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Speedy deletion nomination of Category:Redirects from Sinhalese-language terms

A tag has been placed on Category:Redirects from Sinhalese-language terms requesting that it be speedily deleted from Wikipedia. This has been done under section C1 of the criteria for speedy deletion, because the category has been empty for seven days or more and is not a disambiguation category, a category redirect, a featured topics category, under discussion at Categories for discussion, or a project category that by its nature may become empty on occasion.

If you think this page should not be deleted for this reason, you may contest the nomination by visiting the page and clicking the button labelled "Contest this speedy deletion". This will give you the opportunity to explain why you believe the page should not be deleted. However, be aware that once a page is tagged for speedy deletion, it may be deleted without delay. Please do not remove the speedy deletion tag from the page yourself, but do not hesitate to add information in line with Wikipedia's policies and guidelines. Liz Read! Talk! 16:42, 16 July 2019 (UTC)

rp -> sfn

As you may have noticed in my edit summary here, I ended up using {{rp}} when I was recovering and merging some citations. I was curious what methodology you use for converting citations from {{rp}} to {{sfn}}? Do you have a script for conversion, or do you just use find-and-replace with regular expressions? Or do you do it manually? Retro (talk | contribs) 22:52, 19 July 2019 (UTC)

You must have noticed me converting the refs at Bangime language, but that was an easy case because pretty much all the citations were to the same source, so a very simple find-and-replace did most of the job (with a bit of manual fiddling here and there). I remember a similar situation in the past where I used a simple regexp to select the right parameter (p= vs. pp=) based on the number of pages cited. Other than that, I haven't used any advanced tools and I don't have any scripts, I'm afraid. That's not really something that I do often. As for the article you pinged me about, do you think a conversion to {{sfn}} would be worth it? There certainly are a few duplicated citations, but most of the references are one-off as far as I can see. – Uanfala (talk) 23:10, 19 July 2019 (UTC)
That's actually a question I have about {{sfn}}: is it acceptable to leave some citations in <ref>...</ref> form, while others are in {{sfn}} form? Basically, because {{sfn}} needs a separate "Bibliography" section, is it acceptable to have some references in the bibliography, but some full citations in the other citation section? I think this hybrid form looks a bit messy in an article where it started to occur.
And sorry if I sound a bit scatter-brained: my last edit involved tracing citations that were accidentally inserted wrong (i.e. completely devoid of content), and that took more time and energy than I expected.
Regarding United States Military and prostitution in South Korea, I'll probably end up handling conversion soon myself. There are at least 3 sources that use multiple page numbers throughout the article, so I think it's worth it. And I think I can do it fairly efficiently. Scratch that: John B123 took care of it for me. Retro (talk | contribs) 23:23, 19 July 2019 (UTC)
I'm not particularly bothered about articles mixing citation styles, but yeah, that might look messy, and it's probably against the manual of style. I don't think sfn necessarily entails having a separate bibliography section: you can have the first instance of a reference fully formatted inside <ref>...</ref> and then all subsequent citations to that source done with sfn (pointing back to that first instance). On a more general note, there's a technical proposal that, if implemented, will remove one major practical reason for converting existing citations into the sfn format. – Uanfala (talk) 18:41, 20 July 2019 (UTC)

Move Language to dialect

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Goalpariya_dialect#Move_to_dialect 77.13.11.241 (talk) 13:37, 29 July 2019 (UTC)

Revert without explanation - WP:BRD

Most of your recent reverts come without explanation [1]. Please respect WP:BRD. 78.55.29.138 (talk) 14:56, 29 July 2019 (UTC)

You're very well aware of the explanation. As stated at the ANI thread, you can't just go around orphaning established templates without discussion. You've started a TfD now, and if it results in deletion, you'll be welcome to go back and replace existing uses. Just wait till you've got consensus, alright? – Uanfala (talk) 15:01, 29 July 2019 (UTC)
"You're very well aware of the explanation" - you have to provide in the edit summary for everyone to see. What don't you understand about that? Regarding "you can't just go around orphaning established templates" - it's not one of the established ones. 78.55.29.138 (talk) 15:35, 29 July 2019 (UTC)

You are still doing it [2]. 77.183.70.51 (talk) 11:18, 31 July 2019 (UTC)

Vasconic languages

Hi Uanfala, I would like to have your opinion on this topic: Talk:Vasconic languages#Merge with Vasconic substratum theory. My point is, I think that the use of "Vasconic languages" for anything other than Vennemann's Vasconic hypothesis is mostly WP-driven, and that the article should therefore be collapsed to a redirect to Vasconic substrate hypothesis, or maximally to a dab (like this, with all necessary formal corrections). – Austronesier (talk) 14:37, 17 August 2019 (UTC)

Another sign of the unavoidable expansion of your watchlist? :)
In this special case, no. It is a genuine interest which predates my WP activities, although just from an amateur's viewpoint, and not as an active researcher.
I'll have a look later, though I don't know if I'll have anything to say as this is not an area I'm familiar with. – Uanfala (talk) 15:09, 17 August 2019 (UTC)
I think it can be approached formally without actual "expertise", provided you have sufficient input. –Austronesier (talk) 15:52, 19 August 2019 (UTC)

Your edits regarding boundary between North and South America

You recently edited a couple of articles on geography to state that the traditional boundary between North and South America is not the Darién Gap, but the Panama Canal. Please note the the Panama Canal is a man-made geographic feature of the 20th century, and as such is not the traditional boundary between the continents. Please also note that the Darién Gap not only is the traditional boundary between North and South America, but also forms the land border between Panama and Colombia, so mainland Colombia is located wholly within South America; Colombia's claims to transcontinental status stem from its claims over the San Andrés and Providencia archipelagos off the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua.

