User talk:J JMesserly

'''Thank you for posting a note to me. My practice is to move comments back to your page so the discussion is in one place. I will see your responses there.''' -J JMesserly

Agenda

 * My issue was with using the word 'agenda'. I agree with 'Obama administration' becuase it matches the Category I found. Flatterworld (talk) 21:05, 28 November 2008 (UTC)

List of energy abbreviations
(message moved to talk page for Sebastian 01:23, 5 December 2008 (UTC))

Assessment
As a rule, every member of WP Enegy may assess any energy related article, so you are welcome to add assessment yourself. There is no problem to assess articles up to the level B. There are specific producers for GA and FA assessments and for A class assessment (quite rear in practice), the peer review and wider consensus are needed. Please see also WikiProject Energy/Assessment. Beagel (talk) 18:36, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

Commons
No problem. I figured it out after I checked out the Commons. Will reply over there, just been a busy day. --Skeezix1000 (talk) 21:06, 13 January 2009 (UTC)

Thury
Thanks for the creation of René Thury - I haven't found any biographical information on him elsewhere (and I wasn't even sure if he was Swiss or French!). I've also added him to the List of electrical engineers. I don't doubt that the railfans would want to know more about his work with electric traction, too. --Wtshymanski (talk) 19:18, 22 January 2009 (UTC)

Obama wikiproject notes
Hi, I see you were working on something on Mike Serfas's talk page--I didn't see it until after, when someone pointed it out. Someone on the main Obama talk suggested a Project, so I struck while the iron was hot: WikiProject Barack Obama. Want to merge up? The principle goal I was seeing was to basically drive everything there to a minimum of Good Article, and then work from there once a Good Topic was in hand, for a Featured Topic drive over the months/years. But of course, there could be other sub things too! :) rootology ( C )( T ) 20:40, 23 January 2009 (UTC)

comment on content
Comment from user Zodon (talk) 19:49, 30 January 2009 (UTC) moved to User talk:Zodon

Template:Start-date test
Welcome, and thank you for experimenting with Wikipedia. Your test worked, and it has been reverted or removed. Please take a look at the welcome page to learn more about contributing to this encyclopedia. If you would like to experiment further, please use the sandbox instead. SamB135 (talk) 07:37, 5 February 2009 (UTC) If I appear to be wrong about this or you wish to comment on this warning, please leave me a message.


 * Oh sorry -- I was using an anti-vandalism tool and one of your edit's came up and it appeared to be vandalism from my perspective. Sorry about that! --SamB135 (talk) 07:47, 5 February 2009 (UTC)

Microformats
It's always good to see editors interested in furthering the use of microformats on Wikipedia; and you clearly have some useful ideas to contribute; and time to work on them. Unfortunately, a number of your recent edits have corrupted articles, or emitted bad metadata (wrong dates, etc.) and have had to be reverted. Please conduct your testing in sandbox pages, and please discuss your work and collaborate with other interested editors, and propose incremental changes to existing templates, instead of creating duplicates. I have been working on adding microformats to Wikipedia since 2007, and have done so on hundreds of templates and thus many thousands of articles. I'm happy to offer assistance and advice. Thank you. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 22:10, 6 February 2009 (UTC)
 * I appreciate you observations. However, it is more productive if you post bug lists to the Template that you are concerned about. Whether or not you are correct about the Augustus article, perhaps there is no harm if there is no visible damage to the users to simply inform me of what you view is an error on the template that you are concerned about.  I do fix things, and do so promptly.  Thank you.  -J JMesserly (talk) 23:05, 6 February 2009 (UTC)
 * Emitting bad metadata is harmful; moreso than emitting no metadata. Otherwise, why do we bother? The Augustus article was broken; there is no doubt. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 23:14, 6 February 2009 (UTC)
 * If you can explain the bug on the template page, and cite references to prove that it is in fact a bug and not a particular way of emitting microformats, I'll take a look at it. You may have noticed that the start-date template now not only handles natural language dates, but correctly does the end date calculation.  Something that the old template will never be able to do.  Progress is being made, and it is exciting to collaborate with you.  -J JMesserly (talk) 23:22, 6 February 2009 (UTC)
 * Please do not suggest that I am required to provide proof and references of proof of bugs in your templates; that is not the case. Prove that they work and gain consensus to deploy them. And please do not again move this discussion to my talk page; it was started and can continue here. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 23:30, 6 February 2009 (UTC)

