User talk:Aranel/archive2

This is an archive of User talk:Aranel from November and December 2004. Please do not edit this page—any comments or additions should be directed to User talk:Aranel.

Propaganda category
Hello. I've noticed that the propaganda discussion has been removed from the categories for deletion page. The Category:Propaganda still exists though there were twice as many votes for deletion than there were for keep. Where does it go from here? Thanks. Grice 11:36, 3 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Transformation semigroup
Hi Sarah, I noticed in the above page (renamed from 'semigroups') that you removed the original ref. That's OK with me, but I thought it useful to have it mentioned - so why remove it? Moreover, you being a Tolkien fan I wonder how on Earth you got to my page..?.. Just curious, Nico B. 09:00, 1 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Dispute resolution
Hi, Sarah. I saw your question from about a week at Wikipedia talk:Dispute resolution. I don't know whether you got any help. If not, maybe we can help each other -- because I need help. Thanks if you're interested. Maurreen 08:25, 2 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Congratulations!
Congratulations! It's my pleasure to let you know that, consensus being reached, you are now an administrator. You should read the relevant policies and other pages linked to from the administrators' reading list before carrying out tasks like deletion, protection, banning users, and editing protected pages such as the Main Page. Most of what you do is easily reversible by other sysops, apart from page history merges and image deletion, so please be especially careful with those. You might find the new administrators' how-to guide helpful. Cheers! -- Cecropia | explains it all ® 16:39, 4 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Category
Thanks for fixing the category on Abydos. I'd just noticed I'd done it wrong when it was suddenly fixed. KorbenDirewolf 20:48, 5 Nov 2004 (UTC) Also, thanks for the suggestion on the episode guide stuff. I'll have to do some more thinking on that. KorbenDirewolf 18:48, 10 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Talk:Legendarium
I apologize. A stupid comment with the signature date as its only excuse. Feel free to delete it (I don't do it myself because I don't want to appear as trying to hide my less helpful contributions). dab 11:28, 8 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Thanks
I've been rather heated on the whole Neopets issue (as you've probably noticed) and you've managed to state everything I wanted to and keep your head cool at the same time. My level of Wikistress seems to be on the rise lately due to several unrelated articles as well. So thanks. That's all I really wanted to say. Reene (&#12522;&#12491;) 19:19, Nov 17, 2004 (UTC)

List of Biblical Stories
this is how lists are rendered not as seperate list articles. CheeseDreams 23:20, 17 Nov 2004 (UTC)

User:Aranel/Sarah
Hi Aranel - as per a previous deletion and what your user page says, I deleted User:Aranel/Sarah and moved what was there to User_talk:Aranel/Sarah. I can't remember if you're an admin or not, so I figured I'd help you out. Andre ( talk )A| 04:02, Nov 18, 2004 (UTC)
 * Thanks. I've decided to duplicate the effect by using font and underline tags in my signature to avoid having to do this repeatedly. -[[User:Aranel|Aranel (" Sarah ")]] 19:51, 18 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Olympics on CFD
"Olympic competitors" sounds really good. Thanks for helping with cleanup. -- Beland 14:23, 19 Nov 2004 (UTC)

category:orphaned categories
Hi - Seems your attention has been elsewhere lately. category:orphaned categories is gowing faster than I can cope with. If you can spare some time to help that'd be great. Thanks. -- Rick Block 04:59, 22 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Weaving needs your attention
There's been a couple of edits to Weaving by Special:Contributions/User:194.222.59.249. The edits seem to be made in good faith but appear somewhat unencyclopedic, needing a major rewrite. Can you have a look into that? -- Sundar 10:17, Nov 22, 2004 (UTC)

A quick note to say thanks


I just wanted to drop you a quick note to thank you for your support in my request for adminship. It was certainly a wild ride, and I really appreciate you taking some time out to contribute. ClockworkSoul 16:26, 24 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Mohamed ElBaradei
Thanks for the iso8859-1 fixup at Mohamed ElBaradei, I always forget to check those. --fvw* 02:53, 2004 Nov 26 (UTC)

New Zealand categories
Just wanted to say thanks for cleaning up the mess I made with the New Zealand regional categories :) 02:56, 26 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Desteapta-te, Romane!
Many thanks for spotting the vandal so quickly. At least this was one with a sense of humor, at least the second time. -- Jmabel | Talk 02:20, Nov 28, 2004 (UTC)

National Bolsheviks
Thanks for the clarification, sounds like this is well in hand. -- Jmabel | Talk 19:44, Nov 29, 2004 (UTC)

Category:People by religion
Following through on what I said/promised, considering your willingness to go along with my proposed change, and generally in the name of consistency, I am willing to move forward with the name-change CFDs for the children of this category. It does tend to daunt my "biting off more than can be chewed in areas I am not currently working on" guideline, since I try to take a gradual approach to structural changes. As I mentioned, there are a lot of single-word plural categories out there. I probably don't care for any of them, and I think my change in direction is the right one, but that doesn't make the job any smaller, if we find ourselves on the slippery slope of renaming plurals more generally. So, I just wanted to check back and ask, are you sure you want to move forward on these at this time? If so, I will help out. --Gary D 19:58, Nov 29, 2004 (UTC)

Thanks
Thanks for the information I am actually just learning about Wikipedia, I am in University and we have to create a page that can be added to the site and I am trying to do mine on Speech and language delays, hopefully it turns out well.