I have edited the List of Transcontinental Countries article to make clear that mainland Colombia is located wholly within South Anerica, and have reverted your two edits that substituted the Panama Canal for the Darién Gap as the continental boundary. Please rest aassured that my edits were done not in pursuance of claims on behalf of Colombia (I am entirely neutral regarding rivalries among South and Central American nations), but for sober-eyed geographic and historical reasons. I see by your recent edits that some articles concerning Colombia did include other editors' POV edits that espoused the country's greatness (which is not acceptable for an encyclopedia), and you were correct to clean up those articles, but the articles on geographical boundaries between continents are not part of any such agenda. AuH2ORepublican (talk) 12:11, 19 August 2019 (UTC)

The edits you're referring to are these [3] [4]. I was simply removing text that was unsourced and mostly off topic. I mentioned the isthmus, not the canal. I already pointed that out on your talk page, maybe you've missed your messages? – Uanfala (talk)

YAL

Nope, no objections, normally page swaps work well, I think I screwed it up, let me do it again and it will work as intended. Steven Crossin Help resolve disputes! 13:28, 25 August 2019 (UTC)

Actually, hang on....was the DAB not supposed to be at YAL? Capitalised version? That's what's been done by me. Can you clarify?
The dab was at YAL, I wanted it moved to Yal: all-caps titles are dispreferred if there are lower-case entries on the page. If you move it, that would be great. But there's no need to complicate the page history with a swap here, you can just move Yal to Yal (disambiguation) and then YAL over the vacated title of Yal. – Uanfala (talk) 13:39, 25 August 2019 (UTC)
Well, the G6 tag at Yal got actioned in the meantime, so I've just gone ahead and moved YAL. That settles the matter as far as I'm concerned, but if you have any objections let me know and I'll revert. – Uanfala (talk) 13:52, 25 August 2019 (UTC)
Nah, all good. I must have not had my morning coffee, I do page moves all the time and sometimes see requests like this in the CSD category. Now that I look at the edits I made to prepare for the page swap, I did realise the correct thing to do, but must have overlooked it. Sorry about that, glad it's all handled. No objections on my end, just a good old sans-coffee error! Steven Crossin Help resolve disputes! 13:54, 25 August 2019 (UTC)

Please comment on Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Taiwan

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Taiwan. Legobot (talk) 04:24, 27 August 2019 (UTC)

FYI

[5] Could be the Saraiki sock. Can you take a look? --regentspark (comment) 15:38, 31 August 2019 (UTC)

Thanks for reverting them. I don't know if that's a sock: I don't have any fresh memory of Saraiki ethnonationalist socking (though no doubt there have been such socks, it's just that they can't have been as disruptive as that other one who was insisting on Saraiki being a dialect of Punjabi). Anyway, this sort of edit (tampering with census language figures) happens all the time, so I wouldn't even bother leaving them a warning unless they show signs of persisting. I'll keep an eye on their edits though, just in case. – Uanfala (talk) 16:10, 31 August 2019 (UTC)

Heresy in Buddhism edits

Hello. I'd like to clarify that in East Asian Buddhist literature, Manichaeism (摩尼教), Nestorianism (景教) and Zoroastrianism (祆教) are specifically mentioned as heretical (外道). Because the categories for the first two subjects are listed under Category:Heresy in ancient Christianity, the argument that they are "separate religions" does not support their exclusion from Category:Heresy in Buddhism. --Invokingvajrastalk 23:21, 31 August 2019 (UTC)

Oh, I see where you're coming from, and sorry for my curt edit summaries. However, I still don't think these three religions could be included in Category:Heresy in Buddhism: such a title implies that the category is either for general concepts to do with heresy in Buddhism, or – more likely – for Buddhist heresies, that is heterodox religious movements within Buddhism. Neither seems appropriate for Zoroastrianism and the rest. If the category was named "Heresies according to Buddhism", then it would be applicable, but that's probably not something you would really want to use as a basis for categorisation as probably every major religious tradition has at one point or another characterised every other major religious tradition as a heresy. – Uanfala (talk) 23:53, 31 August 2019 (UTC)
These traditions have a peculiar relationship in the history of Buddhism. The term 外道 above is also the name of a volume within the Chinese Buddhist Canon that includes texts of historical significance that belong to or are related to the three traditions included. Their inclusion is an explicit statement of their place in Buddhist thought. The use of Category:Heresy in ancient Christianity is similarly used to denote a relationship to religions such as Manichaeism. If this particular religion came from within Christianity, a subcategory such as "Heresies within the (ancient) Christian Church" would be more appropriate. I would argue that Manichaeism holds a similar relationship to ancient Christianity as it does with Buddhism. Granted, any religion that falls outside orthodoxy could be included in their respective category, but that seems outside the scope of the category's intended function, which is to list those traditions that have been deemed heretical "according to" the religion in question. I will concede that in Buddhism these traditions may be closer to the concept of the "infidel" though the term "heretic" is a common translation in the field. Category:Heresy in Buddhism is in its infancy. There's much more that can be done to build and clarify its content. --Invokingvajrastalk 02:51, 31 August 2019 (UTC)

I have unreviewed a page you curated

Hi, I'm CASSIOPEIA. I wanted to let you know that I saw the page you reviewed, Tso (letter), and have marked it as unpatrolled. If you have any questions, please ask them on my talk page. Thank you.

Message delivered via the Page Curation tool, on behalf of the reviewer.

CASSIOPEIA(talk) 02:11, 9 September 2019 (UTC)

New message from DBigXray

Hello, Uanfala. You have new messages at Talk:Tharparkar_District#Request_to_merge_this_page_into_Tharparkar.
Message added 05:28, 15 September 2019 (UTC). You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{Talkback}} or {{Tb}} template.