Well if you can't identify whatever it is you think is wrong, then I can't fix it. -J JMesserly (talk) 23:31, 6 February 2009 (UTC)
 * I can, and did so on each of my edit sumamries. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 23:33, 6 February 2009 (UTC)
 * Andy, please understand the context. Here is the code that recognizes natural language dates and correctly adjusts for dtend.  Perhaps if I can take the trouble of coding this up for the wikipedia community, you can spend a little bit more time than simply stating: emits bogus metadata.  Thanks.

Start-date:

I am working out some tough problems so we can have good microformat support on the wikipedias. All I ask is for you to take a little time to describe what you think is wrong, and show that what is happening now is widely regarded as incorrect according to recognized authorities. How does that sound?-J JMesserly (talk) 03:02, 7 February 2009 (UTC)


 * I already understand the context. I have already described what is wrong (as you know, having responded in other places where I have done so). Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 12:10, 7 February 2009 (UTC)

Death dates
Please desist from adding hCalendar/ death dates to biographical infoboxes, until consensus establishes whether that should be done (and until the mediation you have initiated kicks in). Lives are not single events, but a series of events, starting with birth event and ending with a separate death event. This has already been explained to you, and you have already refereed elsewhere to the debate where the harm of your preferred model is explained. If you wish to debate this issue, I suggest using the existing discussion of the matter on the microformat project talk page, in which you are already participating. Thank you. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 19:02, 9 February 2009 (UTC)
 * Andy, you have demonstrated no harm. We are at an impasse.  If you agree to binding mediation, we can settle this class of objection you continually raise.  I shall continue until you show that some perceptible harm is caused.  If you persist in reverting, then there is no choice but to take it to escalate this to arbcom.  Mediation I think is a better way of going about this, don't you agree?  -J JMesserly (talk) 20:38, 9 February 2009 (UTC)

Andy, I understand that you disagree with me, but it is pointless to make mass reverts of infobox changes have no visible harm based on unfounded assertions. ,,. To date, you have refused to show that there is any perceptible harm for wikipedia users to using a technique of encoding that other sites use for encoding death date (discussion), nor have you provided any citation that the encoding that I have introduced is prohibited. If what you say is true about death dates and one day we will have death date in an hcard- that's great. We can do things that way then, and I'll even write the bot scripts/ template changes myself. I really don't care which encoding is used. What I don't understand is why it is necessary to remove wikipedia functionality due to your esoteric stands on which way is the most theoretically correct way of encoding things. What matters is what is practical. It makes no sense to me that users aren't able to click google or yahoo maps due to these sorts of objections to microcoding correctness. Let's submit our respective POVs to a mediator. I am eager to do so with the understanding that both of us agree in advance to be bound by its outcome. How does that sound? -J JMesserly (talk) 21:06, 9 February 2009 (UTC)


 * I refer you to the above comments. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 22:02, 9 February 2009 (UTC)
 * Your response is not intelligible to me. You refer me to which comment in response to which proposition I made or question I asked of you?  I am unaware of any instance of you concretely showing what harm a user perceives.  As a counterpoint, I have repeatedly shown how anyone can verify that your edits are in fact removing functionality.  It is a form of vandalism you are committing,  and you are doing it on the basis on uncited, unsupported assertions that this encoding is somehow illegal.  Put yourself in my shoes.  Would you believe someone just because they said something was so but was unwilling to back it up?  No.  So why do you expect any different from me?  Please agree to binding mediation and let's settle this.  Think about it.  What's the worst case?  A vevent is on some infoboxes for a year  but after the year they come off and the templates encode the death date as dday instead of dtend?  Why must this be escalated over something that worst case has zero long term impact?  Why not just have a live and let live policy until there are firm statements from standards bodies that either one encoding or the other is deprecated?  -J JMesserly (talk) 22:07, 9 February 2009 (UTC)
 * You have been told on Commons that false accusations of vandalism are unacceptable (and had to apologise to me for making them). That is no less true here. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 22:21, 9 February 2009 (UTC)

