User talk:Wbm1058

For discussion of RMCD bot edits, see User talk:RMCD bot. For Merge bot edits, see User talk:Merge bot. For Bot1058 edits, see User talk:Bot1058.

For help with getting started creating bots, see User talk:wbm1058/Creating bots.

Disambiguation link notifications

As these are generated by a bot, and I occasionally check or patrol the status of these, I moved them to a special archive: /Disambiguation link notifications. Wbm1058 (talk) 13:11, 18 July 2014 (UTC)

My content creator's to-do list has items so old they've grown mold

...so I moved them to the /Content to-do items subpage. Someday maybe I'll get to these... Wbm1058 (talk) 03:00, 7 October 2015 (UTC)

Wikipedia "Merge" like WP:RM or WP:AFD

There are a lot of tumbleweeds rolling over at Wikipedia:Proposed mergers... the last edit added a {{backlog}} template. Now that I'm an administrator, I've decided to focus on clearing the Wikipedia:WikiProject History Merge and Category:Possible cut-and-paste moves backlogs first. If Proposed mergers were busier, I'd make this a higher priority.

• Older discussions are at /Automating proposed mergers. Wbm1058 (talk) 03:40, 21 November 2015 (UTC)

Proposed Mergers

Since you run MergeBot and RMCDBot, I was wondering, if it were possible to create an auto generated list like WP:RM has but for WP:PM, that links to the centralized discussion area, and lists the topics to be merged (from/to/with) ? As the current MergeBot already generates arrows indicated from/to/with, it would seem a modification of template:requested move/dated/multi would do to handle such an automated listing based on a standardized talk section header.

-- 65.94.43.89 (talk) 04:42, 12 May 2015 (UTC)

See § Wikipedia "Merge" like WP:RM or WP:AFD above. Still on my back-burner. Wbm1058 (talk) 16:37, 21 May 2015 (UTC)

Adding permalinks to block log entries for 3RR

Discussions are consolidated at /Adding permalinks to block log entries. – Wbm1058 (talk) 14:44, 2 October 2014 (UTC)

Cross-namespace redirects

Deep gratitude

A big thank you for your help to clear Category:Cross-namespace redirects into its subcats. Really can't thank you enough! Joys! – Paine Ellsworth ^CLIMAX! 03:17, 24 December 2013 (UTC)

You're welcome. One final push to clear most of the rest, and then it will be time to take a break. Wbm1058 (talk) 03:30, 24 December 2013 (UTC)

Break? Whassat?! – Paine Ellsworth ^CLIMAX! 05:06, 24 December 2013 (UTC)

• Just a note that Category:Redirects to user namespace is significantly underpopulated. I was working off the list at User:Largoplazo/WP Redirects to further populate it, and worked my way through the A's. It's on my patrol list, so I may get to it eventually. Wbm1058 (talk) 02:42, 2 October 2014 (UTC)

  I finally used AWB to populate Category:Redirects to user namespace; it now has over 900 members. My technique was to Make list from source Special page: All Redirects in namespace Wikipedia: – the category hasn't yet been fully populated for other namespaces. I think all of the cross-namespace redirect categories can and should eventually be populated by bots... AWB may be able to do that with a sufficiently sophisticated configuration. – wbm1058 (talk) 16:53, 25 May 2016 (UTC)

  See HERE for the regex find & replace used for this. I manually monitored this and had to skip some that were already rcat templated; also may have missed some. wbm1058 (talk) 17:09, 25 May 2016 (UTC)

  Or the database query method used to generate User:Largoplazo/WP Redirects may be a more efficient method than my AWB special page walk-through. I need to figure out how to do that myself. @Paine Ellsworth: FYI. – wbm1058 (talk) 17:31, 25 May 2016 (UTC)

Thank you for the ping, Wbm1058! That's pretty cool stuff you're doing – and waay outside my full comprehension. Please keep up the great work!  OUR Wikipedia (not "mine")! Paine  15:26, 26 May 2016 (UTC)

Redirects from namespace 1 to namespace 0

SELECT concat( "*[[Talk:", p.page_title, "]] redirects to [[:", r.rd_title, "]]" )
FROM redirect r
INNER JOIN page p ON p.page_id = r.rd_from
WHERE p.page_namespace = 1
AND   r.rd_namespace = 0
ORDER by page_title;

• Query – User:Wbm1058/Talk-to-mainspace redirects – wbm1058 (talk) 00:23, 17 September 2020 (UTC)

Duplicate template parameters

• File:Haut-Brion 1931 chateau card.JPG
• File:Petrus 1931 chateau card.JPG
• File:Margaux 1931 chateau card.JPG
• File:Cantemerle 1931 chateau card.JPG

Your edits reverted my fix to remove duplicate parameters and these files will soon be placed in Category:Pages using duplicate arguments in template calls. I'm not watching them, nor am I watching this page, so I leave it to you to fix the issues. --  Gadget850 ^talk 22:08, 31 October 2014 (UTC)

@Gadget850: Right, already taken care of. See Template talk:Non-free use rationale logo#Override fields. Wbm1058 (talk) 22:14, 31 October 2014 (UTC)

To do: possible merge of {{Non-free use rationale}} and {{Non-free use rationale 2}}

For that matter, {{Non-free use rationale 2}} and {{Non-free use rationale logo}} are also somewhat redundant, as show by the usage of both here. Wbm1058 (talk) 01:31, 10 September 2015 (UTC)

Generate automatic summary /* blah */ when I manually add a section heading

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T22307

Consolidated discussions are at my subpage /Generate automatic summary /* blah */ when I manually add a section heading when editing. Hopefully solutions are on the way soon. – wbm1058 (talk) 23:37, 3 June 2017 (UTC)

• Wikipedia:Talk pages consultation 2019/Phase 2 §Marking separate discussions – wbm1058 (talk) 12:16, 24 May 2019 (UTC)

Module documentation and test cases

There's really no point to having test cases for data modules, since there's no code to test. Also, doc pages that contain a #invoke of the module itself exist so that TemplateSandbox can be used to preview changes of the module. It's fine to add "real" documentation, but the #invoke must not be disabled or removed when doing so. Jackmcbarn (talk) 20:47, 15 January 2015 (UTC)

Module:Syrian Civil War map is in Category:Pages where template include size is exceeded.

I edited Module:Syrian Civil War map/doc, and created Module:Syrian Civil War map/testcases.

Cities and towns during the Syrian Civil War used to transclude {{Syrian Civil War detailed map}}, until substituted.

Template:Syrian Civil War detailed map loads Module:Syrian Civil War detailed map.

Template:Syrian Civil War map (created 21 February 2015‎) . . . Wbm1058 (talk) 03:02, 27 June 2015 (UTC)

Nomination for deletion of Module:Syrian Civil War map/testcases

Module:Syrian Civil War map/testcases has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the module's entry on the Templates for discussion page. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 01:33, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

Accuracy

See User talk:Jimbo Wales/Archive 187 § How much should we trust Wikipedia? (again)

Your comments about the state of accuracy in the world on Jimbo's talk page are very interesting. I would like to explore this topic further. I'm particularly fond of your statement, "Society as a whole perhaps doesn't value accuracy as much as it should, and indeed Wikipedia editors should strive for a higher level of accuracy." Heck, I think some kind of variation on this should be our guiding principle. You've really nailed something here, and I think it's worth pursuing. One counterargument to pursuing accuracy, however, might attempt to appeal to the blind men and an elephant analogy. How would you respond to this? Viriditas (talk) 08:49, 18 April 2015 (UTC)

The best we can do is report the truth as best as we know it, and be open-minded to new information that can give us a better vision of the truth. As more "parts of the elephant" become known to us, the more accurate our "truth" becomes. Wbm1058 (talk) 14:28, 18 April 2015 (UTC)

Timeline of DOS operating systems

I remember that you once intended to take your Timeline of DOS operating systems article to featured status, but did not take time to familiarize yourself with the process. Looking at that article, the only thing that is not compliant with the featured list criteria is the lead section. Basically, the only thing required to promote it to FL status would be to expand the lead section by adding an introduction to DOS operating systems. After that, you are good to go and can nominate it according to the instructions on WP:FLC. (Since this article is a list, the Good Article process does not apply.) Good luck! sst✈ 04:24, 17 October 2015 (UTC)

I see, apparently there is no "good list" equivalent to Good Article, so I can skip that step and go straight to becoming a member of Category:Featured lists, where around a couple dozen featured timelines can be found. Thanks! As I haven't made any significant updates to that since February, I suppose I'm due to get back to it and finish it off soon. Wbm1058 (talk) 11:40, 17 October 2015 (UTC)

Race Against the Machine

Hi wbm, I see you mention this book on your user page. Does the main thesis have implications for how Wikipedia works, and if so, on what time scale? - Dank (push to talk) 15:57, 28 August 2016 (UTC)

A main thesis of the book is that accelerating technology improvements will reduce employment, and over time this will effect more higher-skilled occupations. We see this already with jobs coming back to the US from China... because they are replacing people with bots. Yes, a few more jobs for Americans who are skilled at bot development, operations and maintenance. But way fewer jobs than were displaced in China. Of course, at Wikipedia there are relatively few editors that work for money. We already have very intelligent bots such as ClueBot NG that help tremendously with tasks such as vandalism reversion. That one has over 4 million edits now! Bots also help with spelling corrections. There could be further enhancements to these tasks that could reduce the need for new page patrollers and spelling correctors. Time scale is dependent on volunteer contributions, or possible funding by the Wikimedia Foundation. wbm1058 (talk) 17:29, 28 August 2016 (UTC)

Thanks. The future seems to be coming at us pretty fast. I try to stay informed-but-neutral. - Dank (push to talk) 17:50, 28 August 2016 (UTC)

Templates for deletion for deletion

Implement multiple parameters to prefix: operator on fulltext searches

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T159403

See also: Wikipedia talk:Requested moves/Archive 29 § Archive and search, Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 152 § Search prefix:, and mw:Talk:Wikimedia Discovery § Search prefix:

See also: Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 152 § Search prefix revisited – search with multiple prefixes?, and Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2017-02-27/Op-ed § Discovery

{{Search deletion discussions}} and {{Search prefixes}} and all that authors other stuff should probably be deleted after emailing him. His {{Create parameter string}} is used but not well.

For now, I'd fix wp: Deletion process § Search all deletion discussions with a search link for each of the fullpagenames in wp:Deletion process § Step-by-step instructions (all discussion types).

I would. And I'd be glad for an invite to help you with any queries or discussions on this matter. — Cpiral§Cpiral 05:57, 21 December 2016 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 61 § is there a way to search several sections with one search? – June 10–17, 2009

And User talk:Rainman § modification to search several Wikipedian sections at one time – June 15–17, 2009

And User talk:Stmrlbs/Archive/001 § multiple prefixes – June 15–17, 2009

June 17, 2009 Help:Searching documentation update, alas documentation of this multiple-prefixes-separated-by-pipes feature was removed on October 11, 2009 when this was rewritten, to try to improve usability

"To search multiple sections of Wikipedia with different prefixes, enter the different prefixes with a pipe delimiter."

"This should be especially useful for archive searching in concert with inputbox or searchbox."

• MediaWiki search engine improved, 10 November 2008
  • en.wiki migrated to new search backend, June 2, 2009. Wikitech-l
• Initial import of rewritten Lucene-Search extension
  • History No commits between August 2007 and March 2010. So where is the June 2009 change to support this?

@Cpiral: so clearly prefix did at least briefly take pipes. Unfortunately, the volunteer developer of that, Rainman, isn't active any more either, and I haven't been able to locate his code changes that implemented that feature. – wbm1058 (talk) 02:48, 30 December 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for the history lesson. Interesting. Maybe useful.

Anyway, for now we have wp:deletion process#Search all deletion discussions. Hope that helps. — Cpiral§Cpiral 07:59, 30 December 2016 (UTC)

Task to switch between new and old interface of "search for contributions"

This section is a followup to an earlier discussion I initiated at the village pump.