DBigXrayᗙ 05:28, 15 September 2019 (UTC)

Please comment on Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style

The feedback request service is asking for participation in this request for comment on Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style. Legobot (talk) 04:26, 18 September 2019 (UTC)

Vrishchika and Mesha move

Hello, regarding move of Vrishchika and Mesha, the link you mentioned WP:TRANSLITERATE clearly mentions that all titles must be Romanized, without any diacritics. Also google search gives around a million links for Vrishchika and Mesha. Crashed greek (talk) 07:44, 19 September 2019 (UTC)

WP:TRANSLITERATE says all titles must be transliterated, but it doesn't say anything about diacritics (it does give examples of established titles with diacritics in its very first sentence though). What it does say is Established systematic Romanizations, such as Hanyu Pinyin, are preferred. Meṣa uses the International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration, which is an established systematic romanisation for Sanskrit terms. Mesha, on the other hand, is an informal anglicisation, which has the disadvantage of not being in a straightforward relation to the original Sanskrit (sh could stand for both ṣ and ś, a could be either a or ā).
Also, all the articles in Category:Hindu solar months have established titles in IAST, so any change of that sort would probably need an WP:RM. Feel free to start one: I don't have a strong opinion, and I'd be happy to support if it turns out that the informal transliteration is more common in reliable sources (and btw, it's the usage in reliable sources that is relevant, and not on the wider internet). – Uanfala (talk) 10:48, 19 September 2019 (UTC)
Transliteration using diacritics is allowed in French or Spanish or German language Wikipedias, not in English wikipedia. This is not International English Wikipedia either. My earlier interaction with User:Chiswick Chap also inspired me to move the articles Meṣa and Vṛṣabha. That too personally I move articles only if they miss letters like h and i/u due to diacritics like these cases respectively, not all articles having diacritics, which cause problem for users who come here from google search. Crashed greek (talk) 04:04, 20 September 2019 (UTC)

FYI

this can't be right, is it? --regentspark (comment) 01:32, 23 September 2019 (UTC)

This is a clueless but stubborn user who's turned into a major annoyance in the area: Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/Muhammad Samiuddin Qazi (sami). – Uanfala (talk) 07:44, 23 September 2019 (UTC)

Printworthy redirects

Why would you have in print "Kathar: see Kathar, Myanamar" and then immediately below it have the article Kathar, Myanmar? ―Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 21:54, 23 September 2019 (UTC)

Kathar, Myanmar doesn't exit, the article is at Katha, Myanmar. If it's created, I think we would normally still have Kathar as the printworthy {{R from alt name}} and Kathar, Myanmar as an unprintworthy {{R from unnecessary disambiguation}}. – Uanfala (talk) 22:08, 23 September 2019 (UTC)
Uanfala, The fact that it was misspelled is a really good reason. ―Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 00:23, 25 September 2019 (UTC)
As the article makes it clear, this is not a misspelling but a legitimate alternative spelling. – Uanfala (talk) 07:14, 25 September 2019 (UTC)

Re: Mimi language

Hello, thanks for the ping. Your review of the content of the articles and decision to have them as separate articles makes sense to me - good work. Thanks QuiteUnusual (talk) 08:30, 25 September 2019 (UTC)

This is the first time I'm seeing a fellow editor come to my talk page only to express agreement with something I've done. Quite unusual! :) – Uanfala (talk) 08:44, 25 September 2019 (UTC)


Tibetan transliterations

Hi Uanfala, do you know anything about how Tibetan works? I find the same names written in different ways by different authors and having a hard time to figure out who is who. It is also not clear what transliteration we use on Wikipedia with, once again, different editors transliterating differently.

For example, for the founder of the Ladakhi dynasty, whose name is spelt on Wikipedia as Lhachen Dpalgyimgon, the sources use

Et cetra. -- Kautilya3 (talk) 11:27, 1 October 2019 (UTC)

I'm afraid that's not really my area. I guess the major source of trouble when romanising Tibetan names is the fact that written Tibetan has kept the old spelling while the spoken language has undergone major sound changes. So something like Dpal-gyi-mgon looks like an accurate transliteration of the name as written (in either Classical or modern Tibetan). It also reasonably well represents the pronunciation at the time when Classical Tibetan was codified about a thousand years ago (unpronounceable though it may look). Pal-gyi-gön, on the other hand, looks like a transcription of the name in modern Standard Tibetan, as pronounced in Lhasa. I think it's generally best to give both forms (though it's open to question why we should give modern pronunciations of the names of ancient kings), but a complicating factor here is the modern dialectal variation: many of the sound changes that make the modern Lhasa pronunciation so different from that of the classical language haven't taken place in the western varieties, so that something like Pal-gyi-gön may not necessarily reflect the pronunciation in Ladakh.
All in all, maybe a broad discussion is in order somewhere? Though I don't know if one hasn't already occurred: I don't watch the relevant project pages. There's also Wikipedia:Naming conventions (Tibetan), but of course that only applies to article titles. Regardless of what the title is, a good rule of thumb is to always include the transcription in the lede (keeping the hyphens as they distinguish syllable boundaries: gyi-mgon is different from gyim-gon). Based on that, a reader familiar with Tibetan will be able to work out the pronunciation in whatever variety they know. Template:Bo might also be of use. – Uanfala (talk) 13:30, 2 October 2019 (UTC)
My feeling is that we should use the simplest possible spellings that can be sourced. The Tibetan naming conventions page you link above says just as much. Of course, whatever spelling we use for the page title is what would appear throughout the body and on other wikilinks. See also the Namgyal dynasty of Ladakh page where this is done (not by me) for the second dynasty.
It seems that the A. H. Francke book is using simplified (probably phonetic) spellings, whereas the others are transliterating. If we do that, then the question is whether the diaeresis on 'o' is necessary. You think that is a Lhasa spelling that may not make sense for Ladakh? -- Kautilya3 (talk) 11:02, 3 October 2019 (UTC)
I've just flicked through a Ladakhi grammar, and although it doesn't talk about any of that, I can tentatively infer that the fronting of on to ön hasn't occurred in Ladakhi. On the other hand, Ladakhi apparently shares with Standard Tibetan the dropping of d from dpal and of m from mgon (although it's almost certain that these changes would have taken place longer after Lhachen's time). As for Namgyal (rnam-rgyal), modern Ladakhi would have retained at least the second r. – Uanfala (talk) 13:53, 4 October 2019 (UTC)

