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Archive 1Archive 2Archive 3→Archive 5

Table formatting

I want to put a second opinion in for The Beatles, so the first cell would need to cover 2 rows (see rough example below). This is an area of wikicode that I find harder to use than plain old (x)html! How can I do it? If it can't be done would there be any objections to me converting the code to HTML?

The BeatlesFAcommentLar
A-classcommentSteve

--kingboyk 18:08, 5 March 2006 (UTC)

Use a rowspan tag on the first cell, just as you have above, but put it between the two cell pipes as a cell attribute... This is done in several of the templates we use here already (the image spans the first two rows), so you can see it in use there. I would really NOT like to see this converted to straight HTML. It's not harder than HTML just different. Note: Real life is about to get busy for me so you may not see me as active for a while. ++Lar: t/c 18:17, 5 March 2006 (UTC)
It's harder! Pipes and dashes, not obvious abbrevs such as "tr" for "table row" etc. Anyway! Since it can be done in wikicode, I won't convert it of course, as that's considered bad. --kingboyk 18:29, 5 March 2006 (UTC)
Stop whinging. Stiff upper lip and all that, chap... I've changed the sample table to show how to do it. You can have any cell use rowspan so you could even merge the places where you agree with the other person. But I have to ask, do we want to do that? Why not just hash out what we think? There are so many articles I'm not sure we want multiple views, seems a waste of effort. I am willing to accept the eval of others (deletionists excluded! LOL) for the most part. ++Lar: t/c 18:38, 5 March 2006 (UTC)
Thanks old chap, leave it with me. --kingboyk 18:43, 5 March 2006 (UTC)

Building from the category dump

I asked Phaedriel how she built the initial tables for IP of NA. There may be automation somewhere, I dunno. But if there isn't, the way I was building these tables was too slow. It involved multiple find/replaces against a screen capture of the category page. (I was going to use AWB to generate a list for me but it's not currently working for me) and was error prone and required some manual intervention

I got a copy of the latest category database dump, and I think I am going to write some perl code to do what I want instead, it will be a lot cleaner/eaiser. Not sure when I will get to it, depends on a real life deliverable getting done first. I suggest meanwhile we (that is, the rest of you! Grin) categorise and start work on the articles we have already listed. If someone could develop a list of all the categories that need to be searched out for articles, that would be helpful (I can use the subcats of Category:The Beatles but are there any there we want to SKIP? ... any categories NOT in there we should consider??)

The downside of running against the category dump is that the items will maybe not in alpha unless I can decode what some of the other fields look like... the category dump is one big honking massive SQL insert statement with values tuples of the form: 

CREATE TABLE `categorylinks` (
  `cl_from` int(8) unsigned NOT NULL default '0',
  `cl_to` varchar(255) binary NOT NULL default '',
  `cl_sortkey` varchar(86) binary NOT NULL default '',
  `cl_timestamp` timestamp(14) NOT NULL,
  UNIQUE KEY `cl_from` (`cl_from`,`cl_to`),
  KEY `cl_sortkey` (`cl_to`,`cl_sortkey`),
  KEY `cl_timestamp` (`cl_to`,`cl_timestamp`)
) TYPE=InnoDB;

LOCK TABLES `categorylinks` WRITE;
INSERT INTO `categorylinks` VALUES (5,'Redirects_from_CamelCase','AlgeriA',20060103031440),
(5,'Unprintworthy_redirects','AlgeriA',20060301005610),(6,'Redirects_from_CamelCase','AmericanSamoa',20060103031440),(6,'Unprintworthy_redirects','AmericanSamoa',20060301005610),(12,'Accuracy_disputes','Anarchism',20060303010427),(12,'Anarchism','*',20060124020129),...
(etc... that's right... one HUGE line 250MB chars long !!)

I already saved it with one tuple per line to make it easier to process.

So I need to suss out if the "cl_sortkey" is how to tell what sort order the cats are in.