CheeseDreams
Since you seem to be involved, would you be interested in signing Requests for comment/CheeseDreams? -- 23:19, 30 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse (no pictures)
Hello. I noticed you were the one that originally pushed for the picture-free article. It was deleted because it split the article into two complete versions that aren't edited together. I've done some tweaking and have a solution. Basically, I've turned the main article into a template with parameters enbedded in the image tags. When it's used as a template from a page with the parameter set to "-5px", the images error out. This makes a version of the page without images, but one that's still based on one and only one article. I hope this answers your concerns.

See Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse/pictures suppressed. Cool Hand Luke  07:57, 5 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Article Licensing
Hi, I've started a drive to get users to multi-license all of their contributions that they've made to either (1) all U.S. state, county, and city articles or (2) all articles, using the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike (CC-by-sa) v1.0 and v2.0 Licenses or into the public domain if they prefer. The CC-by-sa license is a true free documentation license that is similar to Wikipedia's license, the GFDL, but it allows other projects, such as WikiTravel, to use our articles. Since you are among the top 1000 Wikipedians by edits, I was wondering if you would be willing to multi-license all of your contributions or at minimum those on the geographic articles. Over 90% of people asked have agreed. For More Information:
 * Multi-Licensing FAQ - Lots of questions answered
 * Multi-Licensing Guide
 * Free the Rambot Articles Project

To allow us to track those users who muli-license their contributions, many users copy and paste the " " template into their user page, but there are other options at Template messages/User namespace. The following examples could also copied and pasted into your user page:


 * Option 1
 * I agree to multi-license all my contributions, with the exception of my user pages, as described below:

OR
 * Option 2
 * I agree to multi-license all my contributions to any U.S. state, county, or city article as described below:

Or if you wanted to place your work into the public domain, you could replace " " with "  ". If you only prefer using the GFDL, I would like to know that too. Please let me know what you think at my talk page. It's important to know either way so no one keeps asking. -- Ram-Man (comment| talk) 18:59, Dec 8, 2004 (UTC)

Fictional trains

 * This category seems to have survived categories for deletion. Since you seem to know something about the topic, would you be willing do do some clarifying and perhaps reorganizing? (I must admit that my understanding of rail terminology is practically nonexistant.)

Well, I'll have a go, but I'm not promising I'll be any good at it! Also, since I'm not a sysop, you'd need to do any category deletion - if any is needed (there probably won't be any). 01:36, 10 Dec 2004 (UTC) I think I've done it OK - except that I used the word "Railway" in a category where it should probably have been "Rail transport"... can you check that it looks all right, please?

RFC pages on VfD
Should RFC pages be placed on VfD to be deleted? I'm considering removing Requests for comment/Slrubenstein, Requests for comment/Jwrosenzweig and Requests for comment/John Kenney from WP:VFD. Each of them was listed by CheeseDreams. Your comments on whether I should do this would be appreciated. - Ta bu shi da yu 03:18, 10 Dec 2004 (UTC)

RFC pages on VfD
Should RFC pages be placed on VfD to be deleted? I'm considering removing Requests for comment/Slrubenstein, Requests for comment/Jwrosenzweig and Requests for comment/John Kenney from WP:VFD. Each of them was listed by CheeseDreams. Your comments on whether I should do this would be appreciated. - Ta bu shi da yu 03:18, 10 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Category:Bible stories
You wrote: This category was, according to consensus at Categories for deletion, deleted. You recreated it. It was deleted again. You recreated it again.

Note that, according to Candidates for speedy deletion, articles that have been deleted according to deletion policy and have been recreated are candidates for speedy deletion. It isn't immediately clear whether this point applies to categories (I don't believe it has been tested), but it covers a comparable situation.

As it currently stands, there is a consensus to delete. If you disagree with the counting of the votes, that can be discussed, but please do not continue to recreate and repopulate the category without discussion. Votes for undeletion might be a good place to bring this up, since there doesn't seem to be a clear category undeletion process. -[[User:Aranel|Aranel (" Sarah ")]] 01:39, 11 Dec 2004 (UTC)


 * According to your counting of the votes, it needed 80% to delete. According to you that required your vote. According to you you did not give it. Therefore it failed to meet consensus to delete. Cheesedreams 22:36, 11 Dec 2004 (UTC)


 * According to wikipedia deletion policy, votes to rename DO NOT COUNT. Discussions about renaming must occur on the talk page, not CfD. CheeseDreams 10:35, 12 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Collaboration of the week
Congratulations, the candidate you voted for, Underground Railroad, is this week's Collaboration of the Week. Please help edit the article to bring it up to feature standard.