Sources

  • Fisher, Margaret W.; Rose, Leo E.; Huttenback, Robert A. (1963), Himalayan Battleground: Sino-Indian Rivalry in Ladakh, Praeger – via Questia
  • Francke, Rev. A. H. (1907), A History of Western Tibet, S. W. Partridge & Co – via archive.org
  • Petech, Luciano (1977), The Kingdom of Ladakh, c. 950–1842 A.D. (PDF), Instituto Italiano Per il Medio ed Estremo Oriente – via academia.edu

KDT, and what belongs in disambiguation pages

You reverted my deletions on KDT, with the comment that these abbreviations are used. The point is that they're not mentioned in the relevant articles; disambiguation is disambiguation, not adding new information or a dictionary of abbreviations. The (unreferenced) statement that they may be used is irrelevant. To keep this comment short I refer you to WP:DABABBREV (which I had linked in my edit summary). Also MOS:DABACRO. Best wishes, Pol098 (talk) 16:26, 4 October 2019 (UTC)

I wouldn't always count on an article to mention any common acronyms. And usage of acronyms is usually pretty easy to verify with a simple web search. – Uanfala (talk) 16:34, 4 October 2019 (UTC)
WP:DABABBREV and MOS:DABACRO are quite clear, and say what to do if an abbreviation is commonly used. Pol098 (talk) 17:43, 4 October 2019 (UTC)

Punjabi language

Thoughts welcome here : "Talk:Punjabi_language#Devanagari_Script"--DBigXrayᗙ 13:18, 6 October 2019 (UTC)

Thanks, will have a look at some point. – Uanfala (talk) 14:33, 6 October 2019 (UTC)

Nomination of Bernetz (township) for deletion

A discussion is taking place as to whether the article Bernetz (township) is suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia according to Wikipedia's policies and guidelines or whether it should be deleted.

The article will be discussed at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Bernetz (township) until a consensus is reached, and anyone, including you, is welcome to contribute to the discussion. The nomination will explain the policies and guidelines which are of concern. The discussion focuses on high-quality evidence and our policies and guidelines.

Users may edit the article during the discussion, including to improve the article to address concerns raised in the discussion. However, do not remove the article-for-deletion notice from the top of the article. Bearcat (talk) 15:13, 10 October 2019 (UTC)

I have unreviewed a page you curated

Hi, I'm Onel5969. I wanted to let you know that I saw the page you reviewed, Berre (Aude), and have marked it as unpatrolled. If you have any questions, please ask them on my talk page. Thank you.

(Message delivered via the Page Curation tool, on behalf of the reviewer.)

Onel5969 TT me 11:08, 14 October 2019 (UTC)

Trouted

Whack!

You've been whacked with a wet trout.

Don't take this too seriously. Someone just wants to let you know that you did something silly.

You have been trouted for: YOUR REASON HERE Mir Noor Ahmed Langove (talk) 05:28, 22 October 2019 (UTC) the word was not lango tribe it was langove tribe and also its tribal figures were changed.

Recently …

On your talk page, you say:

I've recently completed a beta version of a template for formatting interlinear glosses.

This undated comment appears just after inviting us to whack you with a wet rainbow trout for doing anything silly!

Some time ago, I resolved to sign all comments I make, even on my own talk page, as this serves to remind me — not just that I did it, but also when I did something — as in, "Oh! Has it really been that long?" May I heartily recommend this "self-documentary" discipline to you, too? The benefits are akin to those experienced by programmers who adopt the discipline of commenting in their code every little thing that will not be immediately transparent (from the variable and procedure names they've chosen, oh so carefully), even to themselves, after the next three projects or three months, whichever comes first.

Now, an inspection reveals that the Interlinear template and module has taken quite a lot of work to set up, and it's certainly worth having others test it out. What one can't readily tell is whether it still needs testing, or has progressed from beta to production status. Please do let us know!

And do you really want another fish? You're very welcome, of course, if you do … yoyo (talk) 07:21, 28 October 2019 (UTC)

Ah, yes, I'd forgotten about that. The creation of the template is not "recent" by any standard measure (it's been two years now!), but I'm a bit unwilling to change that lest is appears the whole thing is more finished than it actually is. I'm probably not using the word "beta" in its usual sense (I'm no programmer), but for me labelling the module as "beta" sends the signal that it's not completely settled and important aspects of its function may change. Your proposal to switch to explicit parameters is one potential such change, another one is the implementation of some alternative way to deal with article-level gloss abbreviations (I'm not completely satisfied with my decision to use labelled section transclusion). Still, even without these prospects, the module could do with more testing as not all functionalities have been rigorously tried out. I was hoping to get the time to pull together the loose ends and fix the known bugs at some point around the end of the year. If everything's fine then, I'll probably remove the "beta" label from the module as well as that infelicitous time reference from my user page. Thanks for all the fish so far!
The module could certainly do with more eyes on it, and I'm sure if you play around with it you'll be able to find more bugs and oddities. – Uanfala (talk) 11:41, 28 October 2019 (UTC)

People surname

Why you edit people surname as other uses? Are you surname of Kho? You are too troublesome always edit people surname with no reason! This Wikimedia page was create by surname of Kho. Please don't make me complain you to Wikimedia. Language not the first people bored out to learn, it was learn how to talk with name first. DON'T EDIT MY PAGE ANYMORE! Thank you! kho (talk) 06:50 PM, 28 October 2019 (UTC)

k.b.cheng, the page that you're talking about is Kho. There are several problems with your edits to it. First off, this is a disambiguation page, and disambiguation pages list articles whose names are ambiguous with the term in question. You can include people with the surname "Kho" (like Baldwin Kho), but you can't include articles in which "Kho" is simply part of a word, like Khosrow or Khorasan. Second, you've created a section called "Surname of name": the heading doesn't quite make sense in English, and the only entry there says that "Kho" is a variant of "the Chinese surname", without saying which surname that is.
I strongly encourage you to read about disambiguation pages at WP:DAB before making any more edits. Please also bear in mind that editors don't own articles – Kho is not yours, it's not mine, it's editable by anyone. If you still would like to complain of me, you're welcome to do so at WP:ANI. – Uanfala (talk) 11:26, 28 October 2019 (UTC)


