User talk:Alai/Archive 12

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Categorization
Glad to see steady progress! :)

Just out of curiosity, how long does it generally take your bot to go through the 1,000 new pages on the Special:Uncategorizedpages list? If I ever want to help manually, what's the best way to get in there? Start at the end and work backwards, while the bot works forwards? --Elonka 08:08, 19 January 2007 (UTC)

Bill Slavick question
Hi there,

Could you have a look at Bill Slavick? An editor is insisting that, despite the fact that it is only a few sentences, it should not be stubbed. The editor also deliberately created the stub conditions by drastically shortening the article and even nominaged it for AfD, which it passed. I don't remember ever reading about a short article that is notable but should not be expanded. Thanks!--Thomas.macmillan 03:42, 20 January 2007 (UTC)

Uncat stubs
User:Grutness has just deleted the categories and templates for this cleanup programme (I've restored them). Might be useful if you can point him to the discussion that got it set up. Grutness is a good contributor, so this would not have been a whim. I'm leaving him a note. Rich Farmbrough, 22:36 20 January 2007 (GMT).
 * OK sorted, just some minor confusion. Rich Farmbrough, 22:53 20 January 2007 (GMT).

Soft-drink-stub
Ok. That was weird. I guess I copied and pasted the stub name from the category name and forgot to put in the dashes. Thanks for catching it.

Take a look at Soft-drink-stub in the bottom area. I have started using a standard (without the Food & Drink space anyway) of checking if categories should be automatically added or not:

On a userbox:

In a stub tag:

That ifeq test checks to see if the attribute categories is set to no. If it is, is suppresses the category from displaying on the page where it is transcluded. This is very helpful when the stub (or any template that uses this feature) is displayed on a page listing WikiProject (or other) templates. Before using that trick, the sample templates pages were showing up in all sorts of weird places that did not make sense (the WikiProject is a member of the WikiProject, the WikiProject is a stub, the WikiProject enjoys beer, etc.)

Example:

Produces:

Notice that this page is not listed as a stub, even though there is a stub tag added to it. With most stub tags, this would have identified your talk page as a stub, which probably is not desirable.

Why plural (categories) instead of singular (category)? Well, because several templates I design can generate multiple categories. I thought it would make more sense to keep the attribute named the same across all templates I develop. Also, there might already be an attribute named "category", but hopefully less chance of a conflict with the plural (if integrating this feature in with an existing template).

How do you like it? Is there a place to discuss that as a possible recognized (but not mandatory, of course) feature or standard in template designs?

Thanks! -- Willscrlt (  Talk &middot; Cntrb  ) 23:40, 21 January 2007 (UTC)


 * I see your point about editing and feature creep, and I greatly respect your input. If it's alright with you, I will keep using it within the WikiProject Food & Drink (and it's subprojects) since it is already in use in several other templates there, but not promote it outside of that Project space. If it catches on, ok. If not, ok. Sound like a plan to you? (You can respond here.) -- Willscrlt (  Talk &middot; Cntrb  ) 07:57, 22 January 2007 (UTC)


 * Sounds like a plan to me, indeed. Alai 15:09, 22 January 2007 (UTC)

Alaibot First Nations stub-sorting
Hi; I'm guessing that Alaibot is your creation; I've not been aware of the First Nations stub before, so maybe you can tell me - does it index/sort into the Indigenous people's Wikiproject the way the NorthAm-native stub did? If not, is there a way to make sure it does so, as the point of placing the NorthAm-native stub in the first place was to identify Indigenous people's Wikiproject-related articles. I realize the talkpage template may do the same thing, but without identifying articles as stubs. Or is this a new template; or just one that wasn't being used as it apparentl should have been? Whichever; I'm just concerned about coordinating BC First Nations content with Indigenous peoples project content.Skookum1 07:36, 25 January 2007 (UTC)
 * Ah, that does answer my question (your latest on my talkpage); so long as it's already part of the Indigenous project, that's fine; I didn't have time to discuss the stubsorting agenda there, or I probably would have recommended there be a separate BCFirstNations category/stub, as BC has about 60% of all Canada's governmental First Nations, plus the same proportion of indigenous languages; this category may require further division, as there are distinctions between government articles (bearing "First Nation" or "Nation" in the title, or that are tribal councils or other bodies, e.g. treaty groups, educational organizations etc) and those that are "pure culture/history" articles (which would be without "First Nation" or "Nation" etc in the title, or otherwise non-governmental in content); are the na-lang stubs still intact (various languages spill across national boundaries, for one thing....).Skookum1 08:35, 25 January 2007 (UTC)

