User:Rich Farmbrough/blog

'' Thoughts, doings and ramblings.

8 August 2017

 * Finally finished first pass of Pseudonyms, at Gatwick Airport awaiting the 11;30 flight to Montreal, for WikiMania 2017.

26 August

 * Finished creating start articles on the various genetic codes.  Some redirects to do, and it would be nice to find out more about the missing tables.
 * Worked over the last week or two on catching up with the listas backlog. Lots still to do.
 * Also a little on an authority control project for Women in Red, but this may need punting over to Helpful Pixie Bot.
 * No time to work on pseudonyms, I will return to this soon I hope.
 * Created User_talk:Rich_Farmbrough/Research to gather some of my research over the years, and maybe update it.
 * Other ongoing work includes winners of [{the Queen's Award for Enterprise Promotion]], where a number have been deleted, uploading and categorising my Stamford photos (and others), and writing articles for the other Canterbury Pilgrims.

5 July
Completed today the first pass of K of my pseudonyms project. This actually means I am about 3/4 of the way through, since I have done parts of the list ahead of K.

10 January
Missing the London 101 meetup today, which is a shame. However I have been making good progress with which returns the ISO 3166-1 or ISO 3166-2 region code for various infoboxes. It gets the country code successfully almost all the time and the subdivision code about 87% of the time (up from about 60% yesterday). The major problem was the French Regions, which re-organised on 1 January, and do not have ISO codes yet. Others were that Lesotho and Ivory Coast regions were uncoded, the need to disambiguate Districts/Regions/Govenorates form other level subdivisions of the same name, accented letters, such as Île-de-France vs Ile-de-France and the almost universal use (500+ articles) of "Punjab, India", leading to the slightly odd input "India Punjab India".

19 October
Completed today the first pass of the "C" section of J. F. Clarke's "Dictionary of Pseudonyms" - made stubs for Yvonne Kapp, Rupert Gleadow (Justin Case), George C. Jenks, V. F. Calverton and John R. Coryell among other work. There are over 440 redlinks on my work page. "D" is ten pages and should be relatively quick.

Today I received a copy of ''English Architecture Public and Private: Essays for Kerry Downs" (1993) which has an extensive essay on the Simeon Monument in Reading.

A week or so back, I submitted a request to have the remedy from my arb case discontinued, despite some disappointing responses it seems to be moving towards at least discussion of a relaxation, which is major progress.

23 September
Just completed the first pass of the "B" section of J. F. Clarke's "Dictionary of Pseudonyms". Stubbed Douglas Ritchie also known as "Colonel Britton", the rest of the work was mainly creating redirects, adding or correcting a few pseudonyms and building the missing articles list.

Good meetup at Oxford on Sunday, though we missed RexxS, HJ Mitchell, and number of other regulars, and irregulars.

Might be worth linking to a nice blog post about me at WMF, by Syed Muzammiluddin.

17 August
Google Books are very good at removing copyright violations, and at correcting dates etc. on older volumes, when informed of problems (if not always very quick). Today I set them a challenge, asking for several hundred books to be removed. Here's the message I sent about The Annie Lennox Handbook:

It's hard to provide details in 1000 characters, and it's annoying when Google decides I'm somehow dangerous and asks for captchas, but they do provide a generally good service.

25 July
Pseudonyms! I have been working on pseudonym redirects for some time, driven from J. F. Clarke's "Dictionary of Pseudonyms". Today I finished "A". Which is better than it seems, because I have done about three times as much scattered through the alphabet, including "X, Y and Z".

To see the progress and the missing articles you can peek at [{User:Rich Farmbrough/temp13]].

Approximately 85% of entries have an article, which usually needs a redirect/hatnote/dab entry/dab page creating from the alternative names(s). The rest become a list of missing articles.