November 2019

Hi Uanfala, Please take a look at Skardu Valley and Gilgit Valley which are uncomplete articles. I think these should be redirected to the articles Skardu city and Gilgit city respectively, as the areas are the same and both the valleys are associated with these areas. Thank You. PakEditor (talk) 15:13, 2 November 2019 (UTC)

(talk page stalker) Valleys are the main inhabitable areas in mountain regions, and they often contain dozens of towns and villages. Redirecting them to individual towns is no good. It is better to redirect, i.e., merge, them to the rivers that flow through them. Gilgit River is a good candidate for Gilgit Valley. As for Skardu Valley, I don't exactly know what it is, but I see that there are plenty of sources that talk about it. Please investigate. -- Kautilya3 (talk) 19:03, 2 November 2019 (UTC)
Yeah, the division of labour between the articles might not be optimal (there's Gilgit, Gilgit District, Gilgit River and Gilgit Valley, and then Skardu, Skardu District and Skardu Valley). But I'm afraid I'll leave the matter to those more knowledgeable than me. – Uanfala (talk) 20:11, 2 November 2019 (UTC)
While working on Ladakh pages, I discovered that Tibetan uses the same term for both the river and the valley, lungpa. Only when the river needs to be distinguished from the valley do they use chu. Wise language! -- Kautilya3 (talk) 22:41, 2 November 2019 (UTC)
Ha! An even wiser language, in my opinion, would be one that doesn't normally need to differentiate between "valley", "region" and "district". – Uanfala (talk) 22:43, 2 November 2019 (UTC)

SVG images

Hi Uanfala, first off, thanks for your recent input at the Punjabi language talk page discussions. I think you really played a role creating a consensus that everyone was content with.

I noticed that you contribute a lot to South Asia articles in general with many other contributors and with a lot of know-how. Would you or another contributor you know be able to convert abugida character images from PDFs into SVG images that could be uploaded to Commons and used in charts in Wikipedia articles? Sharada and Multani characters (as proposed by Pandey) would be the abugidas in question, particularly the Sharada characters on page 6 and possibly 7 as well, and the Multani characters from pages 2 to 4 (in the sections named "Vowels," "Consonants," and "Notes on Consonants" variants). Thanks for any help you are able and willing to give, or for referring this request to any interested contributors. Sapedder (talk) 00:12, 3 November 2019 (UTC)

Are the images in these files available under a compatible licence? I don't know if this is the case for Pandey's work, but the official Unicode document for Sharada [6], for example, expressly forbids the extraction or reuse of the glyphs.
As for getting svgs out of pdfs generally, you can see Wikipedia:Graphics Lab/Resources/PDF conversion to SVG, though the process is likely to be fiddly. I guess you can ask at some of the talk pages there for more competent advice. But you really need to get the copyright issue out of the way first. – Uanfala (talk) 02:12, 3 November 2019 (UTC)
Thanks, this link looks useful. And thanks for bringing up the Terms of Use, but in light of them: a) would the images at the Sharada script page (added about 5 1/2 year ago) be violating copyright? Unless I'm mistaken, they seem to use the glyphs from Pandey's charts. And b) if the images at that page are not in violation of any copyright, would I be able to use those images to create separate glyph images instead? Sapedder (talk) 03:55, 3 November 2019 (UTC)
The images at Sharada script have rather vague source information on commons, so they do appear suspect. Are they taken from Pandey's document? If yes, then I think we'd need to contact him and ask for permission – both for the existing images, and for your plan to extract individual glyphs from his pdf. If permission is granted, then the files' descriptions on commons need to be updated to make that clear. – Uanfala (talk) 14:18, 3 November 2019 (UTC)
I'll try to contact regarding both the Sharada image and the glyphs, thanks. Sapedder (talk) 01:09, 4 November 2019 (UTC)

Category:Language versus dialect

Hi Uanfala, the removal of Category:Language versus dialect from Hindi wasn't a mistake. I was emptying out that category to redirect it to Category:Language varieties and styles since the category was mostly redundant. Looking at the Hindi article, there's no discussion of what differentiates a language or dialect, and that's not a defining feature of the article topic even if there were sucha general discussion. I put it in Category:Languages because the article treats it as a language, but I don't have strong opinions on what category it goes into so long as Category:Language versus dialect is removed. Wug·a·po·des​ 20:11, 8 November 2019 (UTC)

Well, I assumed it was a mistake because Category:Languages is a diffusing category (at least with respect to individual languages) and I was surprised to see all those articles show up there all of a sudden. – Uanfala (talk) 20:44, 8 November 2019 (UTC)
Oh, my bad! I've been slowly trying to clean up Category:Linguistics and its subcats, and have been moving stuff into Category:Languages when the article deals with a "language". I'll try to sort those into more specific categories when I can. Wug·a·po·des​ 20:55, 8 November 2019 (UTC)
Most languages are usually already sorted into the most specific relevant categories, so if there are any linguisticky categories on them, it will probably be safe to just remove them. Thanks for working on Category:Linguistics though: I've tried to chip away at it in the past, but I always tend to despair at how big and messy it is. – Uanfala (talk) 21:17, 8 November 2019 (UTC)

National language of india

Hindi is not a national language of india.60% of people using other languages.IF THERE IS a national language it will be TAMIL. Because TAMIL is a oldest language in world all government was accept this.tamil is a official language in 3country like Sri Lanka, singapORE . THERE IS NO national language for india. Even in law book of india.this is also crime your sharing wrong info about Indian government — Preceding unsigned comment added by Midfail (talk • contribs) 02:34, 9 November 2019 (UTC)

Welcome to wikipedia, Midfail. I suspect you're here because this edit of yours was reverted. Well, it might be a good idea to learn a bit about how Wikipedia works, Help:Getting started is one starting point. Two things to bear in mind: 1) you should always use reliable sources for any content you add, see WP:V; 2) it's best not to edit on topics that you feel very passionately about. – Uanfala (talk) 02:40, 9 November 2019 (UTC)

Google Code-In 2019 is coming - please mentor some documentation tasks!