(undent) Whether or not vandalism is the correct word for intentionally damaging functionality is a matter of interpretation of course. Mediation or arbitrators will I am sure determine the truth of the matter, so we can be patient. I suppose it has to do with intent, and I have said repeatedly that I believe you intend to be doing good, and that what you are trying to do is damage bad functionality. So from your POV you are making WP better. I get that. The problem is that I show the features deliver benefit to WP users, whereas you refuse to demonstrate any harm to them. So I think it is demonstrably the case that you aren't doing good despite your intentions. So if we should use another term for that sort of damage, then fair enough, propose another term and I'll use that. That is the only meaning I intended. Do you agree to binding mediation on the matter of how we settle microformats disputes? I would like to have this be a model for disputes over other future emerging formats, because as we both understand this is just the beginning. There are many more proposed microformats being discussed, and many folks will feel strongly on both sides of these sorts of arguments. Really- I don't care either way. If we had your dday thing today and Operator recognized it, my template would be emitting that. Pure practicality wins the day from my POV. -J JMesserly (talk) 22:37, 9 February 2009 (UTC)
 * No, it is not "a matter of interpretation". False accusations of vandalism, such as those you have been making are not acceptable. They are strictly against policy. Desist. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 22:45, 9 February 2009 (UTC)
 * Andy, our edits crossed as I was refining my response of 8 minutes ago. Could you reread my response?  Also, do you have a response to my proposal for mediation?  Or should I go ahead with initiating arbcom?  -J JMesserly (talk) 22:49, 9 February 2009 (UTC)
 * The wording I replied to is visible in this edit (though my point still stands; and I have demonstrated, more than once, the harm you are doing). Please do not change your comments after others have replied to them. I have seen no formal proposal for mediation; but I'm not going to let threats of involving arbcom stop me from pointing out the harm you are doing, your breaches of policy or the dishonest statements you are making. You could instead, try discussing the problems with your edits and listening to the good advice you have been given. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits

(undent)Andy, this tone is really unnecessary. I had just posted onto the talk page and noticed a refinement and did not anticipate you would so quickly respond. I became aware of your comment only after the edit conflict warning, and notified you of the situation. I had no nefarious intent. Regarding mediation, both User:Swift and I have proposed it. So far you have not indicated that you would like to proceed. Arbcom is not a threat in any way, and I am not trying to distract you from my errors I may or may not have made. We have an issue that we have not been able to resolve, and that is the mechanism of last resort. I would like to avoid last resorts, so let's make an effort at a mediation that both parties agree to be bound by. This has been my "formal proposal" for mediation. Swift has described the proposal and conditions of acceptance if you agree on your talk page. If you prefer instead we go the arbcom route, then let's proceed. I offer you the opportunity to initiate it if you prefer, but really I would like to exhaust other remedies first.

I agree you have described what could be considered by some to be a kind of harm, but what I was asking for is not for any alleged harm, but a harm that users can perceive impacts wikipedia functionality. You have not ever described this despite multiple requests. If you feel you have, then I request you move the description of this to some talk page under a new section name so that you can simply provide a link to it. That will also help others understand your response to my question. -J JMesserly (talk) 16:06, 10 February 2009 (UTC) -J JMesserly (talk) 16:06, 10 February 2009 (UTC)


