User talk:Charlesdrakew/Archives/2018/July

Talkback
Please respond to my message re Wog page. 103.217.166.34 (talk) 13:39, 3 October 2017 (UTC)
 * This user has now changed IP's. Charles - the message this user is talking about can be found at User talk:103.217.166.225. Hope this helps. Class 455  ( talk |stand clear of the doors!)  15:32, 3 October 2017 (UTC)

I don't understand what I need to be approved my editing... Mirkomaty (talk) 01:02, 27 May 2018 (UTC)

Adopt-a-user - your availability
Hello Charles I am really new and have primarily used the visual editor and am learning How to use the Markup Language. Could you adopt me? My area of focus is the Huntington family and their British ancestors and American descendants. Thank you! Jjjheart (talk) 16:48, 20 May 2018 (UTC)

Hello. Could I ask you to check and, if necessary, update your availability details at Adopt-a-user/Adoptee's Area/Adopters, please?

I've been updating that page, plus the list of over 100 people seeking adoption (which I've now stripped down to around 20 active editors genuinely seeking help.

I've been working to identify those Adopters who are currently available, and those who haven't been active on Wikipedia for a while. But I don't think the bot has been updating correctly, so a manual check from you would be really helpful. I've also made some suggestions and a few edits to make life easier for newcomers. I've put some of my observations down in answer to a recent post about inactivity of some Adopt-a-User Project contributors. Regards from the UK, Nick Moyes (talk) 00:39, 29 January 2018 (UTC)

Adoption
Hi, i would like to be adopted (Arispol012)
 * No sorry, I have too much else going on at present.Charles (talk) 20:59, 9 March 2018 (UTC)

RAF numbers
Hi regarding the raf aircraft numbers you stated there are 301 operational aircraft however due to global firepower and the rest of the Wikipedia page there are actually 944 aircraft Tom7972 (talk) 21:44, 12 April 2018 (UTC)
 * I did not state anything. I reverted your unexplained and unsourced changes. Your edits were not minor edits either as they changed the meaning of the content. Always cite a reliable source when making changes.Charles (talk) 08:16, 13 April 2018 (UTC)

Deleting others discussions is inappropriate
I see you felt my Talk at Objections to Evolution was not productive. And I can see someone may feel that way about it, or the three other posts there. And many others things in Talk in many articles.

However that’s not a good reason to delete them. And note that deleting it is contrary to TALKO. In article content deleting is fine — but not in Talk.

If you feel my input is not productive, please do add a comment to say so. We may discuss to something better, or you may convince me to strike out a prior post.

But unless someone’s post is outrageous enough to be a legal issue or something, it’s not appropriate to edit or delete someone else’s TALK.

Cheers. Markbassett (talk) 04:47, 22 April 2018 (UTC)

Lipchis Way
You seemed only determined to remove facts from this site - have you appointed yourself editor? Many records exist and wikipedia would be a good place to record and encourage participation and record breaking. Other routes have runners / walkers records -what is your problem here? If you can't be productive, you may come across as over zealous. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Adrianstanleybutter (talk • contribs) 09:50, 20 June 2018 (UTC)
 * I wrote the bloody article and it does not need self-promotors.Charles (talk) 17:26, 20 June 2018 (UTC)
 * Using Wikipedia to record your own records is pretty nauseating, and cuts across pretty much everything we are here for. I suggest you try to edit it seriously, not use it as a vehicle for telling us how great you are. DBaK (talk) 14:42, 21 June 2018 (UTC)
 * Sorry, too snarky, and therefore withdrawn with apologies. What I should have said was: I don't agree with your edit to the article, and I don't agree with your analysis of Charles's editing, motivation etc, which seems inappropriate. I respectfully suggest that you might want to continue discussing the edit, but without the personal comments, at the article's Talk page. Thanks DBaK (talk) 08:21, 22 June 2018 (UTC)

Undoing edit to Hassocks page
Hello, you undid my edits to the Hassocks page concerning Zoella. I am not challenging your decision, just wondering why so I can become a better editor. Thanks!


 * There were two problems. You did not provide any reliable source that Zoella lives in Hassocks. That person's article says they live in Brighton. Secondly you added a hyperlink to an external website in the text, which is not allowed (see WP:EL).Charles (talk) 20:22, 20 May 2018 (UTC)

Portals WikiProject update #010, 30 June 2018
We've grown to 94 participants.

A warm welcome to dcljr and Kpgjhpjm.

Rating system for portals
We are in the process of developing a rating system specifically for portals, as the quality assessment scheme for articles does not apply to portals. It is coming along nicely. Your input would be very helpful. See the discussion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Portals/General.

Better than a barnstar
One of our participants got involved with this WikiProject through interest in how the new generation of portals would be handled in WP's MOS (Manual of Style). It didn't take long before he got sucked in deeper. This has given him an opportunity to look around, and so, he has made an assessment of this WikiProject's operations:

"I'm quite frankly really impressed and inspired by what's happening here. If you'd asked me a year ago if I thought portals should just be scrapped as a failed, dragged-out experiment, I would have said 'yes'. This planning and the progress toward making it all practical is exemplary of the wiki spirit, in particular of a happy service-to-readers puppy properly wagging its technological and editorial tail instead of the other way around, and without 'drama'. It's also one of the few examples I've seen in a long time of a new wikiproject actually doing something useful and fomenting constructive activity (instead of acting as a barrier to participation, and a canvassing/ownership farm for PoV pushers). Kudos all around. — SMcCandlish"

Congratulations, everyone. Keep up the great work.