A chunk of the file with linefeeds in line order for 'Abu Dhabi' suggests that it is true, they are in alpha: 

(43,'Capitals_in_Asia','Abu Dhabi',20060103031449),
(43,'Cities_in_the_United_Arab_Emirates','Abu Dhabi',20060103031449),
(43,'Coastal_cities','Abu Dhabi',20060103031449),
(43,'Emirates','Abu Dhabi',20060103031449),
(43,'Philately_by_country','Abu Dhabi',20060103031449),

Basically all I have to do is check if the second item is the category we want to find (in '_' notation, for example 'The_Beatles_singles') and save that line only, as my start. Then munge that line into what we want the table row to say and Bob's your uncle... All dirt easy in perl. The file's so HUGE though that it takes a fair bit of work to even look at it. ++Lar: t/c 18:58, 5 March 2006 (UTC)

I have Mediawiki/MySQL installed, but not the latest dump. If the task would be significantly easier with PHP and MySQL let me know. Incidentally, a guy contacted me about some perl scripts he'd already written for parsing the dump, it's in my talk archives somewhere. I have to attend to my RFA thanks and some real world things, back later with more detailed consideration - actually, scratch that, I'll let you do the thinking and I'll start on the assessments! --kingboyk 19:08, 5 March 2006 (UTC)
The category dump is SQL. I didn't have the room for the XML dump... it's 1.6G and I need to do some housecleaning on this laptop. I can give you the links to what I took, if I can find them again... I am not sure that PHP will be any easier. But I realised I should ask on WP:VP if this has been done before before I go off and code it, so I did, no answer yet. It seems too obvious.... I asked Phaedriel if she used automation to build the tables, but haven't heard back yet. I'm now betting there IS some automation out there already, but WP is a big place... could be in any of a hundred different places. ++Lar: t/c 19:28, 5 March 2006 (UTC)
Could be on meta also. Looks like they've improved the downloads quite a bit since I last looked (and grabbed an XML dump). --kingboyk 20:03, 5 March 2006 (UTC)
That's where I got it all right. This may be the last you hear from me for a while, I leave for the airport soon... ++Lar: t/c 21:08, 5 March 2006 (UTC)

HTML colo(u)r codes vs human readable names

So, I see Kingboyk added a new one for merge and called it "orange" instead of "96FE76" (or whatever). Those colors in there already were done with HTML codes and I never bothered to change them. But human readable names are much better. Maybe now, before a LOT of articles get categorised, is the time to change all the colors to human redable named ones? We surely can find ones close enough I reckon... thoughts? (from the DTW airport, enroute from GRR to DAY on NWA ) ++Lar: t/c 01:56, 6 March 2006 (UTC)

I did that because I was being too lazy to find the code. However good things often come from laziness (and hubris) and this may well be one of them? --kingboyk 01:59, 6 March 2006 (UTC) P.S. And you accuse me of not having a life!
OK, let's review. I get to the WorldClub, get a nice cuppa and some biscuits (diet coke and cookies) and kick back. You want I should work on my work deliverables instead of goofing off here? Geez. Slavedriver. I changed a few of them. The problem I see is green, there isn't a nice named green, light green is too light and green is too dark. Yellow and pink worked ok... thoughts? Now is the time to change them! ++Lar: t/c 02:14, 6 March 2006 (UTC)

Beatle Barkers

Steve: See subject page, where I say more, I agree with your assessment. ++Lar: t/c 05:17, 6 March 2006 (UTC)

I'll reply there. Regarding this project, though, I don't think parody and tribute albums belong in the main category. Hell, even Revolver is (rightly) in a subcategory. Therefore, should there be several of them we need to name a new subcat. --kingboyk 16:52, 6 March 2006 (UTC)
What do we want to do with this one? I say AFD and be done with it. --kingboyk 01:31, 10 March 2006 (UTC)
Thought we wre going to wait N days (where N is actually more than 3) to see if anyone improves it first? Geez, you trigger happy deletionist, give it a rest... Grin. ++Lar: t/c 01:55, 10 March 2006 (UTC)
Too slow Lar! Anyway it gets 5 days and sometimes (only sometimes) the AFD results in improvements which lead to an article being kept (this is the User:JzG school of thought anyway). Do you really - honestly - feel that an album with no links from other articles has any kind of notability? --kingboyk 02:05, 10 March 2006 (UTC)
Ya, honestly I do think it has notability. Notorious in some circles even, right up there with Leonard Nimoy singing "Yesterday"...I did a google search for the term Beatle Barker and found quite a few references to it. No offense, but why ask me what I think and then put it up less than 1/2 hour later? ++Lar: t/c 02:42, 10 March 2006 (UTC)

<--- Well then why didn't you tell me before?! As for the latter, you were online and I figured I'd have got a cease and desist notice with immediate affect if you objected. Should I withdraw it? I'm still puzzled as to how such a notable album can have no incoming links though. --kingboyk 02:44, 10 March 2006 (UTC)