 * The tone which is unnecessary is the one which falsely and in breach of WP policy labels edits as vandalism; doubly so when the person doing so has previously apologised, to the same person, for such behaviour. Your representation of my response to Swift is another falsehood; but I repeat: I have seen no formal proposal for mediation. I have described harm which can be perceived by users and which impacts Wikipedia functionality; you have, in a lamentably small number of cases, even acknowledged and/ or remedied that harm. I have also indicated to you that I will not be bound up by answering multiple repeats of your questions. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 18:37, 10 February 2009 (UTC)
 * Andy, I see that you are in a conversation with Swift on the very question concerning the terms of mediation. I agree to the terms he describes in his 10 February message to you.  This is a formal proposal for mediation.  -J JMesserly (talk) 18:58, 10 February 2009 (UTC)

←Andy, today you have reverted the same edits, and the situation is the same as it was. You have refused to provide any support for your argument this is not permitted, or that it constitutes harm (see WP talk:UF). Blocking these template changes means that contributors are forced to use the method of specifying biographical you prefer and have advocated in the microformats community, and so this is not really fair to those who differ with you. What is wrong with a live and let live approach on this issue? -J JMesserly (talk) 20:58, 17 February 2009 (UTC)


 * I am tired of trying to explain WP:BRD to you. You have edited, I have reverted, It is not for you to decide unilaterally that the points I have made in favour of the earlier version are invalid; demonstrate consensus, if you can. Please cease edit-warring. I again refer you to the above comments. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 21:07, 17 February 2009 (UTC)
 * By all means, let's discuss this. Your position as I understand it is that the edits produce bogus metadata and present a harm.  We both understand your position.  However your position is unsupported by any authoritative source, we only have your assertions to go on.  I have repeated my requests for this support, but all you have in response for me is that you have already supplied them.  If that is so, then it least is clear to you from my repeated requests that I have not seen them.  What harm is there in putting them in one section on the WP:UF talk page and refer me to them?  Because really, to date all I have seen on this subject is that the assertion that this is the right way and this is the style you wish me and others to conform to.  Understand that contributors such as myself and others need a little bit more to go on than simple assertions of fact.  -J JMesserly (talk) 23:43, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

Infobox help
Hi, I see that you've made some recent edits to Template:Infobox_Skyscraper. If you could please take a look at Weston_Centre_(San_Antonio), where the article creator is trying to include the location parameter but it doesn't seem to be working. I've taken a look but haven't been able to figure it out. Thanks!  shirulashem     (talk)   01:43, 9 February 2009 (UTC)
 * [[Image:P yes green.svg|30px]]done- note on Shirulashem's page. -J JMesserly (talk) 04:14, 9 February 2009 (UTC)

Your post at WT:MOSNUM
I find it rude to edit other people's comments, but: --A. di M. (talk) 10:35, 9 February 2009 (UTC)1941-12-07
 * the color you use for examples looks too much like a visited link;
 * there is a typo in the last example (unless the year numberings in the Julian and the Gregorian calendar differ by 20 years).
 * Maybe it'd make sense to replace "HST" with "HST", for people who don't know what "HST" stands for?
 * Why specify midnight as the time in microformats when no time of day is specified in the template? E.g. the first example could use a microformat of  rather than  . Also, for the second example wouldn't it make more sense to use   as a microformat?
 * (copy of response to A. di M.:) Thank you for your care and thoroughness in consideration of my note. I made your recommended corrections and believe they make it more clear.  I corrected the purple to green, and inserted the HST link.  If there any other recommendations, please let me know, or feel free to correct them.  I don't mind at all.   Now to the meat.  You have acute senses.  Regarding this T00:00 nonsense.  You didn't say it, so I did.  It is quite simply nonsense.  In my laziness, I did not notice that those examples were dated from an earlier version that did not yet support precision.  If the user only specified the Year and month, only the year and month is emitted.  Note that I always emit UTZ as the first parameter demands users be specific with time zones if they specify hours and minutes.  That was a tactical decision, not anything driven by the template.  It allows the contributor to vary the precision eg hours only, but these values are meaningless without timezone.  First parameter is about "what the time is", the second is "how the contributor wants it to appear.  Just the same as the semantics of the familiar abbreviated form of name pattern.  ISO date values can be verified in the Opera Browser or in articles that demo this template.  Let me know if you are interested in verifying the microformats code emitted, and I will provide instructions and an example.  Regards, -J JMesserly (talk) 16:25, 9 February 2009 (UTC)