WP:Stub sort: Cat:GA univ stubs
From my stub suggestion: I created it, and will populate it as soon as I have time. Should Category:University of Georgia stubs be deleted (and all of the stubs within moved to this category)? —Disavian (talk/contribs) 01:07, 25 January 2007 (UTC) If so, how does one go about doing that? —Disavian (talk/contribs) 20:34, 25 January 2007 (UTC)

Green grass
Thanks for your note--it does seem like shouting down a well sometimes, but I just have to hope that if we keep talking about this common sense will prevail. Or at least survive. Nareek 11:35, 28 January 2007 (UTC)

When it arises
Hi! Was wondering what this was all about. If you're deleting such refs, you may be undoing a planned, albeit delayed, implimentation of stuff I'm doing between here and the commons. Hence, if you find something backlinked with Fab&#32;artus on it, I'd appreciate a query. Thanks! // Fra nkB 05:52, 29 January 2007 (UTC)

re:
 * It's a list of category "redlinks", by number of instances, from the November db dump. I'm not systematically eliminating them myself, but I think that User:RobertG has a robot that's doing something-or-other with them.  If you (or he) would like an updated list, please let me know.  I'm not sure I quite follow the latter part of your message:  are you saying you're deliberately creating these?  If so, are they from some particular page?  Alai 06:18, 29 January 2007 (UTC)


 * See Commonscat1Ra (list among several)... I'm tagging categories with interwiki links and cross connecting commons categories to main articles, plus sharing templates with newer sisters (see Interwikitmp-grp) and consolidating our templates documentationwise (see Template doc page pattern) before exporting those. The adminsistrative needs are similar on most wiki's, save perhaps wikinews, and to a slight extent wiktionary, neither of which use categories extensively. I also don't imagine wiki-media needs my blessings, but putting a uniform system in place as far as predictable tools template category names and schemes, plus sharing the tools with backlinks to a master copy will make those of us that work 'There' more productive, and vice versa when we cross the interwiki divide.    So now and then I create a new category. I usually make sure I've tagged 5-10 somethings before generating an actual page. I'd seen one of those on that page, as another backlink showed the page to me. I've had some links like that edited out, pre-implementation. NBD, but 'tis silly for one to work such they undo what work someone else has done. Since you had the list, I thought I'd ask. Haven't dealt with you before, so nice to do so. Definitely seen you around... I tend to lurk more than post on the forum pages... I'm usually several weeks behind the threads! Sigh! Best wishes and thanks! // Fra nkB  06:51, 29 January 2007 (UTC)
 * Oh yeah, I was wiki-missing for three months with real life matters, so things are in catch up mode... Shrug. Getting there. Have even been getting help since I returned. ttfn // Fra nkB 06:54, 29 January 2007 (UTC)


 * Thanks for the kind words. I'm still not sure I quite understand:  the page you link to doesn't seem to have any category redlinks, just a template and a mainspace redlink.  Is that what you mean, or were there previous category redlinks there?  Sorry if I'm being slow here.  As I say, I'm not doing anything about these directly, as if there's a small number of cat-redlinks for a relatively short time, I can't see it running into problems in general.  Hopefully anyone "fixing" category redlinks will be trying to make an informed decision as to which cases to edit or remove the link, and in which cases to create the category.  Alai 03:35, 30 January 2007 (UTC)