P.S. I don't mean to be contrary, but Leonard Nimoy singing Yesterday is news to me! Now, this on the other hand: William_Shatner's_musical_career#Lucy_in_the_Sky_With_Diamonds. In fact, I think Shatner's L.S.D. is so notable we ought to find a Beatles subcategory to put it in! --kingboyk 02:49, 10 March 2006 (UTC)
As offered before, shall I withdraw that nom? --kingboyk 22:57, 11 March 2006 (UTC)
Thanks for the offer, mate, but I'd say leave it be. I tend to say unless it's speedy one way or the other (which this one isn't, it feels like a no consensus close to me) let the AfD run its course... it often spurs major improvements in the article. I know you like to pull out early but it's not my approach, I tend to stay in to the end. As for Nimoy, well I may have been making that bit up (It was Shatner and L.S.D. I was thinking of, but couldn't remember exactly)! BUT... you AfD nomed something without googling for it first? Geesh. Bad bad man. ++Lar: t/c 01:33, 12 March 2006 (UTC)
No, I meant why didn't you tell me it's "Notorious in some circles even" - sounds like some personal experience. Let's just forget it now and let the AFD run. It's way way too trivial to spend any more time worrying about! :) --kingboyk 01:47, 12 March 2006 (UTC)

Beatles for Sale

History shows that User:Johnleemk classified this. Maybe he's not done but we need more than just the tag as A class or whatever, it also should carry the infobox yes/no and the user that did the review and the time/date stamp. Remarks are optional if there's nothing to say, I guess. Agree/disagree? ++Lar: t/c 15:28, 6 March 2006 (UTC)

never mind, he was in mid edit. ++Lar: t/c 15:39, 6 March 2006 (UTC)

Klaus Voormann

OK, maybe I shouldn't be rating (some of) these articles as clearly I don't know enough about Beatles history. On reading Steve's rating, I agree, but I missed what he's driving at completely. I saw it as needing work but not as weak as I now realise it is. Given that he's still alive and has a website etc, maybe this will not be hard to fix up (although we have to be cautious of using his material, it's primary source). Let's at least get the Revolver cover in there anyway? (I SHOULD be working but...) ++Lar: t/c 15:43, 6 March 2006 (UTC)

Beatles history might be very, very different if Klaus hadn't wandered into (gosh, it doesn't say which club and I forget which one it was at that time) - a Hamburg club and heard a raucous motley crew called the Beatles. He introduced them to Astrid Kirchherr; she gave them their haircut, took the iconic early photos, and fell in love with Stuart Sutcliffe who stayed in Hamburg and later died there. Designed one of the most well known album covers in history, and 30 years later did some wonderful collages for Anthology. Was considered as a replacement for Paul - I believe from my reading that this is not mere legend, although I doubt it was ever a serious plan. Played on numerous Beatles solo projects, including Imagine and the Concert for Bangladesh. Played at the Concert for George although I'm still not sure which one he is! :P Has to be comfortably in the top 10 of figures from the Beatles circle.
I should be working too. Other people are helping now, which is great, and there's no rush. Relax! --kingboyk 16:47, 6 March 2006 (UTC)
Got it in there. Now I REALLY should get back to work. Note that a user here apparently interviewed him... (see the talk page) Maybe he'd make some material or a photo available under GFDL if asked nicely? we should have the article in better shape before asking, though. ++Lar: t/c 15:52, 6 March 2006 (UTC)

The Beatles' Story

I figured it was money (should this sort of back and forth go into the article rating box? Maybe I DO need to put section heads in at the alphabet letters). Need a source for that, and maybe it could just go into the article? (caution, metaanalysis ahead, I do this too much but...) are we spending almost as much time rating stubs as we would fixing them up instead? Should we rate and fix at the same time? Should an article rated also get the template:TheBeatlesArticle when it was visited? Should this discussion all be on the main project talk page? Should I get back to work? I dunno. ++Lar: t/c 16:45, 6 March 2006 (UTC)

I've been applying minor fixes as I go - added a note about the release of The Beatles' Story, merged A Secret History. If the fixes are small, apply them. There's no great rush to get the list done as long as it keeps moving. --kingboyk 16:49, 6 March 2006 (UTC)

Assessing Articles

Might I suggest that none of us be the primary assessor of articles we have played a large part in creating or shaping? The idea is to build an inventory of our stock and where it lies in the scale of goodness, and that's best done by somebody who hasn't spent hours working on it. --kingboyk 04:17, 7 March 2006 (UTC)

Vigorous nod. I'm clean, though, as all my articles are about totally different topics, the only one that's even about music is my latest DYK... ++Lar: t/c 04:45, 7 March 2006 (UTC)