Start date template
FYI, your change to Lunar Orbiter 1 resulted in a...well...I don't know what happened, but it broke the template: diff. I've changed to straight text, which is without question human readable. — Huntster (t • @ • c) 05:54, 14 February 2009 (UTC)
 * Thank you. It was an error in my conversion process.  I was subst'ing the old template to render the new template, and as you will see in my edit, I neglected to perform the second pass to remove the mumbly special characters.  It will work fine if these are replaced, (58- colon, and 32 = space).  I have not restored with this fix because there is a dispute on whether one template is more desirable than the other.  In case you are interested, there is a discussion of the issue at Manual of style- numbers.  Mars Climate Orbiter was lost due to lack of intelligibility of numeric information resulting in a unit error between JPL and Lockheed.  Same issue here. -J JMesserly (talk) 16:43, 14 February 2009 (UTC)
 * Yeah, I had a feeling those ASCII character codes were the culprit, but wasn't sure if they were an integral part of what you were trying to accomplish. To Andy below, there is absolutely nothing wrong with a limited run, manually-operated test of alternative methods of doing similar things. If this new system proves more robust and capable than the old, then it deserves its place on the site, same as any other template, system, or method of operation. — Huntster (t • @ • c) 19:28, 14 February 2009 (UTC)

Please desist from replacing Start date with Start-date, as you did here and on many other pages, until you demonstrate a consensus to deprecate the former. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 14:46, 14 February 2009 (UTC)
 * This is not part of a large scale conversion effort, which clearly would require consensus. I am identifying possible issues with the new template in actual usage, and surveying how dtstart emitting templates have been used in the past (see findings here) .  So far, I have not run into anything to show that it cannot replace all the functionality of start date.  If you are aware of any limitations, let me know.  I do not see any reason why it is not acceptable to replace start date during this survey- there no concensus against using start-date as a replacement, and substituting it in actual usage helps identify any possible issues we are unaware of.  There is no cause for alarm, to date only a very small percentage of start date templates have been replaced.  How does that sound? -J JMesserly (talk) 16:43, 14 February 2009 (UTC)
 * 250+ changes is not "a large scale conversion effort"? Wikipedia does not work by "not having consensus against", but by "consensus for"; which you have yet to demonstrate. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 21:02, 14 February 2009 (UTC)
 * That's a small percentage of the 11,000 pages using the less humanly readable start date. By the way, I am unclear whether you oppose use of the new start-date.  It is not even clear what your stand is on phase out of the old template since you have not opposed the moratorium on it.  Regardless whether or not you agree that the new one should be used in place of the old one, a large scale effort would require a bot run to convert everything over, and we would have to make a notice at the bot page etc.  Couldn't happen for at least a week, and even then there are some technical issues with the conversion.  What I saw in my survey was multiple apparent errors in previous bot runs.  These errors in prior conversions will have to be given proper consideration, and I may well run into more.  Barely 2 percent have been surveyed, so this does not represent a significant number.  Being bold, I saw nothing wrong with using one rather than the other.  If you care to revert any, that of course is your prerogative.  I may need to survey some more depending on what the cause of these anomalous pages was.  By anomaly I refer to start dates used outside of infoboxes.
 * Given the strength of opinions voiced against start date bot runs voiced at MOSNUM I suggest that it is doubtful that there will ever be any future consensus allowing bot runs converting human readable dates to its less human readable form. So as a practical matter, if we want to press on with microformat encoding Wikipedia dates, we might as well acknowledge this reality and use the more human readable start-date.  If you oppose use of start-date, please enumerate your reasons at the MOSNUM or microformats page since I am sure more than just myself will be interested in hearing that particular POV. -J JMesserly (talk) 23:45, 14 February 2009 (UTC)
 * Your above comment contains a number of misleading statements. I have made clear my opposition to your "moratorium" in my responses to you on WP:BOTREQ; there has been no "strength of opinions voiced against [the] bot run", which already has clear consent and - as I have already explained to you before - would already happened had not the original BOT-owning volunteer not suffered a bereavement. I have invited you to raise any issues you might have with Satrt date on its talk page, and have done so around a dozen times now - you still have not taken up that offer. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 23:08, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