 * Apologies... I'm not sure where I swerved so you didn't follow, as I wasn't citing any page with redlinks that I recollect or can see on either talk page. The 'links' were just to give you a rough idea of the scope of the preliminary experimental trial tagging&mdash;with a working system, others are using it, and so has begun burgeoning. No publicity yet, either. (I'll take that as an endorsement... others are finding it useful!)    But I was talking about how I might be creating some redlinked cats in general... such as (1) below (with a name error), contents pending an change in templates I am working with, and (3) below, the 'good' destination... [(2) also has a redlink cat... see below]
 * Goof creation: Category:Exported templates used only on Mediawiki commons currently awaiting departure of it's contents via judicious changes in a few templates.
 * and
 * Category redirect2 however has a redlink category, haven't yet gathered enough experience whether to keep and initialize said category, or delete it. Hence, it's a 'proto-stub', if you'll allow, and one day may blossom or get edited away to the big bit bucket in the sky.
 * Category:Shared templates used only on Wikimedia Commons
 * The second (newly created) cat is filled with redlinks using Cat see also such as I was discussing... planning and writing templates, part of the 'design cycle' is figuring how they fit into the category scheme. Whether you need such tracking and the like. These are now planned additions, and have to be coded into interwikitmp-grp inside the appropriate, which will also populate them, save unreliably. There is another particularly useful template Template list which is like '' will allow the same names in a list to be used to navigate across to other sisterproject's equivilent page by specifying a single additional parameter.


 * Such allows tagging, building a list's contents from a category page, then (Alas!) manually checking each link to verify it's contents are indeed where I said they were when tagging and porting.


 * If not defined, the tool has reached the right page on the right sister, and I can back navigate to our source template using the 'Sistertmp' templates in preview screen (in this case, navigate back to our template, enter edit mode, copy it, back up to the sister and paste it in... call it taking about a minute flat from check failure to resuming the checking at the next in the list. Tedious, but feasible.


 * I pretty much follow the same process from the auto-links in the interwikitmp-grp (below) when originally tagging a tools template for exportation, assuming I'm exporting and/or updating at that time. Whenever I do the exporting, the links are going to the correct page on the sister. The case above was verification of that, as it's all manual, and one can make a mistake, or be interupted (Say the phone rings, the kids have a fight, what ever...) and loose one's place, and so on.


 * My newest generation tagging scheme uses a fairly sophisticated template which has the capability to individually track which sisters are 'enabled' when tagging a shared template, and so to also categorize them... Hence the redlink cats in (2) became feasible whereas in the old version everything went into one tracking category and there was no way to tell whether it was accurate.


 * So that's the long short of when I create relinked cats... usually when coding templates or scheming how it all fits together. After a while that gets implemented, and the redlinks go blue or get eliminated.   Bottom line, other than an explanation about why that page was, I wasn't asking you for anything, an you needn't be concerned. I do have to get around to having a chat with User:RobertG, as I've planned for a while now. I'm hoping we can get him to run his bot over on the commons once a week or so... we're rescheming and reorganizing maps categories in a top down heirarchy [an entirely different project, but an indirect ancestor of this one] and we've lost access to the bot we used when last persuing that task the end of last summer. So thanks for the interest and concern. See you around! // Fra nkB  05:33, 30 January 2007 (UTC)
 * re: OK, that's a bit clearer, give or take some details I don't think I have to worry about. Or, at least as likely, I'm thinking a bit more clearly.  If you'd find an update of the list of redlinks useful, let me know, and I'll see if I can unearth the script for it.  (I can't immediately help you if you're looking for the same on commons, as I don't have that db downloaded and rebuilt.)  Alai 05:07, 31 January 2007 (UTC)


 * Ahhhh- you're one of those nefarious script people! They didn't even have a dream of one back when I went to school. Well, maybe for my second masters. RegEx parsing was all the rage in all of computing, and there was this funny little language called C that came out of nowhere and kind of took over many things. It beat the heck out of assembler, and so we used it for embedded systems from then on. I've only run across one company since that uses another language--Good old Pascal. The CS types probably had some kind of course discussing work on scripts... but DOS ran on IBM-PC's, not PCs.  A few computer generations later I kind of remember waiting forever for windows 2 to boot--was a real drag as my best man/friend was (and is still) a MAC expert and watching his old Mac boot was amazing... my how things have changed. I need to get back to work! But if I can think of anything I need a script for, I'll pick on you! Or are Bots smart scripts? Do you have to understand one to run it? Cheers and Good Morning or Night, as applies. I just passed Midnight! Yikes! Been a long day. // Fra nkB  05:39, 31 January 2007 (UTC)