Beatles Real Person Fic

Slashfic. Shudder. NOT something that should be in the main category. Maybe AfD fodder. (you're a bad influence, Stevie!) ++Lar: t/c 04:47, 7 March 2006 (UTC)

Fancy nominating it? --kingboyk 04:05, 8 March 2006 (UTC)
If I get bored at work tomorrow I will, ya. It would be nom #2 for me. Some inclusionist I am. Don't go hogging the fun, k? ++Lar: t/c 04:10, 8 March 2006 (UTC)
You misunderstand me Lar. Having you nominate it is the fun! :P --kingboyk 04:16, 8 March 2006 (UTC)
You're a bad bad man. Isn't it like 5:20 AM there? Birds singing yet? ++Lar: t/c 04:20, 8 March 2006 (UTC)
I'm not gonna advocate the deletion of the article, cos I know f... ermm .. nothing about it, save to say I don't think it belongs in The Beatles categories particularly. --Mal 04:57, 8 March 2006 (UTC)

Categories are now grist for my mill!

See Wikipedia_talk:AutoWikiBrowser#Category:The_Beatles_singles... Martin found the problem in AWB that was preventing category parsing (if you have a heavily loaded up monobook.js, as it turns out, and I do.. he didn't which is why he wasn't seeing the problem, but no way can I live without Popups!!!) and I can easily create text files of article names by categories at will, one per line, which will make the rest of tableization quite easy. I have songs and singles stashed already, expect tables for those tonite. (they won't have alpha at all, that would have to be put in by hand, which I can do although I might be guessing (or checking against the category pages)... note that some of the categories have issues with articles of the form "The mumble" being under T instead of M previously... that's something to fix while you are tweaking/evaluating an article i guess) I just need to make sure we have consensus on what categories to do. Note that this does NOT prevent dups, the notation you're using to show dups is goodness. Alternatively I could squish ALL categories together into one list, alphabetise it to remove dups and make one honking big table. Thoughts? ++Lar: t/c 19:41, 7 March 2006 (UTC)

Tables split by letter rather than category maybe? Some articles are in more than one cat, and we might to shift others around? --kingboyk 20:32, 7 March 2006 (UTC)
Could do. Maybe gather the info of what categories the article was in and show that. (that's back to code rather than clever find/replace though) Why I like categories based divisions: plays to the strengths of some editors. A song review requires different knowledge than an album review or a person review or a company review... We do have time to think about it though. As long as we don't mind hand transfering over the stuff already evaluated, which sholud not be that hard. ++Lar: t/c 22:11, 7 March 2006 (UTC)
Sorry to be unhelpful, but I'm happy to go with whatever you decide on this one. --kingboyk 22:14, 7 March 2006 (UTC)
Na, that actually IS helpful. (bwahahaha) Wanna know what others think though. ++Lar: t/c 22:36, 7 March 2006 (UTC)

Singles/Songs

I'm getting very tired now Lar, so I'll keep it short and use small words. For The KLF and The Shamen, I decided to use one category for both. However, I think 2 categories is correct for The Beatles. 1) Navigation into the Beatles area from other parts of Wikipedia. WIkipedia has parent cats for both songs and singles. 2) If every song on every official Beatles album has an article, it will be useful to have a seperate smaller Singles category. I say keep both cats, assess those articles which are in the Singles cat in the table for that cat, and blank (colspan) their entries in the Songs table as I did for a couple of Apple articles. --kingboyk 03:57, 8 March 2006 (UTC)

nod. My questions below are different in thrust. One comment though, some songs may rate both a song article AND a single article (have to go see if there is an example of that). Yesterday, perhaps? Most covered song ever! ++Lar: t/c 04:00, 8 March 2006 (UTC)
Possibly. I have wondered about that. That Badfinger one from Magic Christian (told u I was tired) perhaps. Yesterday, well, arguable yes, but I'm of the "1 strong article" not "2 weaker ones" school... --kingboyk 04:04, 8 March 2006 (UTC)
Me too but we are categorising what IS. I sort of suspected I'd find at least one but I didn't (wasn't an exhaustive search. HOWEVER am now wondering if this should be turned inside out. One big table, with all the categories an article is in, instead of many category by category tables. My brain is mush too. Can't decide. We need to get some old project hands in here and share best practices, we're reinventing the wheel I fear. It may be time to ask for advice on this (hmm... where do we ask?) ++Lar: t/c 04:08, 8 March 2006 (UTC)
I find a good way is to ask individuals. Find a couple of people in other projects who seem to know what they're doing, and go ask them. Personally I never expected it to be split by category - I thought it would be A-Z. Given category duplication, a lot of it my fault and almost always with good logic (or at least kingboyk logic) behind it - an A-Z might be easier. --kingboyk 04:19, 8 March 2006 (UTC)
Asked here: Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject#Best_practices_around_article_classification seemed the best place. we shall see what transpires. If I knew who the leading lights are I would have asked them direct but I haven't trawled a bunch of projects to suss that out. That's my MO at work, figure out who knows what and ask them. ++Lar: t/c 04:22, 8 March 2006 (UTC)
Bingo. We should use the grading templates these guys use, not the grading color codes... Wikipedia:WikiProject_Military_history/Worklist Add some for the ones missing perhaps. ++Lar: t/c 04:50, 8 March 2006 (UTC)