Hello. For notification, the task to switch between new and old interface of user contributions page was rejected. Izno suggested personal gadget/script or something. I would prefer that the switch between old and new be proposed at WP:village pump (proposals). Thoughts? --George Ho (talk) 16:12, 2 August 2017 (UTC)

George, I wouldn't know how to write a script to change the interface, and I'm not keen on switching between two less-than-ideal interfaces. There should only need be one, fully-functional interface that's adequate for efficiently handling all use cases. What we have now is not such an interface, and we should focus on getting that one improved. I'm frustrated with the current means of interacting with the developers – there is a confusing array of different "phabricators" on this, I'm not keen on the phabricator editing interface, and I don't know whether I should add to an existing phab or start a new one, so I prefer using Village Pump where I can use Wikitext. As I need to use this interface to perform specific tasks, I may report issues I have with the current interface that make it more difficult to get the job done. – wbm1058 (talk) 15:55, 3 August 2017 (UTC)

Hmm... How about Wikipedia:Village pump (idea lab), where we can discuss the user contributions interface? --George Ho (talk) 16:03, 3 August 2017 (UTC)

Maybe. But, per "defines a solution rather than a problem" I don't know if solutions developed in the idea lab would be welcomed by the developers. I'm not happy with the "handcuffs" placed on us with regard to modes of interaction with developers. Maybe if I just present problems to WP:VPT, and let them either tell me how to achieve my desired result, or make changes to the interface that allow me to achieve my desired result. wbm1058 (talk) 16:15, 3 August 2017 (UTC)

No offense, but IMO I don't think WP:VPT is a place for general feedback on any software or something. VPT is used for technical difficulties, bugs, glitches, and other tech issues that need immediate attention (not sure whether I phrased it correctly). One complaint describing none of these, and they'll either advise you to write a personal script/gadget or write one for you as they did before. But you're welcome to choose any appropriate venue. I still think the "idea lab" is best bet. --George Ho (talk) 16:33, 3 August 2017 (UTC)

At the top of WP:VPT there is a notice "Bug reports and feature requests should be made in Phabricator" but that's just redirecting us back to an interface I find less than ideal. I don't understand why they have such an aversion to Wikitext. I think that's easiest as all active editors are intimately familiar with it. Almost everything the developers in general try to pawn off as "easier" to use, I find to be more of a pain. But venue should be secondary to getting the issues raised, so if you want to start an idea lab thread, feel free. wbm1058 (talk) 16:45, 3 August 2017 (UTC)

On second thought, I just realized that you can go to meta:Tech and then post your concerns there. The developers changed the interface all over the wikis. --George Ho (talk) 17:04, 3 August 2017 (UTC)

I see, meta:Tech#"Search for contributions" date range. So, let's let the latest bug fix settle in before we try using it again. That page seems like a good place for reporting issues with the Special:Contributions interface, as I hate to go to the trouble to submit a new bug report, only to find that one's already been submitted. wbm1058 (talk) 17:25, 3 August 2017 (UTC)

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T172041

The major bug is fixed. George Ho (talk) 06:52, 5 August 2017 (UTC)

Great! I complained about the new widget date-picking interface after futzing with it and not figuring out how to efficiently make it work to actually select a specific date range. I assumed that it was working as designed, and that I was just too dense to figure out the secret for making it work. So after this bug fix, which I see involves other developers than those designing the widgets (go figure, I don't exactly understand the bug report), I'm happy to report that the widget now works for me with minimal fuss. There's more than one way to skin this cat, so while this might not be my preferred way, I'm not going to fuss about it much if it works. wbm1058 (talk) 13:42, 15 August 2017 (UTC)

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T91148

 There is still an open task to consolidate the "date pickers".

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T183107

 @George Ho: FYI. After letting this settle in for several months, I'm still not satisfied with its behavior. I've entered a new Phabricator task. wbm1058 (talk) 19:37, 19 December 2017 (UTC)

Awwww....

...please don't give up on us, yet. 😞 I know you're busy, and I'm not expecting you to devote a whole lot of time to this project, but your input is highly beneficial and I was hoping you would keep helping us work through some of the kinks when you can, especially regarding admin factors we know little to nothing about. What we're hoping to accomplish will focus primarily on clarification and consistency in our WP:Blocking policy with the ultimate goal being editor retention. ^{Atsme📞📧} 02:02, 10 January 2018 (UTC)

I've had some ideas about this on my back burner. Posting some relevant links here. wbm1058 (talk) 01:20, 18 October 2018 (UTC)

• m:Community health initiative/Measuring the effectiveness of blocks
• User:JamesR/AdminStats (show Blocks)
• Daily counts of blocks and unblocks
• Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee/Audit/Statistics (CheckUser and Oversight use)

Ha!! I forgot all about this, Wbm1058! ^Atsme _Talk 📧 01:21, 6 December 2019 (UTC)

@Atsme: It's still on my to-do list, as is replying to your email! Eventually... I keep a lot of burners going on my giant stove, alas some I have to keep down low for a long time. But I let other ppl cook my Thanksgiving dinner ;) wbm1058 (talk) 01:27, 6 December 2019 (UTC)

Somewhat related to this, i.e. the area of community health and dealing with behavioral issues, is Wikipedia:Arbitration enforcement log. Something I haven't really paid much attention to.

There's a helpful search box at the top of that page. "Enter a username into this box to check if they have been sanctioned." e.g. Hmm. DUE, BALANCE, NPOV, RS talk. Followup. More followup. I'll try to help resolve this if I can. – wbm1058 (talk) 22:50, 17 June 2021 (UTC)

Oh my. wbm1058 (talk) 14:27, 5 July 2021 (UTC)

English Heritage lists breaking transclusion limits

Scheduled monuments in Mendip

Thanks for your fixes on Scheduled monuments in Mendip. I don't quite understand the code of what you are doing but if it is about the number of reference templates breaking the maximum size, would your fix work on Grade II* listed buildings in South Somerset where the last few references don't display - possibly for the same reason?— Rod ^talk 08:19, 29 November 2018 (UTC)

Hi Rod, yes, similar issues there, though InternetArchiveBot hasn't visited that page recently. There is a discussion about the solution to this at User talk:cyberpower678/Archive 60#English Heritage website changed the URL syntax for accessing its site database. – wbm1058 (talk) 12:52, 29 November 2018 (UTC)

New problem reported at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Historic sites#Recent template changes broke a few list-type articles, recommend splitting them to fix the problem – wbm1058 (talk) 17:10, 23 August 2020 (UTC)

Re: Your edit at Template:English Heritage listed building row

In regards to the edit you made at Special:Diff/974562485, the fact that the module output is transcluded by Template:English Heritage listed building row not only means that invoking the module directly matters, it actually means that it matters twice as much! Per Wikipedia:Template_limits#Nested_transclusions, any bytes produced by the module will be counted once if {{#invoke:delink|delink}} is invoked directly, they will be counted twice if {{delink}} is used to call {{#invoke:delink|delink}}, and they will be counted four times if {{English Heritage listed building row}} calls {{delink}} which calls {{#invoke:delink|delink}}. --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 00:25, 1 September 2020 (UTC)

Bill of rights page

Thank you for the changes you made to the hatnote on the Bill of rights article. I think it looks perfect! Rockstonetalk to me! 18:59, 25 June 2019 (UTC)

How about a Wikipedia Editors' Bill of Rights? wbm1058 (talk) 19:00, 25 June 2019 (UTC)

With the current situation with Fram, that sounds like a great idea. . Rockstonetalk to me! 19:20, 25 June 2019 (UTC)

Mass removal of cleanup tags

Articles needing cleanup

All articles

31,675

Hello. I noticed that you recently removed a large number of {{cleanup}} tags dating back over 10 years. As you noted, these tags were indeed stale, and didn't have reasons listed, but I would say that in most of those cases, the need for cleanup was completely obvious from a cursory glance at the rest of the article. As the blurb for the "Articles needing cleanup" category states: "If you're sure the article has been cleaned up, addressing any obvious flaws as well as any specific problems mentioned on the talk page, feel free to remove the tag. There's not much harm in leaving it on if you aren't certain what to do; the tag will alert someone else to come by later and check up on the article." I spend most of my time on wiki working through these articles trying to sort them out, and without those tags, the article are now "on the loose" in the wikipedia with no warning for readers of their poor quality or way of editors finding them to address their problems. Please bear in mind before deleting any more that editors do actually use these tags and categories. Cheers. Jdcooper (talk) 23:33, 24 July 2019 (UTC)

Hi Jdcooper, OK. Here are my relevant 34 edits. I removed a total of 31 {{cleanup}} tags. I did notice that several had been proposed for deletion, and I suppose by removing the tags I'm keeping them from someone else noticing them and putting a PROD tag on the top. Not sure why anyone would want to spend much time to cleanup up a page that was proposed for deletion. I did make a few obvious fixes, but feel free to review them, and if you restore the template and add a reason to it, please also update the date to the current month, which will clear them out of the back end of the queue. I also noticed that in the talk archives the possibility of using a bot to remove these tags had been discussed. But, I'll move on for now to resume working on my more usual tasks, and maybe check back in on this later. – wbm1058 (talk) 00:19, 25 July 2019 (UTC)

Yeah, but the problem is articles like Dick Brooks (magician) where the creator has now removed the PROD tag and a horrible mess of an article is left untagged. I've gone through and added more specific tags to the ones with obvious problems, but I feel like dumping them in the July 2019 cohort (though that is what I've done) will just leave them unloved for even longer. The reason I poke about in this area of the encyclopaedia is specifically to find the long-term worst articles. But there are always plenty more repositories of such articles, obviously! Have a nice day. Jdcooper (talk) 22:56, 25 July 2019 (UTC)

This backlog still seems to be growing faster than it's getting cleared. Category:Articles needing cleanup from December 2008, which is where I was working in July, was deleted in October 2019, and I just coincidentally found that Category:Articles needing cleanup from January 2009 was ready for deletion. So this has been getting cleared at a rate substantially slower than one per month. On to February 2009. wbm1058 (talk) 05:20, 24 January 2020 (UTC)

List of shipwrecks in April 1917

Re your edits to remove the list of shipwrecks in April 1917 from the template limit exceeded category, probably the easiest way is by replacing {{flagcountry|UKGBI|civil}} with [[File:Civil Ensign of the United Kingdom.svg|22px]] [[United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland|United Kingdom]]. This produces the same result visually. The UK civil flag is likely to be the most used in any shipwreck list at least until the 1950s, so changing the flag removes a large number of templates and guards against the list subsequently falling into the category again. AFAIK, no other shipwreck lists fall into the template limit exceeded category, but if you do come across any others, give me a shout and I'll fix the issue. Mjroots (talk) 07:41, 29 July 2019 (UTC)

@Mjroots: I don't know about that being the "easiest way". To unpack {{flagcountry}} I needed to make a series of three substitutions, which left behind a bunch of programming logic (#if and #ifeq statements) transcluded into the article (see my recent edits to List of shipwrecks in April 1917). It's not immediately clear whether making your suggested edit loses any of that embedded functionality, though it seems not. Whereas by simply bypassing a template shell that transcludes the output of a Lua module, I'm guaranteed not to lose any embedded functionality. I think the "best" solution would be to rewrite at least some of the template logic into a Lua module, and someday I'll get around to becoming more proficient with Lua so I can more readily do that.