Stop being careless
Your bot is adding "uncategorised" to user pages and to transcluded pages. Pleae stop doing this. Spanish flu research is transcluded in two pages, Spanish flu and Flu research, as it says at the top of the page. WAS 4.250 20:16, 29 January 2007 (UTC)

"List of people by name" uncat-tagging
_ _ In response to your query that interrupts my pleasant conversation with a very nice 'bot [wink], all i recall w/o research is that
 * it probably was 2 weeks to 2 months ago,
 * i presumed no bot was involved, and
 * i left a note, which i think went unanswered.

I appreciate your work (and that of all our 'bot drivers that i've noticed), expect that i could find it quicker than you would (by browsing my user-talk contribs), and would suggest that i rather than you seek it, if you think, in light of the above, that it is likely to help your work. _ _ Thanks for all. --Jerzy•t 20:51, 30 January 2007 (UTC) Mos' def'. And thanks for the rapid diligence! --Jerzy•t 21:22, 30 January 2007 (UTC)

BJBot
The bot so far has been a great success, tagging 10,044 images out of the list you posted. I just had a few questions about how you are querying the database dumps and such: BJ Talk 05:35, 31 January 2007 (UTC)
 * Are you importing the database dump into MySQL?
 * What databases are you using to generate that list?
 * What queries are you using? (you were saying something about a DB you had to generate to do it)
 * Thanks! I got the full list in the email and it should be a week+ before this list is finshed :). BJ Talk 04:07, 2 February 2007 (UTC)

SLT stubs
Hi Alai - I'd appreciate it if you would have a look at Requests_for_comment/Yugayuga, since you have seen the edits which are the cause of it all. Please comment, even if you agree with Yugayuga that my proposal for deletion of these stub types included bad comments about Sri Lankan Tamils and showed by (quote) "ugly racist face". Grutness...wha?  06:33, 31 January 2007 (UTC)

User:Alai/oldcats
I saw your postings at Category_talk:Category_needed, and I also discovered this page User:Alai/oldcats. Would it be possible to update this with the January dump? I know Martin used to do this and it was indeed very handy. Especially to catch old vandalised articles. Garion96 (talk) 13:29, 31 January 2007 (UTC)
 * Great, tnx. No, a special category is not necessary I think. Just the page would be handy, one can simply remove them from the list when done. Garion96 (talk) 23:42, 31 January 2007 (UTC)
 * For me, you don't even have to put the old categories there. It makes the page too large. But it works, tomorrow I will check some out. I did put some sections in there for easier editing. Thanxs, Garion96 (talk) 01:28, 1 February 2007 (UTC)
 * That one is even better. :) Tnx, Garion96 (talk) 07:53, 1 February 2007 (UTC)
 * Btw, not all of them have/had their categories removed. Antony Kay for instance. Garion96 (talk) 08:12, 1 February 2007 (UTC)
 * I put a message out on the village pump here since boy, that's a big list. :) Hope it helps. Also don't change to name of the list now. :) Garion96 (talk) 19:34, 1 February 2007 (UTC)

Random Smiley Award
 For your contributions to Wikipedia and humanity in general, you are hereby granted the coveted Random Smiley Awardoriginated by Pedia-I  (Explanation and Disclaimer)

--TomasBat (Talk) 23:02, 31 January 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for thanking me! --TomasBat (Talk) 23:34, 31 January 2007 (UTC)

Apologies
I have to apologise because I created another large number of cricket season templates in bulk before I realised that you had run your Alaibot. The articles are all Indian and West Indian seasons, about 120 in all and they are in cricket-stub, which you were trying to reduce. I have made sure that the Australian and New Zealand seasons I've added subsequently went to the new stub categories.