8 November
Unfortunately unable to make the Cambridge meetup today.

It is curious the number of articles that I get stuck creating, and come across an open tab for some time later. I'm going to list a few here:
 * Linda Marchant or Linda F. Marchant a notable anthropologist (there are other Linda Marchants who may be notable) - ran out of time.
 * Elizabeth Weinberg, commercial photographer, trouble finding sources to establish notability, but has won award(s?). Possibly the resources are drowned by rather able self-publicity, or possibly not yet WP:NOTABLE
 * Rouge flambé a red pottery glaze, used by Royal Doulton, pieces are much sought after.  Also a cadmium and ?? glass colouring.

While I'm at it Kendeffy Castle was created by a banned user some time ago, and deleted, I am tempted to say, out of spite. Mourgoula is a place in Mali - where did I pick this red-link up from?

There are, of course, many lists of missing articles, but one that interests me is User:MadMax/Encyclopedia11, I managed to reduce it from 47 to 18 articles back in April, it would be nice to see it completed. (I turned one more link blue, and I have ordered the source book, so I hope to turn the rest blue soon.)

00:01, 9 November 2014 (UTC)

16 June
Another 414 talk page threads prepped for proper archiving. All the rest of the work will be behind the scenes.

Can't do anything substantive about the calls for assistance at BOTREQ except prepare article lists off-wiki.

My attempt to rebuild the SPI table has been stopped by AGK. Have been trying for a few weeks to work out the best way forward. To Arb or not to Arb?

21 May
Virtually the whole day taken up with behind-the-project stuff (SPI mainly). Some changes I made to got reverted with a snarky edit summary, so I had to write a whole chunk to start a discussion. Curiously some vandalism on Formation of rocks had survived many other vandal/revert cyclces.

I futzed a little with Nobility stubs. Stubs are crying out for automation, I have always thought so. Managed to disperse a few, but really AI si the way to go.

Also worked on some off-line projects, that may be of interest in a few weeks or months.

17 May
The AGK débâcle continues to take up far to much of my time. Roger Davies once asked why contributing to an arb case (my own) took so much time. I can only guess that it is because I prefer to take the time and trouble to ensure that in matters that pertain to editor behaviour I am as diligent as I can be, and careful over my wording to avoid giving unnecessary offence, escalating conflict, or making unintended accusations or implications. No doubt I still fail from time to time, but at least I make the effort.

It's notable that the blocking of ClueBot III which I contested is now causing problems. I'm sure they will eventually get sorted out, but we appear to be down to one archive bot now, even that has slight problem.

Updated my FAQ - loads of stuff about bots and the like taken out. I want to find out how many times it was read, seems to have been a couple of thousand at least.

Archiving my talk page is maybe 50% complete. The rest of the mess caused by Arbcom denying me the ability to use Femto Bot will probably take another 3-4 days work. Oh well.

Today in Trinidad and Tobago has gone by the board too. I might try and catch up with that, or just re-start.

01:39, 18 May 2014 (UTC)

25 April

 * Clarification closed- without any clarification. Interesting points
 * Several arbs replied "declined" - you can't deny a clarification.   Language is a key to attitude - as our "dispassionate" friend remarked, there should not be any attitude, except perhaps a bit more faith in human nature.
 * As Erick Haugen remarked I literally have no idea why someone who is told not to automate himself making feature requests for someone else to build is immediately indicative of bad faith.
 * A minor Fram attack occurred on one of the talk pages, somewhere. Possibly worth creating a manual list of their interventions one day.


 * Jagged 85
 * I Have a list of articles that I want to look at closely. I'm going to ask if there is likely to be an objection to uploading the list.


 * Archiving:
 * Made some progress, but Lowercase Sigma Bot seems to come around once in a blue moon. I want a responsive solution.
 * Set the blog to archive too, that will work nicely - perhaps.

00:56, 26 April 2014 (UTC)

24 April

 * Three ring circuses have nothing on this. See WP:RFCA.