But there's more than one way to get the job done. Feel free to revert my edits and solve the issue another way, if you feel that's better. – wbm1058 (talk) 12:19, 29 July 2019 (UTC)

Agree that there's often more than one way to get the job done. As I understand it, there is a finite number of templates that can be used in an article. Not sure of the number but being computer code it's probably a power of 2 (1,024, 2,048, 4,096 etc). Changing the flags in the way I described does remover a larg number of templates from the article. I'll not revert your changes as they had the desired effect, but I feel that the article is probably still very near the template limit. Should it fall into the category again, then we'll change the flags. Mjroots (talk) 13:54, 29 July 2019 (UTC)

@Mjroots: FYI. There are several technical limits. The limit this article hit was the Post-expand include size. Currently the article includes (transcludes) 2,007,669 bytes, and the limit is 2,097,152 bytes. So yes, it is still close to the limit. You can see this in Show preview, under "Parser profiling data" (help) – you may need to click on that if it isn't showing by default. wbm1058 (talk) 14:12, 29 July 2019 (UTC)

Now 2,044,834 of 2,097,152 bytes – wbm1058 (talk) 05:42, 24 January 2020 (UTC)

The system is timing out with an error message when I try to see the diff of my edit, but I see that {{coord}} was transcluded 242 times; I believe I replaced those, e.g. {{coord|48|20|N|6|00|W}} with {{#invoke:Coordinates|coord|48|20|N|6|00|W}}. There is no difference in output: 48°20′N 6°00′W vs. 48°20′N 6°00′W – wbm1058 (talk) 14:46, 24 January 2020 (UTC)

And now it appears that four more shipwecks have been added to the list, transcluding {{coord}} rather than directly invoking the module. wbm1058 (talk) 14:54, 24 January 2020 (UTC)

Category:Redirects from incorrect disambiguation

Note to myself. On my back burner is to followup on the purpose for Category:Redirects from incorrect disambiguation. See the edit history of Assassin (movie). Also User talk:Anomie/linkclassifier#Some suggestions. Hopefully will follow up on this a few moons from now, after working through several higher-priority tasks. wbm1058 (talk) 21:28, 21 August 2019 (UTC)

LinkClassifier

I saw your complaints at User talk:IJBall#Please fix these links immediately, and I wanted to let you know that this should work for you:

mw.hook( 'LinkClassifier' ).add( function ( linkClassifier ) {
    // Delete the "incorrect-title" code
    delete linkClassifier.cats['incorrect-title'];

    // Add the "linked-misspellings" and "linked-miscapitalisations" codes, with appropriate categories.
    linkClassifier.cats['linked-misspellings'] = [
        'Category:Redirects from misspellings'
    ].sort();
    linkClassifier.cats['linked-miscapitalisations'] = [
        'Category:Redirects from miscapitalisations'
    ].sort();
} );
importScript('User:Anomie/linkclassifier.js'); // Linkback: [[User:Anomie/linkclassifier.js]]

Anomie⚔ 00:14, 3 October 2020 (UTC)

Maybe one day in P.R.

	Biked in 50 states!
	https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqdkqABDETY Hoping one day you make it to P.R. - Jose Valiente (radio MC) and bike shop owner's son- can hook you up- just need a translator. The Eloquent Peasant (talk) 18:08, 18 September 2019 (UTC)

Ohio Wikimedians User Group: May 2020 newsletter

Newsletter is archived at m:Ohio Wikimedians User Group/Newsletter (m:Ohio Wikimedians User Group/Newsletter/2020/May

List of GANs per nominator

Hi Wbm1058, I hope you are well. About this topic, did we get any further with this? I feel like it was a bit forgotten and archived, but I'd be very interested in continuing to find a full list of GANs by nominators. I'd love to help get something like this off the ground (I should be a little bit closer to the top 40 now, I've promoted another 30 or so since the discussion)! Best Wishes, Lee Vilenski ^{(talk • contribs)} 21:00, 25 October 2020 (UTC)

Sorry Lee I lost momentum on this and let it drift to my back burners. I'll keep it on my to-do list and try to get back to it. Juggling a lot of balls, as usual, and as you can see from the sections above, new requests for my time keep coming in, making it harder to stay focused on more time-intensive projects. – wbm1058 (talk) 21:50, 25 October 2020 (UTC)

Not an issue. I thought about it earlier, and I didn't know if anyone was actively looking at it or not. I've also been busy, so haven't had much time for much! Best Wishes, Lee Vilenski ^{(talk • contribs)} 21:56, 25 October 2020 (UTC)

GANs

Hi Wbm1058, you did some great work in listing GAs per user a while back. I wondered if you'd consider doing it again and/or doing it periodically? The Rambling Man (Hands! Face! Space!!!!) 22:08, 16 November 2020 (UTC)

@Lee Vilenski and The Rambling Man: – I'm running a new report now, using the last version of my PHP program from 26 July 2020. I started one last night, and it almost completed but died because the drive-by editor Sai5839448 put Category:Lists of good articles back into Category:Good articles, after I had previously removed it. A category is neither an article nor a Good Article. I removed the category and restarted my program from the beginning, and hopefully it will generate a report several hours from now. It will still have the inaccuracies I have yet to get around to addressing, but perhaps is "good enough" for your purposes. – wbm1058 (talk) 17:32, 17 November 2020 (UTC)

Indeed, thank you. The Rambling Man (Hands! Face! Space!!!!) 17:39, 17 November 2020 (UTC)

Great work - it's certainly a start, and good for rough amounts. :) Best Wishes, Lee Vilenski ^{(talk • contribs)} 18:44, 17 November 2020 (UTC)

• @Lee Vilenski and The Rambling Man: Wikipedia talk:Good article nominations#List of Wikipedians by number of Good articles, as of 17 November 2020 – wbm1058 (talk) 21:48, 18 November 2020 (UTC)

• This is some great work! I was wondering why this credits me with 88, but I credit myself with 96, but then I realised it isn't including articles that went through GA and later became FAs. This seems like a sensible conclusion, but worth mentioning.

For me, the next point would be how we go from here, to a full list similar to user:GA bot/Stats lists reviews done by user. This would be with the view to have a bot maintain a full list similar to how Legobot does now. At least with a full list, we can identify the GAs with issue nominators, and come to a conclusion as to whom should be credited; and get a pseudo-definative list.

Once again though, fantastic work, I'm very happy to see this. I'll try my best to move up the order a bit! Best Wishes, Lee Vilenski ^{(talk • contribs)} 09:09, 19 November 2020 (UTC)

List of Wikipedians by good article nominations

Hi! Remember our conversation at Wikipedia_talk:Good_article_nominations/Archive_24#List of Wikipedians by number of Good articles, as of 17 November 2020? I was wondering if any follow-up has happened after that? I see Wikipedia:List of Wikipedians by good article nominations is still a red link. I recently wrote some code (using the Wikimedia Eventstreams API) to easily keep such lists up-to-date (by listening to additions/removals of {{good article}} from articles, so that there is no need to regenerate the whole thing on every run). So if you don't mind should I file a bot request to turn that link blue? Just wanted to make sure I haven't missed any further developments on this. – SD0001 (talk) 15:44, 31 May 2021 (UTC)

@SD0001: no, I haven't done any more work on this since November. Go ahead and file your bot request. Maybe some time I'll try to improve my code to make the look-ups more efficient as you suggested so I can double-check your results. But I still have more tasks on my to-do list than time to do them all. – wbm1058 (talk) 16:23, 31 May 2021 (UTC)

User:SDZeroBot, Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/SDZeroBot 11. Wikipedia:List of Wikipedians by good article nominations looks nice! wbm1058 (talk) 15:50, 11 August 2021 (UTC)

Linked misspellings and miscapitalizations, and alternatives

Thank you very much ...

... for all of the effort you put into cleaning up Wikipedia:Database reports/Linked misspellings. For a long time, I had kept track of the litterally millions of items that I always skipped over when patrolling the list, so it's quite a pleasant surprise to see a compact list of items that can actually be fixed. MANdARAX • XAЯAbИAM 23:13, 19 January 2021 (UTC)

Thanks, I try to drop by now & then to clear out the more troublesome items there, as I juggle the many tasks jockeying for my attention. A longer-term project of mine is to get Wikipedia:Database reports/Linked miscapitalizations down to manageable size as well, but just when I feel like I've made some real progress there I find more litter has been dumped on that pile. – wbm1058 (talk) 02:24, 20 January 2021 (UTC)

If I see one I'll fix it, but you've just moved it from one disam page to another, why not fix the disam use at the same time ? SydGaz|SydGazandAdv ?? Dave Rave (talk) 07:22, 28 January 2021 (UTC)

Dave Rave, I have no idea what you're talking about or what prompted you to make that comment which is your first edit in two weeks. Please explain. Oh, after noting that you're Australian, I think you mean Sydney Gazette ← The Sydney Gazette And New South Wales Advertiser. An Australian editor apparently doesn't understand that "and" shouldn't be capitalized in newspaper titles. Sorry, I still don't understand what your issue with my edit(s) is though. – wbm1058 (talk) 13:32, 28 January 2021 (UTC)

Yes, I'm Australian, and I do understand, you must be a wiki editor and don't. you've just moved it from one disam page to another. that's a hard line to comrprehend
The trouble with Trove is they don't listen when I try to tell them things like why bother providing a link to a ref that has incorrect details. But when a wiki editor trying to fix things some can't see that using a disam pag isn't the best idea and why not fix it can't see the logic in the offerering ...
click your link you provided to the SydGazAndNSWAdv and look at it, it's a disam page Dave Rave (talk) 18:01, 28 January 2021 (UTC)

@Dave Rave: The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser is not a disambiguation page, it is a redirect. The Sydney Gazette And New South Wales Advertiser is another redirect. I used Template:No redirect to link to them so you can see the actual redirect pages. Sorry, I'm still not finding the disam page you're trying to direct me to. I have noticed that a lot of Australian articles use Trove for a reference; that's a very nice database! – wbm1058 (talk) 18:32, 28 January 2021 (UTC)

United Kingdom

Hi WBM, can you please stop adding "the" before United Kingdom in infoboxes? We use short country names per ISO-3166. Hope you can revert all these edits, too. Cheers, — kashmīrī ^TALK 23:59, 23 April 2021 (UTC)

@Kashmiri: List of political parties in United Kingdom was declared to be a high-priority misspelling by WT79. Perhaps they are willing to revert my edits since they decided to take on an executive role and demand that I "fix" this non-problem. Or maybe you can move List of political parties in the United Kingdom to remove the "the" which is not in conformance with ISO-3166. – wbm1058 (talk) 00:18, 24 April 2021 (UTC)

I didn't refer to that article. I meant your mass edits to infoboxes of ~160 different articles over the last 2.5 hours. — kashmīrī ^TALK 00:22, 24 April 2021 (UTC)

I understand that. The purpose of my edits was to bypass the redirect from the "misspelling" that WT79 could not tolerate, in order to clear this item from Wikipedia:Database reports/Linked misspellings. Evidently they ran into one of these in an infobox. – wbm1058 (talk) 00:26, 24 April 2021 (UTC)

OK, this sounds a bit odd to me, I'm not seeing any connection between WT79's list and parameter values in infoboxes. Anyhow, would you mind self-reverting that? — kashmīrī ^TALK 00:41, 24 April 2021 (UTC)

What exactly did I break by making those edits (please explain how it was broken). The infobox links now directly go to List of political parties in the United Kingdom rather than via a redirect from the alleged "misspelling" List of political parties in United Kingdom. I need a reassurance from WT79 that they won't revert my edit which reverted theirs. wbm1058 (talk) 00:48, 24 April 2021 (UTC)

I'd rather move on to fixing more things which are broken than fixing something that isn't. wbm1058 (talk) 00:51, 24 April 2021 (UTC)

@Wbm1058: Sorry – didn't think about standard title forms when adding that rcat. Thanks for reverting. WT79 ^{(speak to me | editing patterns | what I been doing)} 08:41, 25 April 2021 (UTC)

Soda-lime glass

At Soda-lime glass, regarding incorrect and alternative. I don't dispute that in the broadest sense, the hyphen/endash thing is an alternative, but I mark it as incorrect for this reason: per the style guide, the hyphen is not the correct way. It is in need of correction to the endash. Marking it as such will allow an intrepid editor to follow those links and make the corrections in the articles where it is used incorrectly. In the same way that typos and other misspellings are, broadly speaking, alternative ways of writing a word, But they are marked as misspellings (errors needing correction) to facilitate the ongoing improvement of our encyclopedia.