Grading templates now in use. ++Lar: t/c 02:12, 10 March 2006 (UTC)

ground slowly, and maybe ground not so fine?

(edit conflict, will straighten round later) OK, Singles came out fine. But Songs? all munged up. I'm not sure WHAT that order is all about. It seems to MOSTLY be the order the category is in but not quite. Maybe using AWB won't work. Also, some open questions, what to do about some of the things there which aren't songs but are categories or things that properly are in other categories we haven't table-ized yet (Discography we know goes somewhere else). Thoughts? ++Lar: t/c 03:58, 8 March 2006 (UTC)

Hugely popular?

Just a discussion. I noticed Johnleemk had pointed this out as being possibly biased (regarding the Neil Aspinall article). I was wondering if that actually is bias - the Beatles were (and still are) hugely popular and influential. Statistics can prove this to be the case. After all, the Beatles were more popular than Jesus. ;) --Mal 18:24, 9 March 2006 (UTC)

Phrases like those are hagiographic and should be avoided in favour of hard facts. See WP:NPOV. Johnleemk | Talk 18:28, 9 March 2006 (UTC)
In this case it's justified, though, hagiographic or not. I'd go with phrasing that referenced the stats and then drew the conclusion worded as "many people feel" in front of the cite of the stats. ++Lar: t/c 20:13, 9 March 2006 (UTC)

John your point is well noted, believe me, and I'm not trying to criticise you. But, in this case I agree with Lar, although I'd go as far as to not even include the words "many people feel" as that in itself might be considered POV. I'd say it is an undisputed fact that The Beatles are hugely popular. Its not a major issue for me, and I'd happily go with any consensus that might be reached (if it needs to come down to that even). As I say, this isn't something I'm particularly serious on - I just want to see general opinions. Thanks for the policy info John. --Mal 22:14, 9 March 2006 (UTC)

No need to be coy. The Beatles were hugely popular, it's a verifiable fact. --kingboyk 23:25, 9 March 2006 (UTC)
True, but it sounds unprofessional. I much prefer the neutrality policy's example of citing hard numbers, like how many albums they sold, or something of the sort. Johnleemk | Talk 14:38, 10 March 2006 (UTC)
{{sofixit}}!!! Let the facts speak for themselves and see how it flows. I'll bet it flows better with the more direct wording in this particular case but it's worth changing around to see. ++Lar: t/c 15:48, 10 March 2006 (UTC)
Wouldn't a better solution be (as has been done) to just remove the statement and link to the article instead? Anyone visiting the Beatles will immediately recognise their significance. Johnleemk | Talk 16:40, 10 March 2006 (UTC)

Is there a list somwhere in this project that displays all of the redlisted articles? --Mal 00:00, 10 March 2006 (UTC)

Not yet. But it might be a good exercise to generate one. User:Bluemoose has a tool to give you a list of all the redlinks in a particular article. You would just have to walk all the articles in the project and collate/dedup the resulting redlink list. A candidate for automation!!!... ++Lar: t/c 01:16, 10 March 2006 (UTC)

Thanks Lar. I downloaded the program and I'll have a look at it tomorrow. I think this project is progressing nicely. --Mal 04:42, 10 March 2006 (UTC)

If anyone has started this part of the project, let me know - I'm going to start by familiarising myself with the tool by Bluemoose. --Mal 05:51, 15 March 2006 (UTC)

Some fixes/improvements to the two tables being classified

OK... I took an idea from the MILHIST project and switched the classify cells to "templatised" (really subpages transcluded but the invocation syntax is the same). It's now easier to use! See Wikipedia:WikiProject_The_Beatles/Article_Classification#Codes_and_meanings. This will let us tweak the colors if we want to (right now I don't quite like some of them) without having to redo existing rankings. Basically instead of fiddling about with bgcolor=#1Fo4Ce7 and the like just use a template like notation to replace the current template like notation (that is, when you classify the article, replace {{/Unknown}} with {{/A-Class}} or whatever you think the right code is (for the first few you will wnat to have another tab open to the codes table). The referenced codes and meanings table section gives more info. I also introduced a new classification type, AfD, which is SEPERATE from Merge/Delete in that the latter suggests a redirect be left behind after the article is salvaged/blanked while the former suggests scorched earth with no redirect.