If it's not too much trouble, could you please do another sweep of cricket-stub to move the Indian and WI seasons? Incidentally, we now have a stub or article for all first-class seasons worldwide so there won't be any more. Thanks and all the best. --BlackJack | talk page 06:39, 2 February 2007 (UTC)

pagelinks
Did you ever get your issues importing pagelinks.sql resolved? I'm trying to the page links as well, and the only references I can find are your posts asking the same questions. Bkkbrad 16:52, 2 February 2007 (UTC)
 * FYI, I think I found a fast solution to the problem. --Bkkbrad 21:56, 4 February 2007 (UTC)

redirect album list
Great catch!!! I'll work on getting rid of a few of them... I've crossed them off the list - hope that's what you wanted (or just remove them?).

In the process I noticed that there was a bit of discussion on the redirect page, so I've offered a simple caution to put there in place of the album template. Hope that was ok... if not, just take them out.

Ciao - and thanks for the great work. SkierRMH 07:56, 3 February 2007 (UTC)


 * Seems fine to me. I'd think either striking or deleting would work, whatever people working on the page want to do.  Alai 16:30, 3 February 2007 (UTC)

Another SLT stub
Hi Alai - I seem to have missed one of the SLT stub types when I nominated the other three for deletion a few days ago, and for some odd reason I'm hesitant to add this to SFD myself - any chance you could? The reason I missed it is that it's an article pretending to be a template (so it wasn't on the newpages template log). It's SLT bio stub. Unused, unusable, probably speediable, but if I did something about it there'd probably be hell to pay from one editor in particular... Grutness...wha?  10:25, 3 February 2007 (UTC)

Botswana stubs
Hi Alai. I am not sure what happened with this. I created the Botswana-bio-stub and Botswana-politician-stub templates and was sorting them. However, now that I put the Botswana-bio-stub template on an article, it disappears from the Botswana-stub cat, even though that cat is upmerged to the Botswana stub. Could you figure out what is happening? Thanks--Thomas.macmillan 23:09, 3 February 2007 (UTC)
 * Yea there are some still missing. Check out Thomas Tlou and Unity Dow. They are tagged but do not show up on the page. They did but I did something I thought was simple last night and it changed it. Check out the history of template:Botswana-bio-stub--Thomas.macmillan 00:03, 4 February 2007 (UTC)
 * Much Appreaciated!--Thomas.macmillan 00:42, 4 February 2007 (UTC)
 * It might make sense, but it says on the top of the page that African people should be labeled with the tag only if they do not have a national template and category, which all (independent) countries do. Do you think that should be changed?--Thomas.macmillan 04:49, 4 February 2007 (UTC)

Re:Ohio stubs
I'm not sure how much you're already aware, so I'll tell you in short: some Ohio counties already had township articles, but most had either none or very few. A week or so ago, I decided to create a template for my home county, featuring both municipalities and townships, since it already had well-developed township articles. Since this went well, I decided to do the same for other counties with all township articles already created. Since this went well, I thought "why stop with counties that already have them? They're not hard to create!" Therefore, I began creating these articles on a copy/paste format. I'm hoping to get the rest of the state done in the not-too-distant future.

Currently, of the 88 counties in Ohio, 61 counties have all township articles in existence, although many of them (mostly the counties whose townships I added this week or so) have just "__ Township is a township in __ County, Ohio" or "__ Township is one of the __ townships of __ County, Ohio" as their actual text. Of the other 27 counties, almost every county has some articles created, but most have very few. With a few exceptions (such as Lake and Cuyahoga with few, and Washington with 22), most Ohio counties have between twelve and twenty townships. We can say that, for each county for which I created plenty of articles (24 in number), and for each of the remaining counties, there would be somewhere in the mid-teens (perhaps 15 for a pure estimate) of such articles. Let's say, therefore, that I created perhaps 360 such articles, and that perhaps 400 more remain.