I have not made the change back to incorrect, because if my understanding of the usage of incorrect punctuation is wrong, I'd like to know that before foolishly asserting I must be right. I have tried to think of examples where the punctuation is truly incorrect and not alternative. Perhaps a question mark, asterisk, or other non-dashy line would be incorrect, but such redirects would be deleted as not being useful or necessary. The only ones worth keeping are those that have a similarity in form or function.

I write too much now, so I'll stop. Plus the call from the kitchen comes that dinner is ready. I value your response. Senator2029 ❮talk❯ 23:53, 24 April 2021 (UTC)

@Senator2029: Flagging it as a linked misspelling pushes it into the highest-priority work queue – note that there are 28 items in today's report, and every one of them has been fixed already, except the item you prioritized. "what links here" to "Soda-lime glass" It is not necessary to mark these to "allow an intrepid editor to follow those links and make the corrections". As I said in my edit summary, feel free to fix those 54 links yourself before you mark it. If you do it in that order, then I won't notice, and won't be bothered. The editor(s) who routinely clear away the linked-misspellings take care of the easy ones, and leave behind the "hard stuff" for someone more experienced to take care of (that would be me, see #Thank you very much ... above). My second-level priority list is the linked miscapitalizations, which has been a bear to tame, as people keep dumping more heaps of marginal miscapitalizations onto that pile. If I ever get that one down to size and have the luck to find a volunteer to keep it under control, then I might turn my attention to the hyphens and dashes. Right now they are so low priority that I don't see myself getting to them any time soon, if ever. Unless you want them to be fixed by a bot and can get a consensus to do that, then I might be willing to write and operate the bot. Then our armies of executive-level editors could force the bot to edit-war with itself by edit-warring over whether to "R from hyphen" or "R from en dash". – wbm1058 (talk) 00:42, 25 April 2021 (UTC)

Module:Adjacent stations/Busan Metro

The Busan Metro module shouldn't be linking to Dongdaegu Station; wrong system? Mackensen (talk) 22:30, 26 April 2021 (UTC)

Mackensen, yes, I guessed wrong; I reverted my edit that didn't fix it for me. The rail template systems are highly complex, making it a very annoying and time-consuming task to fix miscapitalized links to rail stations. So I guess it's Template:S-line. How do I fix {{S-line/side cell|through=|state=|branch=|next=Sasang|link=|system=Korail|line=Mugunghwa-ho|note=|type=Dongdaegu|oneway=|round=|circular={{#if:|1|}}|side=left}} so that it links directly to Dongdaegu Station rather than the {{R from miscapitalisation}} Dongdaegu station? wbm1058 (talk) 23:24, 26 April 2021 (UTC)

Wbm1058, it's Korail that has it wrong, so you'll want {{Korail stations}}. Mackensen (talk) 23:28, 26 April 2021 (UTC)

@Mackensen: Thanks. THIS was the edit I intended to make earlier. It worked (on e.g. Gijang station). – wbm1058 (talk) 00:41, 27 April 2021 (UTC)

Also needed to edit {{KSR stations}} – wbm1058 (talk) 16:18, 28 April 2021 (UTC)

Philip Kitcher edit

It makes no difference to me, but I'm curious why you made your most recent edit to the link to "Secular Humanism." Since Secular Humanism automatically jumps to Secular humanism, what is wrong with leaving it as Secular Humanism?Maurice Magnus (talk) 00:52, 7 June 2021 (UTC)

I did that to clear the link from the Wikipedia:Database reports/Linked miscapitalizations report. It was there because User:WurmWoode marked it as a miscapitalization with this 29 December 2018 edit. The alternative would be to revert WurmWoode's edit. You will note that there are a lot of uses of title case on that list and I wish other editors were less hardcore about marking such things as flat-out wrong in all usage on Wikipedia ({{R from miscapitalisation}}) rather than simply cases of {{R from other capitalisation}}. – wbm1058 (talk) 02:40, 7 June 2021 (UTC)

I made that edit according to the body of the article, as well as the very text of the Declaration, the only capitalization occurs when secular begins a sentence— it seems akin to discussing a good christian versus the Christian religion. Correct me if I am wrong. WurmWoode^T 10:47, 12 June 2021 (UTC)

Thanks. Your explanation is over my head, but that's ok. The more important question is, in general as opposed to in this specific instance, when linking a phrase to its Wikipedia entry, if the capitalization in the Wikipedia entry is different, is it necessary to do what you did even though the link takes you to the Wikipedia entry without doing what you did?Maurice Magnus (talk) 09:55, 7 June 2021 (UTC)

@Maurice Magnus:Is it necessary to change John A. MacDonald to John A. Macdonald or Lebron James to LeBron James, or should we not care whether a person's name is capitalized differently than in the article title of their biography? If we don't care about that then we can eliminate the Wikipedia:Database reports/Linked miscapitalizations report and ask editors to work on something different. – wbm1058 (talk) 21:08, 7 June 2021 (UTC)

@MZMcBride: Can Wikipedia:Database reports/Linked miscapitalizations/Configuration be tweaked to disregard cases where the linked miscapitalization is not actually displayed to the reader but is just piped to different text? I could play with the SQL in Quarry to try to make that happen but you can probably do that faster than it would take me to figure it out. FYI, THIS is my edit which was questioned above. wbm1058 (talk) 21:08, 7 June 2021 (UTC)

Not fixing it

Hi, wbm1058, I hope you are keeping well in these dangerous times? I saw this edit (I watch a number of dog articles), and wondered a little. Doesn't our advice here suggest that we avoid by-passing redirects? Anyway, just to let you know that I've moved the target page back to Dogo Cubano, the same capitalisation as all our other dog breed articles. Regards, Justlettersandnumbers (talk) 20:40, 14 June 2021 (UTC)

@Justlettersandnumbers: as a fellow sysop you should have noticed the history of the redirect that you moved over the top of. Actually I should have looked at that myself:

• at 13:57, 20 February 2020 SMcCandlish moved page Dogo Cubano to Dogo cubano (MOS:LIFE, MOS:FOREIGN; this is not a Standardized breed name in English, so lower-case.)
• and, edit of 13:57, 20 February 2020 tagged the redirect as {{R from incorrect capitalization}} which declares this form to be a flat-out, blatant error demanding to be fixed, as a high priority.

Tagging it with {{R from other capitalization}} puts it in the "DONOTFIXIT" category.

So your issue is with Mr. McCandlish, not me. Though had I noticed it was him who tagged it, I probably would have wanted to double-check for a consensus on the matter.

I'm rather annoyed at the clan of editors who are so sure of themselves that they fail to recognize potentially controversial moves when they see them, and act boldly rather than starting a discussion. – wbm1058 (talk) 01:12, 15 June 2021 (UTC)

Should remain lower-case, since it's Spanish, and cubano (like other adjectives derived from proper names) is not capitalized in Spanish; and we have zero evidence of this ever being established as a standardized, formalized breed with such a name, rather than simply being a landrace of dogs common at one time on Cuba. This is the same kind of case as people wanting to over-capitalize "Roman War Dog" on the WP:OR hypothesis that it's a breed in the modern sense. The only reason we capitalize modern standardized breeds (and took years of squabbling and a WP:VPPOL RfC to even permit that exception to MOS:LIFE) is because the authoritative sources on them, the written breed standards that establish them in the first place, do so. Such breeds are akin to published works. If there is no written breed standard for some extinct variety, then there is no basis for capitalizing it (especially not against standard usage in the actual language of the phrase).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  15:07, 19 June 2021 (UTC)

Can "Incorrect" names be "printworthy"?

• Forkknife and Fork Knife – note to myself to follow up on THIS someday... avoiding this rabbit hole for now. – wbm1058 (talk) 13:52, 2 December 2021 (UTC)

Template talk:Football squad player

Further information: Wikipedia:Templates for discussion/Holding cell § Other

Hi, in your opinion what's missing for the merge to go on? Is there anything that should be dealt with? Nehme₁₄₉₉ 23:59, 23 February 2021 (UTC)

I took some time off from this task to wait for any possible response to my work so far, and to catch up on my usual work queues. I'm back on this now. – wbm1058 (talk) 16:05, 24 February 2021 (UTC)

Sorry to revert you on the template, but I've started a discussion on the talk page on what form of country name to use. Thanks for all the work you've been doing on this though. Cheers, Number 57 22:18, 24 February 2021 (UTC)

Template Parameters : Football squad player

I noticed your edit to User:Bamyers99/TemplateParametersTool. Wanted to let you know that the March parameter report is ready. There is a new link for the pos parameter called errors which takes you to the error list. --Bamyers99 (talk) 01:32, 3 March 2021 (UTC)

Thanks Bamyers99, your tool is really nice. I have a question: why isn't Cheng Fung on that list? |pos=DF,MF isn't one of the four valid valures for {{{pos}}}. wbm1058 (talk) 23:15, 7 March 2021 (UTC)

That page plus others were not displayed because of a bug. The bug has been fixed. --Bamyers99 (talk) 15:50, 8 March 2021 (UTC)

Thanks! What a speedy fix it was too! You're the best! wbm1058 (talk) 16:26, 8 March 2021 (UTC)

Flagicon

@Johnuniq: re: "the ultimate problem appears to be flagicon" – there have been multiple attempts to address this issue:

• Template talk:Flagicon/Archive 1#Template:FlagiconLua started (5 June 2013) – now named Template:Flags
  • "This template provides a clickable icon flag with options to define the size, the link and the label. Its usage is especially recommended in articles with many icon flags. This project is under development." – Development seems to have stalled soon after it started.
• Flagg – Is there a list of pages that are approaching the WP:PEIS limit that haven't converted over to the new module-based {{flagg}} system?
  • "{{Flagg}} (flag general) is a flag template with variable output format. Using Lua instead of the standard mechanism."

My work on this is on hold pending teaching myself more Lua and maybe JavaScript as well. – wbm1058 (talk) 14:53, 14 April 2021 (UTC)

How can I help with - Should the template display the table in one or two columns?

Python, Flask, CSS developer here. Unemployed and would love to get my hands dirty and gain some more experience. Would like to improve on the above, and learn more about JS and SQL. I also have an art background, so maybe illustration too. Tamccullough (talk) 14:42, 21 June 2021 (UTC)

@Tamccullough: I see you were referred to me from the discussion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Football#Regarding the SPLIT table used in the SQUAD sections of the Club manual of style. Our expertise doesn't overlap too much. I don't know any of Python, Flask, CSS, JS and SQL particularly well. I know Wikipedia template coding and PHP. – wbm1058 (talk) 16:16, 21 June 2021 (UTC)

See #Template talk:Football squad player above. wbm1058 (talk) 16:17, 21 June 2021 (UTC)

wbm1058 I'll look into this then - Wikipedia template coding - and see if I can be of any use at some point. Cheers! Tamccullough (talk) 16:33, 21 June 2021 (UTC)

Log for Articles for creation?

...on potential improvements for WikiProject Articles for creation: What is missed? That's probably better answered by more-experienced AfCers, but one thing as an outsider admin I'd very much like is improved data on how drafts flow around the system. A log of all AfC submissions & reviews (accepts & declines); a log of individual reviewers' records (similar to the CSD log of NPPers); more clarity on the project's stats. ETA: I've just found Template:AFC statistics but it needs a proper historical log. Espresso Addict (talk) 04:08, 4 April 2018 (UTC)

As another "outsider admin", I'm interested in this too, and have the skills needed to create such a log. Adding this to my potential to-do list. – wbm1058 (talk) 17:14, 18 April 2021 (UTC)

Nomination of Wikimedia movement for deletion

A discussion is taking place as to whether the article Wikimedia movement, to which you have significantly contributed, is suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia according to Wikipedia's policies and guidelines or if it should be deleted.

The discussion will take place at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Wikimedia movement until a consensus is reached, and anyone, including you, is welcome to contribute to the discussion. 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.