Hello,

Google Code-In, Google-organized contest in which the Wikimedia Foundation participates, starts in a few weeks. This contest is about taking high school students into the world of opensource. I'm sending you this message because you recently edited a documentation page at the English Wikipedia.

I would like to ask you to take part in Google Code-In as a mentor. That would mean to prepare at least one task (it can be documentation related, or something else - the other categories are Code, Design, Quality Assurance and Outreach) for the participants, and help the student to complete it. Please sign up at the contest page and send us your Google account address to google-code-in-admins@lists.wikimedia.org, so we can invite you in!

From my own experience, Google Code-In can be fun, you can make several new friends, attract new people to your wiki and make them part of your community.

If you have any questions, please let us know at google-code-in-admins@lists.wikimedia.org.

Thank you!

--User:Martin Urbanec (talk) 21:58, 23 November 2019 (UTC)

Ethnologue templates

Hi! I don't know if you have noticed, but SIL has introduced a hard paywall for Ethnologue [7], including their archives of older versions. URLs to older versions are dead and redirected to a default page promoting to buy a plan, e.g. [8]. This includes of course our template-generated links. Bold idea: can we just replace e.g.

[https://www.ethnologue.com/18/language/{{{1|}}}/ {{{2|{{PAGENAME}}}}}]

with

[https://web.archive.org/web/20170101000000/https://www.ethnologue.com/18/language/{{{1|}}}/ {{{2|{{PAGENAME}}}}}] ?

(Maybe there is a better choice of date) I have tried a few languages, seems to work for some but not all. What do you think? –Austronesier (talk) 16:15, 28 November 2019 (UTC)

Yeah, this new paywall is a bit annoying, and I can't really see anyone shelling out that much money for access. Though I kinda think that might be a good opportunity to finally wean ourselves off our over-reliance on Ethnologue. Updating the templates with archive links sounds like a good idea, though don't you think SIL might at some point ask the Internet Archive to take down those pages? Pinging Kwami, who's the one looking after the ethnologue templates. Also, and I don't know if this is relevant, but as far as I can see the paywall is geographically limited like before, so the website should continue to be freely available in countries that Ethnologue has judged to be less well-off.– Uanfala (talk) 20:21, 28 November 2019 (UTC)

A lot of those old links are because there's no date or source for the data, so the old link gives you an idea of how out-of-date it might be. The other reason is to keep track of what we need to update. But we haven't done that in a few years, and now with a paywall if we update ...

Yeah, it would be nice to wean ourselves off Ethn and start using s.t. more reliable, but what? If they provide their sources, we can use those directly. Better that way, actually, as often they use funky arithmetic that should be avoided. When they don't give their sources, we could Wayback.

I wish there were a RS 2ary source we could use, but there isn't one, so we're left to do the research to decide among primary sources. That's a lot of work to keep up with. — kwami (talk) 20:50, 28 November 2019 (UTC)

The old links look dead as in "dead" because they behave differently from links to the current version [9], but we should cross-check this via web users from exempted countries. As for the quality of the Ethnologue data, we all had our heureka experiences (like kwami and I recently had with the Moksha/Erzya figures). But agree, there is no other comprehensive secondary source for quick-and-dirty reference.
Btw, have you seen the Contributor Program? Who ever said there was "no quid pro quo"...? –Austronesier (talk) 12:42, 29 November 2019 (UTC)

Benjo Conev > Benyo Tsonev

The agreed Wikipedia romanization of Bulgarian is the Streamlined System so the Bulgarian name Беньо Цонев is transliterated as Benyo Tsonev not Benjo Conev, and your redirect ought to be reversed. Best, Apcbg (talk) 09:29, 2 December 2019 (UTC)

I've got no opinion on this particular article's title, but generally, for historical figures there might already be an established spelling that's different from the one that uses the contemporary system. Fwiw, the one source of the Benjo Conev article uses the traditional spelling. – Uanfala (talk) 14:18, 3 December 2019 (UTC)

Is this draft really promising?

I read through the draft Draft:Tiantai dialect, which you marked as promising (diff), and there wasn't much material, even in the Chinese wikipedia. The Chinese wikipedia only contains the more general Taizhou dialect (which seems non-notable as well), and nearly all of the already limited text is found in the Baidu citation given. Considering that I found nearly no sources for the Tiantai dialect, is this draft or topic actually promising? The Lord of Math (Message; Contribs) 09:43, 12 December 2019 (UTC)

My opinion is that distinct dialects (if reliably verified to exist) are inherently notable. – Uanfala (talk) 11:20, 12 December 2019 (UTC)
But I have doubts about its notability. It sure exists, but I cannot find that many sources. As a Chinese, I went to the Wu Chinese Wikipedia, which the dialect is from, and even there I couldn't find an entry. I have found 1 additional source (assuming blogs are not verifiable), so this may be notable enough, but it certainly isn't quite promising. The Lord of Math (Message; Contribs) 14:40, 12 December 2019 (UTC)
I am following the style of Suzhou dialect, aiming for Start- or Stub-class quality. The Lord of Math (Message; Contribs) 14:50, 12 December 2019 (UTC)
I'm not complete certain I understand your plans here. If you've found a reliable source, you can use that to rewrite the draft and then either move it to mainspace or merge it into the article about the higher-level dialect group. If you believe there are no reliable sources out there at all, and that the dialect is spurious, you can nominate the draft for deletion at WP:MFD (though we do aim to have some content about spurious dialects if coverage has been significant). If you're not sure, you can leave the draft alone until someone else decides to deal with it or it gets deleted (the fact that it's tagged as promising doesn't grant it immunity against speedy deletion after six months of not being edited). I don't know anything about Chinese dialects, so I can't help in any meaningful way here. – Uanfala (talk) 15:03, 12 December 2019 (UTC)
Thanks. I've started work. Please expect to see something meaningful by 1 week. The Lord of Math (Message; Contribs) 15:33, 12 December 2019 (UTC) (By the way now I have edited, the article isn't going to get G13ed in 6 months.)
Good! Just adding, in case this might be helpful in evaluating the existing content in the draft – the provenance of the information there had been briefly discussed on the creator's talk page. – Uanfala (talk) 00:35, 13 December 2019 (UTC)
I have finished the draft (far ahead of schedule). Would you like to have a look? The Lord of Math (Message; Contribs) 06:40, 13 December 2019 (UTC)