Slideshow development
We've run into a glitch with slideshows: they don't work on mobile devices.

Initially, we will need to explore options that allow portals to have slideshows without adversely affecting mobile viewers. See Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Portals/Design.

Eventually, we may need another way to do slideshows. If we do go this route, and I don't see why we wouldn't, then (user configurable) automatic slideshows also become a possibility.

TemplateStyles RfC passed
Once implemented, this will allow editors to create and edit cascading style sheets for use with templates. This will expand what we can do with portals. For more detail, see mw:Extension:TemplateStyles and TemplateStyles.

Automation effort
We've run into an obstacle using Lua-based selective transclusion: Lua is incapable (on Wikipedia) of reading in article names from categories. Because of this, we'll need to seek other approaches for fully automating the Selected article section. We are exploring sources other than categories, and other technologies besides Lua.

Speaking of using other sources, the template Transclude list item excerpt collects list items from a specified page, or from a section of that page, and transcludes the lead from a randomly selected link from that list. Courtesy of Certes. So, if you use this in a portal, and if the template specifies a page or section serviced by JL-Bot, you've now got yourself an automatically updated section in the portal. JL-Bot provides links to featured content and good articles, by subject.

What is "fully automated"? When you create a portal using a creation template, and the portal works thereafter without editor intervention, the portal is fully automated. That is, the portal is supported by features that fetch new content. If you have to add new article names every so often for it to display new content, then it is only semi-automated.

Currently, the Selected article section is semi-automated, because it requires that an editor supplies the names of the various articles for which excerpts are (automatically) displayed. For examples, look at the wikisource code of Portal:Reptiles, Portal:Ancient Tamil civilization, and Portal:Reference works.

So far, 3 sections are fully automatable: the introduction section, the categories section, and the Associated Wikimedia section.

Where is all this heading?
Henry.

Or some other name.

Eventually, the portal department will be a software program. And we won't have to do anything (unless we want to). Not even tell it what portals to create (unless we want to). It will just do it all (plus whatever else we want it to do). And we will of course give it good manners, and a name.

But, that is a few years off.

Until then, building portals is still (partially) up to us. &mdash; The Transhumanist  13:29, 30 June 2018 (UTC)

Portals WikiProject update #011, 10 July 2018
We now have 97 participants.

Be sure to welcome our newest members, BrantleyIzMe, Coffeeandcrumbs, and Nolan Perry, with warm regards.

Work is proceeding apace. We have 2 major thrusts right now: converting the intro sections of portals, and building the components of the one-page automated model...


 * Converting the intro sections

We need everybody, except those building software components, to work on converting intros. If you have AWB, definitely use that. If not, then work on them manually. Even one a day, or as often as you can muster, will help a lot. There are only about 1,000 of them left to go, so if everyone chips in, it will go pretty quickly. Remember, there are 97 of us!

The intros for most of the portals starting with A through F have already been converted to use the Transclude lead excerpt template.

The standard wikicode for the automated intro that we want to put into place looks like this:

That works for most portals, but not all. For some portals it requires some tweaking, and for others, we may have to use a different or more customized approach. Remember to visually inspect each portal you work on and make sure that it works before moving on to the next one.

Be sure to skip user-maintained portals. They are listed at WikiProject_Portals.


 * AWB tips

I've started an AWB tips page, for those of you feeling a bit overwhelmed by that power user tool. Feel free to add to it and/or improve it.


 * Portal automation

We have some very talented Lua programmers, who are pushing the limits of what we can do in gathering data from Wikipedia's various namespaces and presenting it in portals. Due to their efforts, Lua is powering the selective transclusion core of our emerging automated portal design, in the form of selected article sections that rotate content, and slideshows.

To go beyond Lua's limits, to take full advantage of Mediawiki's API, we are in the midst of adding another programming language to the resources we shall be making use of: JavaScript. The ways that JavaScript can help us edit portals to boost the power of our Lua solutions, are being explored, which will likely make the two languages synergistic if not symbiotic. Research is under way on how we can use JavaScript to make some of the portal semi-automated features fully automatically self-updating, in ways that Lua cannot. Like gathering random members from a category and inserting them into a portal's templates as parameters. Once the parameters are in place, Lua does the rest.

If you would like to get involved with design efforts, or just keep up on them, see Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Portals/Design.


 * When should we start building new portals?

Well, not at the present time, because building portals is quite time consuming. The good news is that we are working on a design that will be fully automated, or as close to that as we can get. And the new design is being implemented in the portal department's main portal creation template. This means, that not only will portals update themselves, their creation will be highly automated as well. That's the nature of templates. You put them in place, and they just... work.

What I'm getting at here, is that it would be better to wait to build lots of new portals until after the new design is completed. Because with it, instead of taking hours to create a new portal, it will likely take minutes.

That does not mean we should be idle in the meantime. The main reason most of us are here is because it became apparent that portals were largely unmaintained and had grown out-of-date. This had become so apparent that a proposal was made to delete all the portals and the portal namespace to boot. That makes our main objective in the short term to improve all the existing portals so that the community will want to keep them&mdash;forever.

Building lots of new portals comes later. Let's fix up the ones we have first. ;)

And on that note, I bid you adieu. Until next newsletter, see ya 'round the WikiProject. &mdash; The Transhumanist  12:29, 10 July 2018 (UTC)