Imminently/Eminently
Hello Sarah,

I think you may have confused 'imminently' and 'eminently' on your user page.

Of course, I may be missing some kind of in joke here, but that wouldn't be unusual.

WLD 11:35, 13 Dec 2004 (UTC)
 * You appear to be correct. How odd that I hadn't noticed that distinction before. (I've been using that word for years, but not so often in writing.) Thanks! -[[User:Aranel|Aranel (" Sarah ")]] 15:24, 13 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Capitalizaiton of prefecture
I don't recollect whether category:Japanese Prefectures vs category:Japanese prefectures was part of the discussion about the Japanese prefecture name capitalization (BTW - where did this discussion go, and perhaps more to the point, is there some way I should be able to find it?). It seems like the category of all prefectures should be category:Japanese prefectures, with the individual prefecture articles and categories using Prefecture. This largely matches the current state of things, except category:Japanese prefectures is an orphan and category:Japanese Prefectures is empty (but not orphaned). Is the current state transitional, and if so, which way is the transition going? I assume one of these categories is destined for WP:CFD. -- Rick Block 16:55, 18 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Help with a vandal
Hi - can you help me out with a vandal? 68.184.229.108 is persistently adding trash to some articles which I've reverted and is now vandalizing my user page. Thanks. 01:59, 21 Dec 2004 (UTC)

primOgeniture
Amusing! I was correcting wrong spelling based on other wrong spelling... now to go over my recent contributions to see where I saw the earlier misspelling :-) Good catch. Anárion 22:43, 22 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Thanks
Hi, Just thought I'd drop a note to say thanks. Your adminship on cfd is appreciated... Good luck in keeping up with my deletion additions though. That darned ophan category thing keeps on growing. Sortior 23:10, Dec 23, 2004 (UTC)

Bot writing
It's not that hard to get a bot up and running.

I found the most annoying and time-consuming parts to be getting the database dump to load into MySQL (which involved setting up MySQL) and getting the bot to reliably make edits under the proper account. This latter required using libraries for handling HTTP connections and cookies, actually.

If you are using Python, pywikipediabot may have done most of the read/write work for you.

I actually gave up on getting the database dump to parse into MySQL properly, since there seemed to be errors in the input stream. Instead, I just parse the raw dump into a Perl-friendly format. It's a gross hack which mean that I can't just run stock SQL queries, but I haven't found much of a need to do that so far. I will probably come back to that problem later. But you don't need to do either unless you will be doing offline analysis.

Once you've got the basic infrastructure working, most operations are a matter of whipping up a few lines of Perl (or Python or whatever suits your taste) to frob the contents of articles or detect interesting features. Though there is also some amount of bureaucracy that also needs taking care of if your bot is to be legal and non-controversial. Bots has the details of the approval process. For my own projects, I've also had to commit to getting community approval before emptying categories (which of course humans have to do, too) or making a new class of changes to large numbers of articles.

Good luck if you make the attempt! -- Beland 02:55, 25 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Oh, I just realized I may have misunderstood your question. If you would like to clone Pearle, that would just involve: making a new account, copying a few files over, and checking some cookie values in your favorite web browser. She's very much a work in progress, with frequent bug fixes and feature additions, but it's not like brain transplants for Perl bots aren't pretty easy, if I were making frequent "releases" or something. It shouldn't be too hard to learn how to feed her commands once she's set up, especially if I did better job documenting all the useful features. -- Beland 03:00, 25 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Notification
Sorry, I couldn't notify all admins about WP:AN because I got blocked once for spamming. So not all admins know about it yet. And I'm not going to risk getting blocked for alleged spamming. I'm rather afraid that it's just "tough" that not all admins know about the board yet, and probably unfair. But I didn't make the decision that I can't tell all the admins to about the noticeboard. I'd take it up with the admin who blocked me. - Ta bu shi da yu 14:03, 25 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Cities and towns oddity
Hi Aranel - merry Christmas! I notice something odd has happened to one of the "Cities and towns of..." categories you've been shifting articles from. "Cities and towns of New Zealand" is now a subcategory of "Cities and towns of New Zealand" - a strange little infinite loop developing from it. Is this something that normally happens while a category is being relocated, or is it a weird glitch of some kind? Grutness|hello? 00:11, 26 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Categories
You are right on not having categories in Userpages. I tested my upates but forgot to delete the content of the page after the testing. Only during the testing the sandbox will appear in the category pages. Sorry, I will try to prevent the not-deleting after the testing. Gangulf 11:30, 26 Dec 2004 (UTC)