I also fiddled around with making the letters section heads in their own rights. It works, after a fashion. You can now edit just the E section of the table, for isntance, but you need to know table syntax pretty well as the preview (taken from the middle of the table as it were) shows a jumble of codes and partly evaluated "templates" ... how do you guys like that? It should reduce conflicts a lot. ++Lar: t/c 01:14, 10 March 2006 (UTC)

Great work Lar. Question though: what is the penultimate column for? I'll try to illustrate what I mean:

|Beatlemania||date||class||infobox||comments||THIS ONE|Mal

|[[Beatlemania]]|| ||{{/Unknown}}||unknown|| || '''THIS ONE'''|

--Mal 04:28, 10 March 2006 (UTC)

It is for your userid (Last column). But you have to trim the trailing pipe (|) off after you replace the (&)nbsp; with your userid as it is no longer needed there, and in fact, if present, will show a blank cell there.

Hmmm ... if you see the way I have entered data in my previous post above, you'll see that I followed the example of others, and simply put my usertag outside the last pipe symbol. I never delete any of the pipes and it seems to consistantly work. What is (&)nbsp; anyway? A null character of some sort? --Mal 06:22, 10 March 2006 (UTC)

Yikes. Somebody has messed up the formatting of "Articles in Category:The Beatles", and I fear it may be me. Sorry! Please fix it Uncle Lar. --kingboyk 05:42, 10 March 2006 (UTC)
A crafty little minor fix-edit makes me think it wasn't me that broke it, but that Northern Irishman! :) --kingboyk 06:44, 10 March 2006 (UTC)

Shhhhh! Don't let on! ;) --Mal 07:24, 10 March 2006 (UTC)

Either you fixed it or I'm missing what you're saying because it seems OK to me. Remember if you use the edit for a particular letter, what you see in preview is gobbledgook because the '{|' and '|}' are missing (just like how if you had td tags with no table tags around them you'd get weird results.. same deal, mediawiki is translating {| into a table start tag) I was away from keyboard for a bit, went out to dinner (Union Station Mall) and musick-ing. The band I saw covered BOTH Ween AND The Beatles, how ironic is that?... ++Lar: t/c 06:01, 10 March 2006 (UTC)

The Grey Video

Outside our scope, but belongs in the bootlegs category I feel. I think I'll go ahead and merge (and tidy) it tommorow since nobody objected. --kingboyk 06:41, 12 March 2006 (UTC)

Just watched this. A work of some considerable genius I feel (not being sarcastic). --kingboyk 04:19, 15 March 2006 (UTC)

Ways to make it easier to edit table sections

I see from Edit sums that Steve just had a spot of bother with editing section G of the main table... There isn't anything we can do about the preview showing up messed up, unless we really make separate tables for everthing... could do that I guess, and force the dimensions to be the same with "width" attr tagging... Meanwhile, would it help if each section had a comment at the top to remind you of what went in which position? Think about it if you want... don't have to answer now. ++Lar: t/c 06:52, 12 March 2006 (UTC)

One thing that helps a little is to add '{|' and '|}' at the top and bottom of the page when editing a section, temporarily. Then you can see the table layout (although without the style and lines and headings). I did that with G just now, and left the tags in there, but commented out. I may generate those in for all the rest, not sure. ++Lar: t/c 07:08, 12 March 2006 (UTC)

Letter C

Lar, could you create a section for the letter "C" in Category:The Beatles please? I've found another crufty article, William Shears Campbell, which I want to (or you can) propose merging to Paul Is Dead. --kingboyk 10:12, 13 March 2006 (UTC)