To customise your preferences for automated AfD notifications for articles to which you've significantly contributed (or to opt-out entirely), please visit the configuration page. Delivered by SDZeroBot (talk) 01:05, 21 August 2021 (UTC)

Merchandise giveaway nomination

A token of thanks Hi Wbm1058! I've nominated you (along with all other active admins) to receive a solstice season gift from the WMF. Talk page stalkers are invited to comment at the nomination. Enjoy! Cheers, {{u|Sdkb}} talk ~~~~~

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 23:50, 31 December 2021 (UTC)

How we will see unregistered users

Hi!

You get this message because you are an admin on a Wikimedia wiki.

When someone edits a Wikimedia wiki without being logged in today, we show their IP address. As you may already know, we will not be able to do this in the future. This is a decision by the Wikimedia Foundation Legal department, because norms and regulations for privacy online have changed.

Instead of the IP we will show a masked identity. You as an admin will still be able to access the IP. There will also be a new user right for those who need to see the full IPs of unregistered users to fight vandalism, harassment and spam without being admins. Patrollers will also see part of the IP even without this user right. We are also working on better tools to help.

If you have not seen it before, you can read more on Meta. If you want to make sure you don’t miss technical changes on the Wikimedia wikis, you can subscribe to the weekly technical newsletter.

We have two suggested ways this identity could work. We would appreciate your feedback on which way you think would work best for you and your wiki, now and in the future. You can let us know on the talk page. You can write in your language. The suggestions were posted in October and we will decide after 17 January.

Thank you. /Johan (WMF)

18:14, 4 January 2022 (UTC)

Cambridge Christian School

thanks on this note. I wasn't sure if it was the script or my error. Let me know if I should revert my manual tag of the new page. Happy to, I just wasn't sure how to best record the AfD where future editors would look. Star Mississippi 15:20, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

@Star Mississippi: Your manual placement of the template on the new page is what the script should have automatically done for you. Evad37 opened a discussion at Wikipedia talk:XFDcloser#Old afd templates placed on talk pages of redirects. – wbm1058 (talk) 15:39, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

Thanks, and thanks for the pointer to the discussion. Will follow it as I seem to be more active in closing AfDs and wasn't aware of that page. Star Mississippi 16:11, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

Status update. Special:Contributions/Evad37. Most recent edit 22 January 2022. Just ten days after opening RFC: Priorities for XFDcloser development in 2022. Any interface editors willing to help maintain this gadget? Sigh. I'd need to get around to taking a crash course in JavaScript, something I've had on my back-back-back-burner for a long time. Doing that would mean dropping other balls I carry, at least for a while. – wbm1058 (talk) 15:16, 1 June 2022 (UTC)

Template:R from unsuitable title

See also /Archive 10#Template:R for convenience

Redirects and article (re)naming

On my watch list I have the following which you made changes to: 26th Milestone: Revision history and Template:Mountain Course: Difference between revisions.

I completely do not understand (your edit summary and what has become of) the former example (and never have understood printworthy, etc), but FYI the article was renamed by a defiant CoI editor to promote the Isle of Man name; there was no need for disambiguation, as there was/is no other article. As you are admin, and if you can easily remove the Isle of Man bit, I will leave it to your discretion; I can give other examples, like this SEO admission not needing disambig. I knew these examples without searching, and there is a long history with this editor, some of which I will not provide publicly. My understanding and rationale is that where there is no need for disambiguation it should not be present. You can email me if necessary. Thank you.--Rocknrollmancer (talk) 02:15, 30 January 2022 (UTC)

Hi Rocknrollmancer. You raise a number of points; I'll try to cover each.

My current project is to clear the pages which are flagged as linking to incorrect names. This is a task that nobody else had taken on until I got to it. There were over 1900 pages on the list when I started, and now I've just gotten it below 500. An example incorrect name is National Broadcasting Corporation. The correct name is National Broadcasting Company but almost nobody calls it that; they just call it NBC and people have forgotten what the letters stand for; thus I found and corrected dozens of National Broadcasting Corporation mislinks. British Broadcasting Company would be another example if there wasn't actually a company with that name!

I removed {{R from unsuitable title}} from 26th Milestone because "26th Milestone" is not incorrect. "25th Milestone" or "26th Kilometerstone" would be incorrect. This is a valid {{R from short name}} because "26th Milestone" is a shortened form of the more complete article title 26th Milestone, Isle of Man.

"{{R from unsuitable title}}" is a somewhat ambiguous template title which may be responsible for some of this mistagging. Can a title be correct, yet "unsuitable"? And how is "suitability" determined?

Pinging @Paine Ellsworth: that template's creator. Just looking at that template's history for the first time in a long time. I see that another editor changed it to a disambiguation back in February 2016, but then I reverted them because I didn't want to disambiguate the 180 pages that transcluded it. That was probably a mistake as now the issue's gotten worse. There are 321 transclusions at the moment. I'm thinking of taking this to WP:Redirects for discussion.

The WP:Article titles policy covers the criteria used to decide on an article title. There is often more than one appropriate title for an article. In that case, editors choose the best title by consensus. "Concision" says the title is no longer than necessary – that supports "26th Milestone". "Precision" and "Recognizability" say the title is unambiguous and recognizable. There are surely thousands or 26th milestones around the world, and few outside of the UK, or even the Isle of Man itself, would readily recognize the location of this milestone. Those criteria support the longer title 26th Milestone, Isle of Man. We have a process WP:Requested moves for conducting discussions to decide the best weight of these sometimes conflicting criteria. Feel free to start an RM discussion if you like.

I'm not keen on tagging conflict-of-interest editors and personally would just rather see the page titles resolved via the RM process.

I bypassed the redirects in the {{Mountain Course}} template so that the pages names in that template are shown in boldface when transcluded on the same page. For example, look at the bottom of 26th Milestone, Isle of Man and click "show" to expand the "Snaefell Mountain Course" navigation template. Note that 26th Milestone (Joey's) is shown in boldface, which it would not be if that template just linked to the 26th Milestone redirect.

Finally, yes, the "printworthy" templates are an obscure thing that almost nobody understands. Getting into that would be another long-winded discussion in itself, so, I'll pass on that and stop now. Hopefully I've addressed all your other concerns. Best, wbm1058 (talk) 18:28, 30 January 2022 (UTC)

Thank you for the ping, wbm1058! In the case of 26th Milestone I would argue that the shortened title is definitely unsuitable for the reasons you expressed above, although it could just as easily be tagged with {{R from ambiguous name}}. As to the question of unsuitable vs. incorrect, converting the redirect, {{R from unsuitable title}}, to a full rcat template has been a low-priority item on my to-do list. Under the circumstances I will probably just remove it from my list and forget about it. To include editor Rocknrollmancer, I agree that "26th Milestone" on its own just isn't enough; however, there might be better dabbing other than a comma-separated "Isle of Man" to be considered in any such move request. As for "printworthiness", or as I call it "printability", this essay explains it fairly well, I'd say. But then, I wrote that essay, so I could be wrong. P.I. Ellsworth - ed. ^put'r there 19:19, 30 January 2022 (UTC)

ThanQ for your work and for the depth of response; I am pleased that there are people who sort out the difficulties.

AFAIK, there are only two 'Milestone(s)' in the Isle of Man which are nouns-proper (ie. with capitalised 'M') these being 26th Milestone and 11th Milestone (the latter's edit history shows changes by 11thmilestone (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log), a sock account which was blocked (the master was soon unblocked, against my arguments). There is much, much more which I will not mention. Normally when written in prose it should be simply milestone. Where there are no such 'stones' or other permanent edifice (ferinstance, having been replaced by wooden boards) I prefer to use milemarker.

It therefore makes no sense that anyone would be searching for multiple-milestones located elsewhere by that exact name. Hypothetical arguments would be a non sequitur, as even if they existed in geography, would need to pass wiki-Notability. Do we have to include disambiguation, 'just in case'? No - any subsequent mentions would be addressed by hat or dab page. I do concur, however that it would be logical if the locations were standardised across all of the navigation varieties.

I will give it further thought, and I will peruse the essay later, @Paine Ellsworth:. Coincidentally, a large part of this started back in 2014 with a template editor nominating an Isle of Man template for discussion/deletion, complaining it was transcluded into too-few articles (IIRC), then set about prod/afd of actual (stub) articles, leaving holes in yet-another IoM navigation template, which in turn led to the creation of List of named corners of the Snaefell Mountain Course to accommodate those places deleted, together with articles to achieve a fuller list. So, a massive amount of extra work created by that particular template editor. rgds, Rocknrollmancer (talk) 01:24, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

Followup on unsuitable titles

I see this template was created as a result of this discussion about talk pages of redirected pages. The idea was to to prevent the creation of a "bad title" or prevent moving an article into a similar bad title. Generally, I think we use WP:SALT to prevent the creation of a really bad title. This is different than the bar for saying we shouldn't even create links to a "bad" redirect to a good title. Above, I noted there were 321 transclusions. Now there's 319. I'll work on removing these or converting them to a more "suitable" {{Rcat}} template ;) – wbm1058 (talk) 14:44, 20 February 2022 (UTC)

GA Reassessment

Staffordshire Bull Terrier has been nominated for a community good article reassessment. If you are interested in the discussion, please participate by adding your comments to the reassessment page. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, the good article status may be removed from the article. Justlettersandnumbers (talk) 22:01, 3 March 2022 (UTC)

Fixing miscapitalized redirect links

Thanks for the suggestion. I wasn't aware of that list at Wikipedia:Database reports/Linked miscapitalizations. Looks useful. Should be straightward to do simple automatic fixes, but I see already that complications do come up, e.g. in this edit, there's a novel probably-over-capitalized piped link. Is that why you find it a lot of work? Would it be useful to just resolve the links without worrying about the rest, or would that be a wasted opportunity in terms of fixing the real problems. What's your strategy and process on such things? Dicklyon (talk) 18:59, 11 March 2022 (UTC)

I also went through and did the big one, Croix de guerre. It took dozens of replace patterns, and I probably still didn't get everything quite right, but knocked off over 500 changes for the better, I hope. Mostly capitalizing, but a few the other way. Dicklyon (talk) 20:07, 11 March 2022 (UTC)

(edit conflict)Hi Dick. Sorry for the slow response; I hadn't gotten around to posting on your talk yet. Do you use WP:NAVPOPS? I suggest installing that for this task. Installation instructions on the top of the WP:NAVPOPS page. Back in 2015, I learned how to amp up the usefulness of that gadget. Initially I just used it for link disambiguation, but later I added fixing misspellings and miscapitalizations to the mix.

• User:Wbm1058/vector.js has customized configuration to hypercharge the utility of POPUPS. Everything but the first line, which is for WP:HOTCAT, is for NAVPOPS configuration. Feel free to copy that to User:Dicklyon/vector.js

  It imports and uses User:Anomie/linkclassifier.js (see User:Anomie/linkclassifier).

• User:Wbm1058/vector.css configures the colors used to highlight the bad links. Feel free to copy that to User:Dicklyon/vector.css

I think that's all you need to do to install this, unless I've forgotten something.

Now for the first demonstration. Go back to Adrian Lillebekk Ovlien where I reverted you. If installed correctly that bad link is now highlighted in pink.

Hover over the pink link and POPUPS pops up showing a line Redirects to: (Fix target or target & label)

Click on either "target" or "target & label" and a Show changes screen automatically pops up showing the diff, with your edit summary auto-filled by POPUPS. If everything looks good, just save the changes. I just did that. Rather than fix the capitalization I just bypassed the redirect, since it's a piped link. Feel free to revert me and try it yourself.