 * Working on WP:Jagged 85 cleanup mostly.
 * Touched a number of Anglo Saxon articles.
 * Popped into Tea House a few times, found Jagged 85 even affecting stuff there!
 * Wanted to create an image for Cayley's sextic, but time has been stolen.

Jagged
So one of the claims Jagged 85 introduced in 2008 based on an unreliable source, was still in 10 Wikipedia articles. It is also copied to over 190 external sites, not all by any means mirrors. It was propagated across en:Wikipedia by cut-and-paste, sometimes sourced, more often not. It is clearly troubling that we don't have the resources to get to grips with this, and other big cleanup operations. I have written some preliminary analysis software, of course the results cannot be shared on-wiki, without invoking the wrath of the Arbgods.

Big oil and others
I looked (relatively) extensively at BP/Deepwater Horizon before my break. It seems a lot of progress has been made there, but there is definitely a maintenance problem:
 * 1) Ancillary articles are outdated (no-one cares like they did in 2011-12)
 * 2) Updating of financial and other information drives out historical data, just as important to an encyclopaedia
 * 3) We simply do not cover business, especially big business (and the oil majors are FMTB) in anything like the depth we should, especially when they are not operating in Europe, Japan or the Anglosphere.

A good example is the subsidiaries of Total, some of these are multi-billion entities, yet we have only the one line in Subsidiaries of Total about them.

00:56, 26 April 2014 (UTC)


 * "We simply do not cover business, especially big business (and the oil majors are FMTB) in anything like the depth we should..."
 * So true!
 * I'm sure that the PR departments of many companies see Wikipedia as just another way of getting their message across. Boscaswell   talk  14:20, 15 March 2016 (UTC)

19 January

 * 1) And we're back -  sort of.....

Rich Farmbrough, 05:05, 19 January 2012 (UTC).

11 January 2012: Department of Redundancy Department
"During today's present day, Palafox Place has shown a enormous amount of showing growing potential in growing, including in restaurants, clubs, entertainment, marketing, and more."

Rich Farmbrough, 12:06, 11 January 2012 (UTC).

27 January

 * 1) You have to admit, that's coool. Rich Farmbrough, 20:40, 27 January 2012 (UTC).

Rich Farmbrough, 20:40, 27 January 2012 (UTC).

14 February

 * 1) From the toolserver MZMcBride coding challenge...

Rich Farmbrough, 22:04, 14 February 2012 (UTC).

26 March

 * 1) Would have been nice to have had some sleep tonight, but seems that the WikiGods had other ideas. What is it that make some  otherwise intelligent people unable to see beyond their noses on Wikipedia?

Rich Farmbrough, 06:03, 26 March 2012 (UTC).

20 March

 * After an enforced absence, what has happened?
 * 1) ArbCom is in all sorts or difficulties.  They have made some good decisions, most of which are reversing previous decisions.  Also really screwed the pooch on a number of issues
 * 2) Kumioko is blocked, with a strange block summary that seems inaccurate
 * 3) AGK has abused his checkuser power in  a direct repeat of the Courcelles incident
 * 4) Sandstein has attempted to restrict people's ability to respond at Arbitration Enforcement, and failed
 * 5) Coren has been bullied out of ArbCom - on the plus side Hersfold also quit
 * 6) Fram has told people to "Fuck off" and taken people to arbCom and generally behaved in the objectionable way he always does.
 * 7) Wikipediocracy continue their social sabotage, enabled by people who should know better.


 * Furthermore
 * 1) None of the projects I was involved from a year ago in have been picked up by anyone else.
 * 2) No-one has shown any reason why reducing conflict between editors merits a 2 month block.  And on the contrary with me blocked they ended up at Arbitration.


 * And the case against Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ) which I thought had at least some merit was just wiki-lawyers extracting their pound of flesh for the totally innocuous creating of Castle_Meyenburg.

Rich Farmbrough, 09:27, 20 March 2013 (UTC).