Done. (with some random name, you can fix that bit) You theoretically could have done it too, but it was a bit fiddly, I can see why you wanted me to do it... I have been thinking about how to make this easier to preview and I think I've come up with a scheme. But it involves making each letter a separate page and taking advantage of the behaviour of noinclude. I will, if I get time, do up an example in my sandbox. Then we will have to decide if we want a bazillion pages named WikiProject The Beatles/Article Classification/Singles/D and the like... that's a lot of slashes. ++Lar: t/c 14:13, 13 March 2006 (UTC)

subeditability (making it easier to work on a single letter's worth of classifications)

see User:Lar/Sandbox... I have been experimenting. The first two letters are done the old way. Letter Q and Letter T are done with subpages: User:Lar/Sandbox/album_Q and User:Lar/Sandbox/album_T respectively. Q and T are done differently, but both use &ltnoinclude;gt; to do a little trickery. Hack (try pressing the edit link on various sections, etc) and see... comments? ++Lar: t/c 00:03, 14 March 2006 (UTC)

Good: Would help reduce edit conflicts?
Bad: Would need to add 50 or more subpages to watchlist?
Sadly although it's a great idea I think the bad outweighs the good there. --kingboyk 05:13, 14 March 2006 (UTC)
The reason for it is to give headers so that preview of a section looks "normal" (and thus reduce mistakes), not to address edit conflicts... section based editing already seems to work OK for reducing edit conflicts. There would be no need to add pages to the watchlist unless you wanted to watch all of them but ya, it's a lot of pages... 26 * number of categories we use... ++Lar: t/c 12:25, 14 March 2006 (UTC)
NOT going to do it this way, going to keep the all in one table we had before. see User:Lar/Sandbox2. That code is generated. ++Lar: t/c 20:57, 26 March 2006 (UTC)

Missing Cats

Are you going to add the missing categories Lar, or are you working on some whizzbang technical solution? (e.g. Category:Apple Corps). --kingboyk 04:33, 14 March 2006 (UTC)

Whizbang. See topic just previous, it has bearing. Once that's sorted it's off to the races. ++Lar: t/c 05:04, 14 March 2006 (UTC)
Thanks for providing the list of categories at Wikipedia:WikiProject The Beatles/Categories. I was looking for just a list of their names without any markup or comments, but this is more widely useful and I can parse that other stuff out, I guess. Right now my perlcode does not do any connecting to anything. But I have the pearlebot source (which does... see User:Pearle...) so I could probably get it to connect and look at things instead of having everything in files. if it did, I'd just supply the URL for the list and let it parse dynamically... ++Lar: t/c 14:04, 27 March 2006 (UTC)

Article classification table generation

I made a fair bit of progress on this this weekend. Results here: User:Lar/Sandbox2. Code here: User:Lar/ClassificationTableGen . I welcome comments. I want to make this useable by other projects. Steve provided a category list here: Wikipedia:WikiProject The Beatles/Categories, please comment or change it if you see missing/wrong items. There are still loose ends however and I may be out of time for a while.

  1. Articles that have commas in them should not be reversed if the commas really need to be there ( "Ballad of John and Yoko, The" should be reversed to "The Ballad of John and Yoko" for listing (but not sorting), however "Hey, Hey, Hey, Hey" should not be reversed to "Hey Hey, Hey, Hey". Ditto for "Baby, You're a Rich Man" although that was fixed by making the non comma version primary).
  2. Categories should not appear in this table, or if they do, they should be linked AS categories, right now the links I inserted make them look like articles.
  3. Some articles had weird sort keys like "*" which make them sort to the top of the overall table, probably not right.

I am thinking of handling these (well, 1 and 2 at least) by an exception list of article/category names, somehow, but haven't quite decided how. The data I have does not let me know what is an article and what is a category. However I DO have the list of categories we care about already in a hash... maybe that one addresses 2 if I am clever enough. Comments on any of this very welcome, especially from anyone other than Steve! ++Lar: t/c 13:53, 27 March 2006 (UTC)

More on this... right now this is a freshly generated list. We will have a big job (by hand) to merge in the stuff we already classified. That begs a question. Should I devote effort into trying to take the current list on board and create an "updater" instead of a "generate from scratch" ??? It would be a lot more work, but also more powerful (you could run this periodically to determine what changed and add new table rows to represent stuff you found, and flag rows that you didn't find to suggest maybe those articles have changed in scope?) For now, if we generate from scratch and hand merge is that good enough? ++Lar: t/c 14:07, 27 March 2006 (UTC)

Discussion

Moved to Wikipedia talk:WikiProject The Beatles/Red links

List

Moved to Wikipedia:WikiProject The Beatles/Red links

Watchlist Column?