You've done good work there! A few points:

  • The mention of ejectives in the consonants table is surprising. I don't think there's any languages that has ejective nasals, could this be some sort of glottalisation instead? I don't know Chinese, but the source used doesn't seem to be giving any indication of what it's based on. One option is to try and dig up a serious phonetic description of the dialect, maybe somebody would have done a dissertation on the topic (is there a central Chinese research repository?), or there might be something relevant somewhere in the vast literature on Wu Chinese (a glimpse of which can be had on glottolog). Either way, that would involve a lot of work, so it's probably simpler to just reword the text to leave out any phonetic details. After all, the source just has this as a transliteration table, right?
  • Vowels: I would rename the section to something like "Syllable structure" and say that the table gives the syllable finals. It doesn't really give you the vowels as it's not known what exact phonemes are represented by each pinyin sequence.
  • The first two sections talk about how Tiantai changes the meanings of words and collapses phrases. Now, are these changes in comparison to Standard Chinese, or with respect to the ancestor language? In discussion of dialects in everyday language, people often say that the given dialect "changes" something, but the change almost always turns out to be simply a thing that the dialect does differently when compared to the standard language (and it would often turn out that the dialect actually represents the ancestor language more faithfully, and it's the standard language that has changed). To speak of "change" in an encyclopedic article, there ought to have been an actual change that has occurred over the course of the history of the language.
  • There's no need to bother with AfC. This process isn't of much use for more out of the way topics like languages. – Uanfala (talk) 02:35, 14 December 2019 (UTC)
Thanks for your comments:
  1. Based on the website I cited, I'm quite sure that there is no problem with the "ejective". That website is a systematic categorization of the consonants and vowels.
  2. With respect to the "changes", I have renamed them to "differences between Tiantai dialect and Standard Chinese".
  3. I prefer going it through AfC, as it acts as a quality check and helps me spot the more obvious problems, such as inappropriate sources. I also like an assessment of the article.
Overall, thanks for your feedback. The Lord of Math (Message; Contribs) 03:55, 14 December 2019 (UTC)
I might not have been clear about the ejectives. There are no languages known to have nasal ejectives out there, so it's overwhelmingly more likely that there is either an error in the Chinese website you've cited or there's been a mistranslation into English. I an article is to be making such an improbable claim, it should be based on a thorough phonetics study published in a top journal, not on a mention in a transliteration table on a website that doesn't give any background or sources. – Uanfala (talk) 12:37, 14 December 2019 (UTC)
The only book I can found that might include a systematic analysis is the book 天台方言研究 ([10]) by Dai Zhaoming, ISBN 9787101054163. I haven't gone on to Google books yet, but I can't find this book in the Hong Kong library repository. Maybe I'll try Google Books. The Lord of Math (Message; contribs) 08:10, 15 December 2019 (UTC)

Happy Holidays!

Hello Uanfala: Enjoy the holiday season and winter solstice if it's occurring in your area of the world, and thanks for your work to maintain, improve and expand Wikipedia. Cheers, Fylindfotberserk (talk) 16:14, 21 December 2019 (UTC)

Spread the WikiLove; use {{subst:Season's Greetings}} to send this message

sami sockpuppetry

Multiple IPs and socks belonging to User:Muhammad Samiuddin Qazi (sami) have been wrecking havoc on {{Urdu topics}} and {{Hindi topics}}. Can you monitor these for a while. While I have asked protection, these IPs have been relentless in recent days. Thanks. Gotitbro (talk) 04:16, 22 December 2019 (UTC)

Thanks, I'll keep an eye on those pages. – Uanfala (talk) 12:26, 22 December 2019 (UTC)

The sentences should be restored.

Hi, Merry Christmas to you. I have a little concern in one of the recent edits that you made in Gujurat article, to some extent i also agree but i think the Language part you have deleted is actually about Gujarat state, so i think it should be restored. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:MobileDiff/932316333 Rocky 734 (talk) 02:29, 25 December 2019 (UTC)

Happy holidays to you too! Ah, you're right: the population figure is for the number of speakers within the state, so that's definitely relevant. I've restored that piece of information, using more recent figures (2011) [11]. – Uanfala (talk) 03:57, 25 December 2019 (UTC)

Pasto

Hello! It looks like about half of the clicks on Pasto have used the Pasto (Colombia) redirect you created on the disambiguation page. From a pageview perspective, it does look as though the Colombian city is the primary topic. The total views for Pasto, Colombia are quite a bit higher than the other topics on the disambiguation page. What do you think? -Niceguyedc Go Huskies! 11:43, 30 December 2019 (UTC)