Yes I also use JWB for some of these, especially the ones with lots of links. – wbm1058 (talk) 20:35, 11 March 2022 (UTC)

I might try those, but for now I'm still getting use to JWB. And what about where that link is piped to "2nd Division"? Is there a reason for capitalized Division there? Do you also look at and decide about such things? Also note the Norwegian Second Division is itself over-capitalized, but that's another story. See Talk:Norwegian First Division#Over-capitalization. Dicklyon (talk) 20:53, 11 March 2022 (UTC)

I rarely second-guess the community consensus on capitalization, but sometimes I might change a redirect tagged {{R from miscapitalization}} to {{R from other capitalization}} rendering the links to be "not a problem". – wbm1058 (talk) 21:27, 11 March 2022 (UTC)

The community didn't specifically look at the capitalization here. This happens often, where someone sees a reason to move to a different name, but doesn't realize that we use sentence case for titles, and nobody notices until after it happens. Dicklyon (talk) 23:27, 11 March 2022 (UTC)

Dicklyon, Wikipedia:Database reports/Linked misspellings is a similar list which I personally give a higher priority. Some quiet gnome IP kept that under control for a long time, it used to be almost always under 50 items, but it seems the IP has either taken a break or quit doing the task, so now it's got about 200 items in it. Any one of these lists by itself may be manageable for a single editor or two, but in aggregate when all of them have backlogs, that's what makes them – in aggregate – a lot of work. You abandon one task to go work on another, and then when you check back in, you see that nobody picked up the ball you dropped. – wbm1058 (talk) 21:53, 11 March 2022 (UTC)

I did a bunch of these miscapped links, and passed you up on Wikipedia:List of Wikipedians by number of edits/1–1000. Dicklyon (talk) 05:47, 19 March 2022 (UTC)

This link case fixing is harder than I had imagined. Slow going. Dicklyon (talk) 16:07, 27 March 2022 (UTC)

I've been working on Applied Mathematics. It's a bitch! So many linkages from parts of proper names like "Institute of Applied Mathematics". Is there some guideline about how such things ought to be done? Delink it? Pipe it? Something else? Dicklyon (talk) 23:38, 3 April 2022 (UTC)

Sometimes I delink per WP:OVERLINK. Sometimes I pipe. Rarely someone reverts my pipe (because "redirects are cheap!"), which is annoying. Academic disciplines are a bother because capitalization of them is widespread. I'm inclined to be more flexible on stuff like this, it's why there's a {{r from other capitalization}} – but there's a lot more editors making edits like THIS rather than fixing the pages that such edits demand to be fixed. Those editors seem to think the human bots that make the fixes grow on trees. – wbm1058 (talk) 00:32, 4 April 2022 (UTC)

And probably nobody checks whether the "miscapitalization" tag enjoys consensus or not before we work on fixing. Not a very robust system, is it? Dicklyon (talk) 02:20, 5 April 2022 (UTC)

Apparently this kind of work is regarded as "pointless", per WP:AN/I#Dicklyon and pointless edits once again. Dicklyon (talk) 03:11, 6 April 2022 (UTC)

I would have tagged Habsburg Monarchy as {{R from other capitalisation}} and then it wouldn't have shown up on the error report at all – making the changes to the piped links unnecessary. This would have saved you yet another trip to the notice boards. Given Ngrams suggests it's a proper name, I would have opposed the move had I noticed that you started that RM discussion. I don't spend a lot of time on the drama boards but my thoughts are similar to the Canadian's on this matter. I notice you have yet to even bother to "fix" the lead sentence in the target article. – wbm1058 (talk) 03:43, 6 April 2022 (UTC)

As pointed out at the RM, n-grams very much suggests that it's not a proper name. Most of the caps uses are in citations to book titles and such; nowhere near consistently capped in sources. And yes I should have done the target article first; just did that. Whatever you think of this particular case, I'd be interested in what you think of working on links through miscapped redirects more generally. Looks like I need to stay away from it. Dicklyon (talk) 04:33, 6 April 2022 (UTC)

and it's now tagged as "other". I had it at "mis" at the right time to get a snap of its big number to show at ANI. Fun place. Dicklyon (talk) 04:35, 6 April 2022 (UTC)

advice for Wikipedia:Database reports/Linked miscapitalizations

Hello! I've been going through the list of miscapitalisations, initially on this account but I've now created an alternative account for maintainance edits. So far, I've been clicking the link to each page, clicking edit, and searching for the miscapitalisation before changing it. This is fairly quick, but I imagine there are some tools which can make that sort of repetitive edit faster. Do you have any advice on the best tools to use? Many Thanks, and have a good day!

– DirkJandeGeer щи 09:37, 30 March 2022 (UTC)

• I use WP:Javascript Wiki Browser this and other bulk tasks. Dicklyon (talk) 23:50, 3 April 2022 (UTC)
• @DirkJandeGeer: Sorry for the belated reply. HERE I explained my use of WP:NAVPOPS to Dick, maybe you'll be more interested in that, which is more handy for the one-off fixes rather than the mass-edits. – wbm1058 (talk) 00:21, 4 April 2022 (UTC)

  Thank you! no worries on the late reply, I find Navigation Popups is quite useful for Recent Changes patrolling as well. Have a good one!

  – DirkJandeGeer щи 11:26, 4 April 2022 (UTC)

Apparently working to clear this list can get you in hot water, as it did me. See Wikipedia talk:Redirect#RFC on NOTBROKEN interpretation for why people don't want you replacing piped links to miscapitalized redirects. Dicklyon (talk) 22:47, 9 April 2022 (UTC)

Continuing null editing

Followup to Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 196#A page is populating a hidden maintenance category, but the category is empty!

Technical stuff: Tunneling into the replica English Wikipedia database via PHP on Windows

I don't know of a way to check to see if your bot is still null editing, so I am asking here. Have you considered continuing null-editing stale pages, beyond the ones that had no refresh date? As of tstarling's comment of 28 Jan 2021 at T157670, there were about 16 million pages more than 1.5 years stale. Would your bot be able to work your way through those pages from oldest refresh date to newest? – Jonesey95 (talk) 19:07, 28 March 2022 (UTC)

No point in stopping before the task is finished, or runs into a wall. 16.6 million is now down to 3.6 million. You can monitor progress with these links:

• page_links_updated by year, all namespaces
• page_links_updated by month, mainspace

So far I've seen two reports of editors noticing the impact of my cache-purging:

• Category redirect Foo playing up again
• More than 3 years for page to appear in category?

Am curious to know whether you've noticed anything else. – wbm1058 (talk) 12:05, 29 March 2022 (UTC)

It came up at WT:Linter as well. Thanks for taking on this task, and thanks for the helpful links. I hope that you will continue operating the bot, ideally with the goal of keeping all pages from getting too old. In one of the tickets, I proposed that no page (or at least no article) be allowed to become more than a month stale. I don't know what that volume of null edits would look like once the bot has caught up with the backlog, but my hope is that it would add no more than a few percent to the overall processing time on the servers. At this point, 2.4 million article-space pages are more than a year out of date. That is definitely leading to many undetected error conditions. – Jonesey95 (talk) 15:39, 29 March 2022 (UTC)

Article-space is now updated to within 50 days: page_links_updated by date, mainspace. The bot is currently null-editing pages last purged on February 19. – wbm1058 (talk) 00:34, 9 April 2022 (UTC)

@Wbm1058 is the bot also null editing other namespaces? I see that while article space is at 22/3/22 other namespaces still have pages from 2020. Gonnym (talk) 13:24, 3 May 2022 (UTC)

Yes, I've been null-editing all namespaces, with highest priority on mainspace. User: and User talk: are the laggards because there are so damn many of them. I think the main benefit there is catching lint errors in user signatures; is there a date after which that shouldn't be an issue? My bot is not yet fully automated as I'm dependent on manual Quarry queries to produce my list of pages to null edit. I need to find a way for the bot to make an API query to get the list of pages to null edit, to make this fully automated. Whatever issue(s) caused T290146 have slowed me down. Would be nice not to be dependent on Quarry. – wbm1058 (talk) 03:33, 5 May 2022 (UTC)

I don't think there is a null-edit date after which we will know that we have refreshed all of the pages with potential Linter errors in them, because there are multiple bug reports in Phabricator dealing with Linter false positives and false negatives. Those get fixed occasionally, and then those changes get rolled into the MediaWiki software, and then every page needs to be refreshed before we know that we have handled all of those newly detected (or ignored) errors correctly. A batch of fixes for the "bogus image options" Linter error was just rolled out over the last few weeks. TL;DR: T157670 still needs to be fixed in a systematic way by the developers or system administrators of the MediaWiki instances. – Jonesey95 (talk) 04:29, 5 May 2022 (UTC)

@Jonesey95 and Gonnym: BRFA filed – wbm1058 (talk) 02:53, 25 June 2022 (UTC)

Below are several links I'm posting here for my records, so I can close several browser tabs and still be able to easily find this stuff. wbm1058 (talk) 16:58, 25 June 2022 (UTC)

• wikitech:Portal:Toolforge
• Toolforge admin console

Quarry queries

Links for the historical record

• Page links last updated before February 2010 (and not NULL) My initial query of Sun, 13 Mar 2022 that began this 3-month project. 306 pages had not been updated in over 12 years!
• Page links updated in namespace before date I frequently tweaked and used this Quarry query to catch the links up-to-date prior to creating the automated process that keeps them reasonably updated.

Links documenting apparent "won't fix" issues

• Page links updated is NULL The "Sweet Sixteen"
• The "Super Six"

User:Merge bot

Hi Wbm1058, have you completed task 2 and no longer require +sysop to be set on this bot? — xaosflux ^Talk 09:25, 7 May 2022 (UTC)

My progress is documented at User talk:Merge bot/Task 2. While my most recent run was on 9 April 2021, this task is still on my to-do list and I expect to eventually get back to it. – wbm1058 (talk) 10:15, 7 May 2022 (UTC)

Looking at NPP

I'm leaving two links here so that when you get time, you can look at possibly developing a BOT or a program that can provide the tools we need. WMF's development team created our curation tool but it took a long time. We are justifiably concerned about the backlog of unreviewed articles, and will probably never catch-up without some form of automation: NPP Feed, and ability to filter reviewed/unreviewed totals by category, date, etc. Atsme 💬 📧 13:31, 22 May 2022 (UTC)

Naming languages

Hi. Thanks for your comment on Mammad Huseyn - it's an interesting quirk of the Page Curation Toolbar that it has a 'translate from other language tag' option but doesn't have a drop-down to specify the language. I'll go back and add it to pages in future. Best Alexandermcnabb (talk) 06:04, 24 June 2022 (UTC)

About the bots

I have been noticing that the bots you run have been knocked out several times. Despite spending hours at a stretch clerking WP:RMC, I don't think that's substianable. Is there any way that I can help you to get the bots back to their reliable states? Co-run, co-operate, etc? I am a developer myself, mostly on WordPress, and pretty grounded in PHP and JS. Let me know. – robertsky (talk) 02:34, 23 August 2022 (UTC)

@Robertsky: My desktop computer froze up for some unknown reason, while I was on an extended road trip. I found it was still powered up but there was no video; forcing a shutdown and restart got it back up. I was running bots from my laptop as my backup, when I had Internet access available. I suppose the solution is to have backups running from another platform so that with failure on a single platform the bots would still be running on the other platform. With this task I've gained a bit more experience operating on the Toolforge platform. I've been asked why I don't run my bots on "the cluster" – I even put that in my bot's FAQ. I suppose I should bump my priority and make the effort. I know I'll need some Linux commands to set it up. If you have experience running (PHP) bots on the Toolforge, perhaps you could help guide me there. Thanks, wbm1058 (talk) 12:58, 29 August 2022 (UTC)

How was the road trip? Nice, I hope! I can empathise on the hardware failure. I run stuff on my own servers/VPS. I don't have experience yet running stuff on Toolforge, although I do have an account on it (have been putting off converting my index creation/maintenance script into a user friendly interface for others to generate their indexes). However, I have had looked at the RMCD script to manually generate the last few rounds of updates before you came back back proper. What you can try running is crontab or schedule the script to run on their Jobs framework:

For crontab, after spinning up an instance, edit the cron file and insert something like this:

*/30 * * * * /usr/bin/php /home/someUser/RMCD/requestedmoves.php >> /var/log/RMCD.log

This would run the script every 30 minutes (given that you have a hard stop of 24 minutes running time in the script, this should be more than enough).