Might it be possible to squeeze in a "watchlisted" column? Anyone who has the stated article on their watchlist can sign, so that (later) we can check that all articles have at least one watcher. --kingboyk 05:27, 16 March 2006 (UTC)

I'd certainly sign such a column (that sounds a bit Freudian!) --Mal 10:05, 16 March 2006 (UTC)
This seems like it would be rather easy to get outdated. But if there's a desire for it, I'll add it to the tables next time I tweak them... where? Last column, after review ID? (someone else could if they want) Relatedly, do we put songs and singles together in one table?? That needs to be decided before I do that table for real... probably this weekend, work is busy... also what about the subpage proposal? ++Lar: t/c 11:40, 16 March 2006 (UTC)
So what was the upshot of this? ... see User:Lar/Sandbox2... those tables were generated by perl. I have a ways to go yet today but hope to have a draft for approval (again, I forgot where the cat list is, I posted what list I'm useing somewhere but that's very changeable)before I stop for the weekend 19:02, 26 March 2006 (UTC)
I think we didn't agree to include it in the classification list, but if a flat list of articles could be made at the same time it would be appreciated. That's my summation of where we got to anyway :) --kingboyk 19:17, 26 March 2006 (UTC)
The classification list is now rather flat. I can add another column if wanted, or generate a second list (with or without the letter change section breaks?) with just two columns. Just LMK. ++Lar: t/c 14:00, 27 March 2006 (UTC)

The Quarrymen (doh!)

The "doh!" is because - inexplicably - The Quarrymen and related articles are not yet in any Beatles category!!!

Some of the band members are blue linked, some are red. So, do we have articles on all, none or some? I'd lean towards none. If we have them on all or some, I think a subcategory Category:The Quarrymen might be in order. --kingboyk 06:10, 16 March 2006 (UTC) Peter Shotton - long term friend of Lennon's, some Apple involvement, wrote a colourful and entertaining book - deserves an article; he's currently in Category:Apple Corps and would be a good candidate for Category:The Quarrymen. --kingboyk 06:13, 16 March 2006 (UTC)

Ladies and gentlemen we have a new article courtesy of Grutness (Colin Hanton) and a new category courtesy of moi (:Category:The Quarrymen) --kingboyk 08:23, 16 March 2006 (UTC)

Leaving/Removing articles once AFDed

Maybe we should leave them but note they were deleted? Just wondering. ++Lar: t/c 11:24, 17 March 2006 (UTC)

Yeah I think we should keep a record of everything we have done - we can always archive it. For example, once we've went through the red links list, we can archive that. It might be helpful to keep the archive to see what has turned blue and what has turned red etc. Just a suggestion - it doesn't mean I like raw tuna. --Mal 11:31, 17 March 2006 (UTC)
For what purpose? By all means archive it somewhere else, but the smaller the classification list the better, surely? (And, to preempt, apologies for calling you Shirley!) --kingboyk 11:34, 17 March 2006 (UTC)
P.S. A list of achievements, certainly, would be great. We already have a new article, one piece of cruft deleted, a new category, and some cleaning/expansion/redlink fixing to list. --kingboyk 11:37, 17 March 2006 (UTC)
I'm too tired to understand what you're talking about, Pepsi(!).. spell it out for me while I go get myself a coffee! --Mal 11:44, 17 March 2006 (UTC)
BTW - take a look at that Pepsi & Shirlie article I linked to.. I can't make head nor tail of it! The popup claims it to be a live article, but the links just go round and round. --Mal 11:45, 17 March 2006 (UTC)
Huh? Works for me! --kingboyk 11:51, 17 March 2006 (UTC)

How about we put deleted article entries into a separate table for historical purposes? Would that work (because ya I agree that keeping the tables shorter is goodness)? I am a packrat, it comes with the inclusionism... ++Lar: t/c 12:13, 17 March 2006 (UTC)

Sure. But wouldn't a more general sub page listing achievements be nicer? I would have thought as an inclusionist you'd be prouder of the fact that Colin Hanton has turned blue than of Beatles Real Person Fic turning red? :) --kingboyk 13:09, 17 March 2006 (UTC)
I dunno, am I prouder of a creation I had nothing to do with, or a deletion that I sponsored? Hmm... let me get back to you on that after I am done navel gazing. As to the listings... How about both? A section here, for article disposition, where deleteds AND mergeds can go (there are a few mergeds that would be candidates already) and a different section, on the front page, with "notable achievements"? ++Lar: t/c 13:17, 17 March 2006 (UTC)
Methinks we have a closet deletionist! You'll be joining the Cabal next!
A seperate sub page would be best, I think. Or a section on one of the existing project pages. Anywhere but Talk. Go for it. --kingboyk 13:30, 17 March 2006 (UTC)
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