As far as the stubs themselves: might I suggest something like Ohio-twp-stub for all Ohio townships? Since there are almost always fewer than twenty of these per county, and since each county generally doesn't have too many articles other than its municipalities (which generally aren't stubs) and townships, it might well be overdoing it to give each county its own stub. I'd prefer not to have to do all the re-stubbing; could we perhaps give that task to a bot? I understand that somebody would have to do it otherwise, so if we can't give the task to a bot, I'd be willing to start. Nyttend 14:13, 4 February 2007 (UTC)


 * Actually, with almost no exceptions, municipalities are not stubs. Virtually all municipalities have detailed geographic information, a map pinpointing their location within their county and the state, and detailed census information.  There really isn't too much of anything that is seen in all Ohio counties in large numbers other than municipalities and townships, so townships are the only plentiful type of stub articles.  Nyttend 01:32, 5 February 2007 (UTC)


 * I'm not sure what you're meaning with "per-county templates", whether you mean a per-county stub or a template like Logan County, Ohio, so I'll just give you what you're asking for, the list of counties to be worked on:

All other counties have had all township articles created and templates (such as the aforesaid Logan County template) created and applied to township and municipal articles. Many of these counties already have Logan County-style templates, and some already have all township articles created (Ashtabula, Butler, Geauga, Medina, Portage, Warren), but not yet applied to all such articles. Moreover, other people have been creating a few township articles recently, and virtually every county has at least one township article. I hope this is what you're hoping for; if not, please let me know!

By the way, I really think we should place Ashland and Richland in a region, even if it means being arbitrary; it would seem odd not to have them anywhere. Nyttend 15:33, 8 February 2007 (UTC)


 * Counties that don't have all their townships done yet are Brown, Carroll, Clermont, Columbiana, Coshocton, Cuyahoga, Delaware, Fairfield, Fayette, Franklin, Greene, Holmes, Jefferson, Knox, Lake, Licking, Madison, Mahoning, Montgomery, Muskingum, Pickaway, Preble, Tuscarawas, and Union. I know that's a lot (over a quarter of the state), but I don't know what I'll be doing first.  Actually, first I'll be doing Ashtabula, Portage, and Geauga, but they already have all their articles, so it will take a little while to get around to it.  Nyttend 19:29, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

another redirect page problem
As I've been whittlin' away at the redirect talk page/album template problem, I noticed another one (which I've fixed when I caught them) - it appears that bunches of the redirect pages were given categories and/or stubs. Is there an easy way to get a list of any redirect page (or redirect talk page) that has a category or a stub so that we can get rid of those as well? SkierRMH 22:09, 4 February 2007 (UTC)

My RfA
Hey Alai,

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

Naturally, I am still becoming accustomed to using the new tools, so if you have suggestions or feedback, or need anything please let me know. - Gilliam 21:25, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

Stub code
I just noticed (and fixed) a problem with US-film-actor-1970s-stub, which you created, and since I've seen other stubs with the same problem, I'm assuming the problem is with whatever you and others are using as a template for making stub templates. Specifically, it lacked the closing for the table before the. Back when the server would automagically fix the problem it wasn't one, but now that it doesn't, it is. Specifically, it causes a stub template lacking that to fall to the bottom of the page, no matter whether there is something (such as another stub template) that comes after it. Caerwine Caer’s whines 23:29, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

WVVA & WVFX
The bot you use tagged these TV stations as Ohio TV stations when they are very much in West Virginia. I think your bot is not working properly. Reverts have been done on those pages, so no worries there. - SVRTVDude 03:51, 6 February 2007 (UTC)
 * Ah, gotcha. I know WVFX serves like one county in OH...don't think WVVA does (but am not sure).  I will give the other stations in WV a once-over to make sure they are categorized properly.  Stay warm....SVRTVDude 10:18, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

Reverted vandalism
Hi Alai, I reverted some vandalism to your user page and warned the IP user. Take care, Ruhrfisch 21:59, 6 February 2007 (UTC)
 * You are very welcome - glad to be of assistance. Ruhrfisch 01:39, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

About MenasimBot
Can I start working on the new job now??  Menasim ( discuss  |  ) 11:02, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

Adminship
Hi Alai,

Thanks for your support on my RfA. I have already encountered my first dilemna as an admin: when speedily deleting articles, should I also delete the talk page if it's only content is mentioning the fact that the content of the article is a copyvio?--Carabinieri 17:32, 8 February 2007 (UTC)