For Jobs framework, (from the documentations) you can try running a command like this (not tested):

toolforge-jobs run mycronjob --command "/usr/bin/php /home/someUser/RMCD/requestedmoves.php >> /var/log/RMCD.log" --image tf-php74 --schedule "*/30 * * * *"

or for ease of tweaking the options, write a jobs.yaml file (again, based from documentation.):

::- name: 30-minute_rmcd_bot
::  command: /usr/bin/php /home/someUser/RMCD/requestedmoves.php
::  image: tf-php74
::  schedule: "*/30 * * * *"
::  emails: onfailure
::

Then after that, this command: toolforge-jobs load jobs.yaml – robertsky (talk) 17:31, 29 August 2022 (UTC)

@Robertsky: Yes my trip was a nice break from Wikipedia and I got a lot more exercise than I do sitting online... My experience trying to get bots running automated on the "Jobs framework" has been a long slog, would you mind reading through my BRFA (might help you getting started on Toolforge too) and if that's TL;DR then just skip to Job logs at the end. Any help you might give me there would be appreciated. – wbm1058 (talk) 20:06, 19 November 2022 (UTC)

Hello there! I am currently on holiday myself, having just attended m:ESEAP Conference! I will take a look at this sometime in December if you don't mind. Cheers! – robertsky (talk) 11:55, 21 November 2022 (UTC)

Bypassing redirects

I see that many of your recent edits are using an automated tool to modify links that point to a redirect, changing them to the exact name of the target. Such links are not broken and should not be changed without good reason, see the guideline WP:NOTBROKEN. There's no need to undo those edits, but please don't make mass changes that are contrary to guidelines. Modest Genius ^talk 13:15, 29 September 2022 (UTC)

Genius, I'm working to clear the database report Wikipedia:Database reports/Linked miscapitalizations. These are broken because they've been tagged with {{R from miscapitalisation}}. If they're not broken they should have been tagged with {{R from other capitalisation}}. wbm1058 (talk) 19:52, 29 September 2022 (UTC)

Hmm, it seems like this can be used as an end-around to institute controversial changes. Are you verifying these individually? For example, Indigenous Land Use Agreement is listed, but it redirects to a section that explicitly uses the acronym ILUA, and I doubt anyone is checking for template changes on these redirects. Developmental neurobiology was another that popped up in looking at the first half of the list. All of the links to developmental neurobiology intend Development of the nervous system, not the capitalized journal; the link itself is not a miscapitalization, nor is the redirect.... (In this case, perhaps the redirect should just be retargeted.) Dekimasuよ! 00:44, 30 September 2022 (UTC)

I see that you've found some edits by the usual suspects. Note the previous discussions about miscapitalizations at #Linked misspellings and miscapitalizations, and alternatives and #Fixing miscapitalized redirect links. Yes I review my edits. Occasionally I get reverted, but also, pleasantly surprised to see who backed me up! – wbm1058 (talk) 17:24, 30 September 2022 (UTC)

This task is a long slog, made longer when you find that this edit was needed to clear the bad-link to Doctor who from The Snowmen – unnecessary obscurity through template coding. I needed to make a copy in my sandbox to sleuth that one out. That page is but one of several "one-offs" that slow me down for various reasons. – wbm1058 (talk) 19:34, 4 October 2022 (UTC)

That does not necessarily mean that the link is broken, in the sense of WP:NOTBROKEN. It could also mean that the redirect has been wrongly categorised. Database reports do not trump editorial judgement, and should not be used blindly. I doubt many editors are familiar with the subtle difference between those two redirect tags. Please check whether each error is with the redirect tag, rather than the links in articles. Modest Genius ^talk 14:36, 17 October 2022 (UTC)

This is why I have not written a bot to automatically bypass these redirects. I sometimes lower the severity to "not broken", for example with this edit to Colorlines. – wbm1058 (talk) 15:01, 17 October 2022 (UTC)

ColorLines

It was the old style, e.g. [1], [2]. More of a FYI than anything else. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 01:03, 11 October 2022 (UTC)

Monitored issues

• Template parameters: Infobox settlement – wbm1058 (talk) 20:54, 6 October 2022 (UTC)
• List of current NBA team rosters exceeds the node count limit – wbm1058 (talk) 19:39, 14 October 2022 (UTC)
• Wikipedia talk:Verifiability#Update on ONUS RFC  • Wikipedia:ONUS  • Special:WhatLinksHere/Wikipedia:ONUS – wbm1058 (talk) 20:09, 14 October 2022 (UTC)

Concern regarding Draft:Fosroc

Hello, Wbm1058. This is a bot-delivered message letting you know that Draft:Fosroc, a page you created, has not been edited in at least 5 months. Drafts that have not been edited for six months may be deleted, so if you wish to retain the page, please edit it again or request that it be moved to your userspace.

If the page has already been deleted, you can request it be undeleted so you can continue working on it.

Thank you for your submission to Wikipedia. FireflyBot (talk) 00:33, 30 October 2022 (UTC)

Gems in neglected articles

WMB.. I would appreciate it if you take a look at my three paragraph talk page where, as a new editor, I have outlined some initial impressions. PS your talk and user page is fascinating! to me in terms of learning about the platform. Flibbertigibbets (talk) 02:43, 30 October 2022 (UTC)

Refreshlinks query and possibly bot needed on Commons

Related to these queries and your bot that keeps links refreshed here at en.WP, I have recently started working on Linter errors at Commons, and pages are appearing in formerly empty categories. Some of them had not been edited in more than eight years. This tells me that the links table is terribly out of date. Is there any magic you can work over at Commons to refresh the link tables in the same way that your bot does here? – Jonesey95 (talk) 15:17, 30 October 2022 (UTC)

I've never run a bot on commons and don't even know whether they have a bots requests for approval process. Making a commons bot for this might just be as simple as changing https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php to https://commons.wikipedia.org/w/api.php in User:RMCD bot/botclasses.php but it's probably not that easy. Don't know how much you've been following my current BRFA but I should probably work on closing that rabbit hole before starting to dig a new one. – wbm1058 (talk) 20:51, 30 October 2022 (UTC)

Oof, that's a saga. I put in a couple of phab comments today on five-year-old tasks that would probably avoid all of this trouble. Why would the developers not want to keep their sites up to date with some basic cron jobs? Maybe, as you are finding, it is more complicated than that. I really don't know. – Jonesey95 (talk) 01:14, 31 October 2022 (UTC)

WMF governance

Hi, I saw your comment at [3] - but there didn't seem to be a response to it. Please have a look at the WMF bylaws - which ensures that over half of the board is community-elected, and couldn't be bought (if they were, then the community could elect replacements). Plus, the CC-BY-SA license provides the opportunity for a fork if need be. Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 22:46, 25 November 2022 (UTC)

@Mike Peel: congratulations on your "election" and good luck with your hopefully-pending selection. It's unfortunate that the only difference between the terms "election" and "selection" is the single letter "s" but per my search of the bylaws the only elections the Foundation conducts are internal elections of its officers in which only sitting board members participate in such elections. All board members are "selected", not elected, and a board which is theoretically controlled by a billionaire may simply choose not to select to seat a member who was "elected" by the community and may either seat the community's second choice instead or order another "election" until it gets the results it wants. Thanks for dropping by my talk. Regards, wbm1058 (talk) 01:21, 26 November 2022 (UTC)

Update: Mike was appointed on December 7, 2022. "Appointed" ≡ "selected", ≠ "elected". – wbm1058 (talk) 16:07, 10 January 2023 (UTC)

Jersey Films

Any idea why my changes were automatically reverted by this bot (it is a bot, correct?)? They were valid contributions but were immediately reverted. Joelikesagoodstory (talk) 18:38, 18 December 2022 (UTC) I'm new to wiki and I thought this was a bot account for some reason. May I ask why my previous revisions were reverted so I can better learn from my mistakes? Joelikesagoodstory (talk) 18:39, 18 December 2022 (UTC)

@Joelikesagoodstory: Sorry, this is a bit of an awkward thing. You linked to IMDB which has been tagged as a miscapitalization. That's what caught my attention as I'm a "human bot" virtually single-handedly working WP:Database reports/Linked miscapitalizations. I corrected the link to IMDb but then I noticed that you removed the link to Jersey Films which is a redirect to Danny DeVito. Jersey Films is discussed in that biography. There is a related redirect Jersey Group which before 2019 was a short stub article. I don't think there's anything there that isn't covered in DeVito's bio. Per WP:IMDB the content on IMDb is user-generated, and the site is considered unreliable by a majority of editors. A reference to confirm that Michael Shamberg is connected with Jersey Films in some way would be useful but the citation link you provided https://web.archive.org/web/20221212214445/https://www.imdb.com/search/title/?companies=co0010434 is simply a page with a list of films which doesn't mention Shamberg. – wbm1058 (talk) 02:23, 19 December 2022 (UTC)

Interesting! No, not awkward. I'm trying to learn.

So, could it be perhaps best to create a page for Jersey Films citing a reliable source for its productions, etc. instead of having two links to DeVito?

I really thank you for taking the time to educate me. Seriously. Joelikesagoodstory (talk) 03:25, 19 December 2022 (UTC)

Maybe better to revive the Jersey Group article and then make Jersey Films redirect to that. – wbm1058 (talk) 03:29, 19 December 2022 (UTC)

Okay!

So I edit that link, add relevant and well cited info. Then publish? If I'm being cumbersome with taking you on as a wiki mentor without consent please let me know. I like to ask before googling. Bad habit. Thank you again! Joelikesagoodstory (talk) 03:41, 19 December 2022 (UTC)

Yes, you can edit that redirect to convert it back to an article if you can address the reasons why it was made a redirect, i.e. there were no sources cited. There does seem to be some interest in this topic per the page views. – wbm1058 (talk) 03:48, 19 December 2022 (UTC)

Hello again friend.

So it was quite a search as the NJ filings were not digitized until the early 00's. But I have one link from AFI showing DeVito and Shamberg as the main producers with Jersey Films.

https://avid.miraheze.org/wiki/Jersey_Films#:~:text=Jersey%20Films%20is%20an%20American,Jersey%2C%20where%20DeVito%20was%20born.

Another showing a production they did, curated by AFI.

https://catalog.afi.com/Catalog/moviedetails/53886

And finally the divorce of the production company where DeVito remained as the sole shareholder.

https://variety.com/2003/film/news/jersey-films-divorce-finalized-1117886451/

Are these valid to reactivate the page? Would love some direction. I'm grateful for all your help. Joelikesagoodstory (talk) 23:12, 11 January 2023 (UTC)

Miraheze is a wiki hosting service and thus not the sort of WP:reliable source needed for verification of a Wikipedia article. The AFI Catalog is good for getting a list of films where the film production company was Jersey Films, but I think you probably need a little more than just a list of their films. You might peruse other Wikipedia articles about American film production companies to see how others have done it; there are over a thousand of them. And yes, the Variety piece looks like something useful to help get you going. You might get further help at Wikipedia:WikiProject Film where other editors interested in writing about films congregate. Ask questions at WT:WikiProject Film. – wbm1058 (talk) 23:46, 11 January 2023 (UTC)

I appreciate your guidance and apologize if me bothering you is not within policies! You have a concise and terse way of explaining that really helps! Joelikesagoodstory (talk) 02:28, 12 January 2023 (UTC)

Linked miscapitalisations

Thank you for all the good work on fixing miscapitalisations (linked or not). I do something similar with misspellings, and I'm never sure what to do with errors which are the target of piped links, e.g. [[Nordic Countries|countries that are Nordic]]. It's debatable whether they're WP:NOTBROKEN and I wouldn't criticise anyone for fixing them, but I tend to skip them myself. Incidentally, I've engaged with a couple of Kung Hibbe socks and think I can recognise them now; their editing patterns differ very obviously from ours. Merry Christmas, Certes (talk) 19:07, 24 December 2022 (UTC)

Thank you...

