother just for my own use. Jmath666 19:31, 17 February 2007 (UTC)

I wrote a small perl code which attempts something like that, see here. For now all it does is converting dollars to math tags and sectioning. Doing the bibliography is more complicated, I may work on that sometime but not today. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 21:15, 17 February 2007 (UTC)

Cool. Where is the script itself? I run few paragraphs through it and it has shown some simple things I might want to add. Jmath666 21:35, 17 February 2007 (UTC)

The code is now linked from the web form, so also here. I guess you can download it to disk and modify the parse_latex routine to your heart's desire (you can easily build a stand-alone perl script around that routine not depending on the web form interface). Then sometime later I could merge it in. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 21:49, 17 February 2007 (UTC)

I implemented conversion from TeX to wiki for references per Wikipedia:Footnote3. In case you use BibTeX, you first need to paste the generated .bbl file at the end of the article for this to work well. The code basically replaces every \cite with a Wikipedia {ref}, and every bibitem with a Wikipedia {note}. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 20:58, 18 February 2007 (UTC)

DOI links

Is it OK to include DOI links in references? For example, this. More generally, is there a policy regarding external links to copyrighted articles that require a subscription or a payment? I have seen a jstor link deleted by someone for this reason. Sometimes there is a free preprint/tech report/citeseer version, but even then the DOI link is always the standard and authoritative reference. Jmath666 03:13, 18 February 2007 (UTC)

In think it is fine to include that in the references section (even without the actual link). Putting it in the external links section is not OK I would think, since that's specifically for online resources which can be accessed by the general public. I don't know the specific policy about that. See if Wikipedia:External links has anything about it.

OK. Wikipedia:External links#Sites requiring registration says "A site that requires registration or a subscription should not be linked unless: ... It has relevant content that is of substantially higher quality than that available from any other website." Wikipedia:External links#Restrictions on linking is only about links that violate copyright. Wikipedia:Citing sources#Use of non-free/open access sources encourages free access source but allows non-free if more reliable. (It should say also more stable - that's the whole point of DOI.) So DOI should be fine and that editor who removed a Jstor link was mistaken. Good.

Perhaps DOI link should be treated similarly to ISBN (example: ISBN 0-89871-462-1 Not that I like how ISBN is presently done - it should be a simple click-through).

I don't like how the ISBN's are done either. The issue with a "simple clickthrough" however is to which library it should point. The library of Congress has a lot of books, but in my experience a lot of books are missing from there and are present in the British COPAC. So there is no good solution.

Choose from a menu a favorite resolver (Amazon.com] for me) the first time then set a cookie and go there directly the next time. I understand the reason but the solution there is so complicated. I have not figured out how to use the ISBN page yet - too much effort required. (No advice requested I will when I need it). Jmath666 21:01, 18 February 2007 (UTC)

BTW Wiki should support links like Wikipedia:External links#Links normally to be avoided#Sites requiring registration. If I did not misunderstand something can you pass the suggestion on please? Jmath666 19:03, 18 February 2007 (UTC)

You can raise this issue at Wikipedia:Village pump (technical). I don't know how useful that would be. For now you can use links of the form Wikipedia:External links#Sites requiring registration to point to specific subsection. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 20:39, 18 February 2007 (UTC)

Ditto for previous question. In time I will. Yes that's how I did the link above. Disadvantage: subsections with same title in different sections are not accessible. Jmath666 21:01, 18 February 2007 (UTC)

On other matters, did you add more functions to the perl translation script as you said you would? Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 03:29, 18 February 2007 (UTC)

Not yet. I was looking how to do references in Wiki. Maybe tonigt. I'll check for updates first. Jmath666 19:08, 18 February 2007 (UTC)

See the previous section. I implemented a first attempt at citing references. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 20:59, 18 February 2007 (UTC)

Thanks! I have some trouble running the code locally, see User talk:Jmath666#Running LaTeX to Wiki, please continue there. Jmath666 07:04, 19 February 2007 (UTC)

It's not infinitely differentiable

Hi.

Can you prove that only finitely differentiable real functions are infinitely differentiable? It's not true. Howevers small the neighborhood is, I can choose some m such that (d/dx)^m f(x) exceeds any limit. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 202.233.36.224 (talk) 19:00, 18 February 2007 (UTC).

That's correct, but that has nothing to do with differentiability. As wrote on your talk page, a function is infinitely differentiable if and only if it is differentiable n times for each n. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 20:33, 18 February 2007 (UTC)

Not all smooth functions are analytic - this is true - but the current article is wrong. Based on your definition of the differentiability and/or the limit value, the same f(x) would be infinitely COMPLEX-differentiable. That is the consequence you never want, I suppose. If you believe otherwise, the article should say why the limit does not converge in the complex plain but on the real line. You need not say that any differentiable complex function is infinitely differentiable but why f(x) is not complex-differentiable at all. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 202.233.36.224 (talk • contribs).

The key argument in the proof at Non-analytic smooth function is that

$\lim _{x\to 0}x^{m}e^{-1/x^{2}}=0$

for any integer m. This is true if $x$ is real, it is however false when $x$ is complex (try $x=i/M$ where $i={\sqrt {-1}}$ and $M$ is a real number going to infinity). So, the proof in the article would not hold if x were a complex number.

However, I see no need to mention in the article anything about complex numbers. That article has to do with functions defined on the real line, the article and the proof is perfectly correct, and the case of what happens in the case of a complex variable is beyond the scope of the article. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 15:56, 19 February 2007 (UTC)

Yes. You got the very point that I have missed, though to be honest, I am not yet convinced that f(x) is smooth on real. Thank you.