The redirect Pasto (Colombia) receives about a third of the total pageviews for the dab page (the page itself Pasto (disambiguation) + Pasto, which redirects to it) [12]. That's a really good sign that there's no primary topic, but it's still a bit unexpected and it is conceivable that the stats might be skewed by a large group of readers looking for some entity that we don't have an article about. That's why I'd rather wait for a few more weeks to see if the pattern persists. Or am I missing anything?
And on a side note, it was my impression that if one article receives half of the views, most people would not consider it to be a primary topic. – Uanfala (talk) 15:29, 30 December 2019 (UTC)
I don't think you're missing anything. However, the only way to know the total of where everyone went when they landed on the disambiguation page would be to change every link into a special redirect (like you did with Pasto (Colombia))
As for the side note, I think you're correct, but the total views also come from clicks that don't go through Pasto. Pasto has 545 pageviews in the last week, where the other articles listed (not including Pashto) have only 197 pageviews this week. That ratio would usually suggest a primary topic for the article. I see no problem in waiting a few weeks to see how it all plays out. -Niceguyedc Go Huskies! 20:06, 30 December 2019 (UTC)
But why should we be interested in the total article pageviews? What we want to find out is what proportion of readers who search for "Pasto" are interested in the city. So far there's more or less direct data that suggests the ratio is 1/3. Sure, we look at total article pageviews as some sort of proxy measure for that, but only when there's no time for little experiments with piping via redirects like here, and with the awareness that they're not always reliable (as most of the time, the vast majority of this traffic usually comes from links rather than directly from searches). – Uanfala (talk) 20:30, 30 December 2019 (UTC)
I'm assuming that the figure of 545 views is for Pasto, Colombia. – Uanfala (talk) 20:33, 30 December 2019 (UTC)
I agree that what we want to know is where users are trying to go when they get to Pasto. I'm saying that the overall pageviews are one of the factors that are usually looked at when the primary topic decision is made.
The 545 views is for Pasto, Colombia. -Niceguyedc Go Huskies! 02:53, 31 December 2019 (UTC)
Drats, most of the incoming links have been "fixed". There was an html comment at the bottom which said, in big letters, "Don't add the dab template for now", and still, people would keep adding it again, and again, and again. And that's not even people who use the visual editor, so I can't imagine how they could have all missed the html comment in their source editor. And of course, during one of those windows in which the dab template was in place in early January, the DLP bot had managed to tag the page as having incoming links, and an editor had swiftly "fixed" most of them. The end result is that the pageviews are not meaningful anymore, and that there are sixty or so links to Pasto, Colombia that are needlessly piped via Pasto (Colombia). I'm giving up on this page, it's been such a waste of time. If we should continue using similar experiments in future, we should definitely start adding big fat editnotices each time. Though I doubt this will be enough. – Uanfala (talk) 12:49, 19 January 2020 (UTC)
Right, experiments of this sort go against the grain of editor and bot expectations. I found this listed at Wikipedia:WikiProject Disambiguation/Malplaced disambiguation pages for several weeks, and found it an annoying waste of my time to investigate this. You would need some way to inform RussBot not to list it there.
Pageviews make a strong case for Pasto, Colombia being the primary topic.
Regarding "readers looking for some entity that we don't have an article about", in Spanish it's a disambiguation page. Possible meanings (in Spanish) are pasture, lawn and grass. I don't know to what extent we should reach to accommodate that in English Wikipedia.
Your dab-page experimenting reminds me of a case from 2013 See Talk:Brand New. I still remember that one, even after seven years. The redirect Brand New (band)(redirect) was created to gauge clicks. The debate was over whether the band Brand New (band) should be primary. Despite the band's demonstrated dominance in views, the marketing concept was deemed primary based on long-term significance even though there wasn't even an article started on the topic. Eventually brand-new was created. After all these years, it's still just a stub. I came to the conclusion that such dab-link experimenting usually wasn't worth the trouble. I'm happy to see that Dohn joe is still around, though less active than back in 2013. – wbm1058 (talk) 16:18, 19 January 2020 (UTC)
I've made similar experiments in the past and they've been helpful in informing decisions on primary topics. Sorry, I hadn't anticipated that the page would get in the way at MALPLACED, I'll bear that in mind in future. And similarly I'll try to work around the apparent unwillingness of editors who edit dab pages to look at the content of those pages. As for Pasto, I don't think many readers are looking for the meaning of the Spanish word; in the reference above to a topic "that we don't have an article about", I was having in mind something more like es:Pastos. And the pageviews have been discussed above: if out of three readers searching for the term, only one is looking for the city, then we have as strong an indication as any that the city is not the primary topic. – Uanfala (talk) 16:43, 19 January 2020 (UTC)
Spanish Wiki pageviews still indicate the Colombian city, if you don't include pasture, lawn and grass in the analysis. And "Pasto" is just a partial title match with Pasto people or Pastos. I'm fine with running experiments, as long as they don't conflict with regular maintenance processes. In the future, perhaps move the item from Wikipedia:WikiProject Disambiguation/Malplaced disambiguation pages § Database report to Wikipedia:WikiProject Disambiguation/Malplaced disambiguation pages § Pages under discussion, while the experiment is ongoing. wbm1058 (talk) 17:20, 19 January 2020 (UTC)
I don't think they're partial title matches: "Pastos" is a plural, while "Pasto people", as with most cases of ethnic groups or languages, simply uses a natural disambiguator: the people are often referred to using just "Pasto" (see examples). Thank you for your suggestion about dealing with the malplaced list: I'll bear that in mind if something like that ever comes up again. – Uanfala (talk) 03:28, 20 January 2020 (UTC)

Nomination of Kazhimbram for deletion

A discussion is taking place as to whether the article Kazhimbram is suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia according to Wikipedia's policies and guidelines or whether it should be deleted.

The article will be discussed at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Kazhimbram until a consensus is reached, and anyone, including you, is welcome to contribute to the discussion. The nomination will explain the policies and guidelines which are of concern. The discussion focuses on high-quality evidence and our policies and guidelines.

Users may edit the article during the discussion, including to improve the article to address concerns raised in the discussion. However, do not remove the article-for-deletion notice from the top of the article. I thought you would be worth notifying as the one who PROD-ed the article and later changed it back from a redirect. Glades12 (talk) 12:01, 31 December 2019 (UTC)

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