...For explaining what was going on with your bot. Steel1943 (talk) 18:13, 25 December 2022 (UTC)

Edit summary

Just an FYI, while film articles are expected to contain spoilers, we don't generally want them in edit summaries. LOL.  BIGNOLE  (Contact me) 16:18, 29 December 2022 (UTC)

"The End Is Nigh"

Just wanted to let you know that what happened Talk:The End Is Nigh was the result of a semi-automated page move process that creates several pages automatically and there is a fair amount of cleanup to be done afterwards. I simply forgot one step for that talk page. ---DOOMSDAYER520 (TALK|CONTRIBS) 17:53, 9 January 2023 (UTC)

Malformed requests

Did you remember to submit your request by using {{subst:Requested move}}? See "Bot considerations"

Just a little question I've had for a time. This hatnote accompanies malformed requests on the WP:RM page. Unless there is a way to point the proposers of malformed requests to this section, then maybe it should read:

Did the nom remember to submit their request by using {{subst:Requested move}}? See "Bot considerations"

(or something similar like "the proposer")

So whenever you have a few minutes to spare please consider updating this. P.I. Ellsworth , ed. ^put'r there 22:00, 9 January 2023 (UTC)

G6 talk page deletions

Why was deletion of Talk:Dusit Central Park considered housekeeping and routine (non-controversial) cleanup? From what I recall, it was first created in the course of a reverted page move, and later created as the talk page of the new article (by me) that replaced the redirect created from the reverted move. Am I remembering incorrectly? --Paul_012 (talk) 14:07, 10 January 2023 (UTC)

at 07:14, 1 June 2022 Paul 012 (you) moved page Talk:Dusit Central Park to Talk:Dusit Thani Bangkok over redirect: Since the content is about the now-demolished building, the new development should probably be a separate article.

Then at 07:31, 16 October 2022‎ you created a new article Dusit Central Park on top of the redirect left behind by that move – another topic with a different scope. This caused the talk page to populate Category:Articles with talk page redirects, a category I created via clever template coding. So I deleted Talk:Dusit Central Park as you did not create a new talk page on top of the redirect to Talk:Dusit Thani Bangkok. Feel free to create a talk page for the article you created on 16 October 2022‎. – wbm1058 (talk) 14:50, 10 January 2023 (UTC)

Hmm. I thought I already un-redirected/created the talk page; I clearly forgot. Thanks for the explanation. --Paul_012 (talk) 14:54, 10 January 2023 (UTC)

PS Maybe adding a short edit summary explaining that the talk pages were redirecting elsewhere next time you go through the task will help stave off confusions like mine, as these deletions are likely to show up on watchlists of people watching the articles (but who might not have noticed the missing talk pages)? --Paul_012 (talk) 15:02, 10 January 2023 (UTC)

Yes, I was asked about a similar deletion back in February 2021. Not bad if the question only comes up once every two years. I'll think about how to tersely explain in the deletion summary. – wbm1058 (talk) 16:37, 10 January 2023 (UTC)

I've created a long list of articles with talk page redirects by making a database query. My initial query found 2828 items, many of which weren't corralled into Category:Articles with talk page redirects because there's no {{R from move}} on them, most likely because they were moved long ago before that template was automatically dropped by page moves. I'll be gradually working through these to resolve them. Many, but far from all, will be fixed by page deletions. Here are some examples of some of the first of such deletions, you can click on the links to see the deletion summary I left. – wbm1058 (talk) 14:33, 15 January 2023 (UTC)

• Talk:15th (Scottish) Division – someone already created a new talk page, which is good. On the revision history, click on "View logs for this page" to see the log of my deletion
  • (G6: Housekeeping and routine (non-controversial) cleanup: new article started 21:31, 23 August 2020‎; deleting redirect)
• Talk:190th (2nd Durham Light Infantry) Brigade
  • (G6: Housekeeping and routine (non-controversial) cleanup: article created 22:10, 5 December 2017‎; deleting redirect)
• Talk:1954 Cupa României
  • (G6: Housekeeping and routine (non-controversial) cleanup: new article started 23:50, 23 September 2015‎‎; deleting redirect)
• Talk:1958 FIFA World Cup qualification (CONMEBOL)
  • (G6: Housekeeping and routine (non-controversial) cleanup: new article started 07:59, 15 December 2015‎‎; deleting redirect)
• Talk:The Chai Walah (this one was flagged by the maintenance category)
  • (G6: Housekeeping and routine (non-controversial) cleanup: new article started 20:03, 11 January 2023‎‎‎; deleting redirect)

Thanks

For this -- I was wondering about that myself when I looked through the database report for linked miscapitalizations. I had excluded a few of them because it was obviously going to give false positives, bt I guess I must have missed a couple (like this)... good catch. jp×g 22:09, 12 January 2023 (UTC)

@JPxG: Yes, thanks – I also made this related edit. Also, this Assemblée nationale edit and this Macedonian Question edit. And I created Imperial Guard (disambiguation) because imperial guard doesn't look like a disambiguation and doesn't conform to WP:DDD. Sometimes I need to second-guess the judgment of the executives who decide what's not acceptable capitalization, few if any of whom are actually administrators. See the earlier discussion here #Bypassing redirects. – wbm1058 (talk) 23:25, 12 January 2023 (UTC)

Indeed, the "Assemblée nationale" redirect being put in the database report is a ludicrous mistake. I think that maybe Wikipedia:Database_reports/Linked_miscapitalizations should use {{Redirect and target}} for stuff like this so that these whoppers can be avoided. jp×g 23:27, 12 January 2023 (UTC)

One more edit I just made. Be careful when de-capitalizing terms that the lower-case advocates deem to not be Proper Names that you usually want to decap the first letter of the title unless it's starting a new sentence or in the infobox. – wbm1058 (talk) 01:16, 13 January 2023 (UTC)

RM close at Casket

I was rather amazed to see this argument in your close:

"Arguments this article is primary topic for casket fall flat when, even after this RM has run for a week editors still allow links from Richie Ashburn, Orangeville, Illinois, and Paul Bearer (LOL), among others. – "

- where on earth do you get the idea it is the responsibility of participants in a RM discussion to clean up all the incoming links? There is absolutely nothing in policy about this, and it seems a very unrealistic expectation. Prior to the move discussion this was a badly neglected and pretty rubbishy stub with no regular editors (my only contribution was this, ten years ago). During a RM discussion is the worst time to start adjusting incoming links, as they may well need changing all over again afterwards. I see you are a regular at RM closes; it is extremely important that such editors do not start making policy up. I'm minded to appeal the close decision, as there wasn't anything much else in it. Johnbod (talk) 18:53, 15 January 2023 (UTC)

@Johnbod: no, it was my responsibility as the closing administrator, per Wikipedia:Requested moves/Closing instructions#Cleaning up after the move, to fix mistargeted wikilinks, which I did, with help from at least one other editor. – wbm1058 (talk) 14:10, 16 January 2023 (UTC)

But what did your close, with the comment that "Arguments this article is primary topic for casket fall flat when, even after this RM has run for a week editors still allow links from ..." mean, if not that it is the responsibility of participants in a RM discussion to clean up all the incoming links, and that failure to do so make their arguments "fall flat"? (my bold) There is no basis for this in policy. Johnbod (talk) 17:36, 22 January 2023 (UTC)

WP:Disambiguation#Is there a primary topic? says "A topic is primary for a term with respect to usage if it is highly likely—much more likely than any other single topic, and more likely than all the other topics combined—to be the topic sought when a reader searches for that term." Primary-topic is applied on a worldwide basis, not just in a subset of English-speaking countries. Before I close any RM where primary-topic status is under discussion, I check "what links here" to confirm the primary-topic claim. This case was an easy close because the claim obviously did not hold up. Per my relevant contributions history I had to "Disambiguate Casket to Coffin" 15 times, and "Disambiguate Casket to Casket (decorative box)" only 9 times. As I said, though, I had help, so there were actually more than 15. When a term is declared ambiguous, it usually gets prompt attention from Wikipedia:Disambiguation pages with links if people monitoring the RM status haven't already taken care of it. Keeping the primary topic means that incorrect links to the decorative box remain in place for months as editors regard their existence as a virtual impossibility. Had these 15+ bad links been fixed before the RM was opened, and someone had committed to monitoring "links here" to catch new bad links, then the case for the decorative boxes being primary topic would have at least had a better chance at getting a consensus.

No arguments were made that the decorative boxes have greater long-term significance than coffins. – wbm1058 (talk) 19:07, 22 January 2023 (UTC)

Cursor

This linked to the redirect. It should happen less often because of some changes ~two years ago, but my experience is that there is a chance of it linking to whatever the cursor is pointing at when I hit Return, rather than the first item in the list, which is usually what I want. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 01:34, 20 January 2023 (UTC)

Speedy deletion nomination of KSRTC (disambiguation)

If this is the first article that you have created, you may want to read the guide to writing your first article.

You may want to consider using the Article Wizard to help you create articles.

A tag has been placed on KSRTC (disambiguation) requesting that it be speedily deleted from Wikipedia. This has been done under section G14 of the criteria for speedy deletion, because it is a disambiguation page which either

• disambiguates only one extant Wikipedia page and whose title ends in "(disambiguation)" (i.e., there is a primary topic);
• disambiguates zero extant Wikipedia pages, regardless of its title; or
• is an orphaned redirect with a title ending in "(disambiguation)" that does not target a disambiguation page or page that has a disambiguation-like function.

Under the criteria for speedy deletion, such pages may be deleted at any time. Please see the disambiguation page guidelines for more information.

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. If the page is deleted, and you wish to retrieve the deleted material for future reference or improvement, then please contact the deleting administrator. Shhhnotsoloud (talk) 15:26, 21 January 2023 (UTC)

I've restored this per my reasons at Talk:KSRTC#Edit-warring over the primary topic. – wbm1058 (talk) 19:56, 27 January 2023 (UTC)

Proastiakos Thessaloniki

Greetings, sir; apologies, I'm used to supporting name changes to articles rather than suggesting them... I do try to read all T&C's regarding Templates procedures, but I messed up this time. As for the name Thessalonica Suburban Railway rather than Thessaloniki Suburban Railway, it seems a glitch was responsible as I had to change it once before but did not notice until you pointed it out... never the less, thank you for pointing this out ✠ Emperor of Byzantium ✠ (talk) 17:03, 26 January 2023 (UTC)

Signpost pages

What was the actual deal with Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2006-09-12/News and Notes and Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2013-12-13/News and notes? I looked at the section in your talk page archives, but I cannot really figure out what was going on there. They seem to have been completely damnatio memoriae'd, and exist only as entries in the old Signpost modules: why did they have to be destroyed? jp×g 06:41, 30 January 2023 (UTC)

Sigh. I got out of bed thinking about what I'd work on today and then you drop by to interrupt my agenda. Right, I dropped this down my personal memory hole as well, so now you're inducing my need to dig this out of my buried memory. User talk:Wbm1058/Archive 5#Signpost page deletions you made is the section in my talk page archives, and now I'm reading it to jog my memory. I also note you mentioned this at Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/Technical#Redirects, indices, etc which you neglected to tell me about here. wbm1058 (talk) 14:56, 30 January 2023 (UTC)

OK, to avoid unnecessary confusion I'll tell you that Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2006-09-12/News and Notes was created @23:41, 31 March 2016 and Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2013-12-13/News and notes was created @16:12, 1 April 2016. The April 1 creation date indicates these were fake Signpost archives created as part of an April Fools joke that the community SNOW-deleted as an "obvious BLP violation in the name of humor" (the LP being Donald Trump). I deleted them to spare the time of a dozen or three editors voting in what surely would be another snowstorm. – wbm1058 (talk) 15:31, 30 January 2023 (UTC)