"start date" vs. "start-date"
Your edit summary to Hercules (emulator) was confusing to someone who's not familiar with the intricacies of the current discussion. Just why is the result of 1999, "1999", not human readable? It sure looked that way to me before you changed it. -- Jay Maynard (talk) 12:22, 15 February 2009 (UTC)
 * The edit summary could have said usability. Consider what happens when an engineer involved with the emulator sees the article and knows the exact day of release.  He wants to have the date in European format, so he has to type... Hmmm... I forget... Ok, let's look at the doc page for the template.   Okey dokey:
 * displays February 24, 1999
 * Consider the alternative
 * displays 24 February 1999
 * Which is easier for the contributor to understand and correct? You might think- the date doesn't looks so bad in the other template, but such templates defeat wikitext's goal that it be as simple as possible for casual users to contribute.  Further, this is only a taste of the unnecessary complexity of the template- look at what happens when the time needs to be further refined: in large numbers of cases time of day is important.  Say you want to state with precision what the exact time of an event was- like the death of JFK, reported as at about 1PM in Dallas.


 * The old template usage is not a straw man- it is exactly how a proponent of the old template encoded this date. The -7 in the old template means that Dallas is 7 hours from international UTC time.  Actually, it wasn't at that time of year (in fact never at any time of year), but that is exactly how it was coded by this frequent user of the older template encoded this event.  Also, the UTC time of 19:00 was used for the date, which is not how this is supposed to work- instead you give local time with the positive or negative number to indicate not what you add or subtract from the local time to get UTC, but what you do to the UTC to get the local time given.  Clear as mud?  Well, it's all in the ISO8601 specs, so we can just point contributors to the section discussing time zones?!?  The point is that not only is the absolute time indicated incorrect, but the user had to know a heck of a lot of information just to specify a flipping time, and wound up doing it wrong to boot!  Jeez.  Maybe contributors have better things to do that figure out date/time arcane subjects.  Ok, the alternative is not totally free of mumbly stuff but it is far less obscure.  It is true, sometimes people don't know what the abbreviations are for time zones that aren't their own, but usually these are mentioned in news reports, so they can just copy paste them.  However, is also possible to specify a significant list of placenames rather than time zones.  -J JMesserly (talk) 17:02, 15 February 2009 (UTC)
 * "-7:00" is very much a straw man; you've already apologised once for "mischaracterising" the reason for that error; making the same claim again seems to be an act of bad faith. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 23:00, 15 February 2009 (UTC)
 * You felt that I had characterized the error as a "misunderstanding", which was not the case, I assumed you had forgotten how to use it. You stated that "I merely neglected to amend the text copied from the "-07:00" example".  Ok fine.  For whatever reason there were two errors in the encoding, errors that you did not catch.  I suggest that part of the reason is through no fault of your own.  This is what happens when encodings are needlessly complicated.  This is the point I was making to User:Jmaynard.  I'm sorry if you took it the wrong way.  I didn't even mention your name, because frankly, it is irrelevant who made the error, and it is no reflection on them.  The point is that anyone could.  You see what I mean? -J JMesserly (talk) 23:33, 15 February 2009 (UTC)
 * Okkay, I see what you mean. Your edit summary only points to MOSNUM, which is unhelpful as to why this change might be desirable. After reading it and your talk page, I was concerned that the Hercules page had become a pawn in an ongoing dispute, and wanted to understand what was going on before coming up with an opinion. In the future, you might wish to point folks to this discussion, or something more to the point, in your edit summary. -- Jay Maynard (talk) 12:42, 16 February 2009 (UTC)
 * I am sorry for the confusion. I will try and see if I can't fit the exact page name/ section name to the edit summaries in the future.  There is a length limit I was up against, but I should have at least mentioned the talk page as I believe I did in later edits.  -J JMesserly (talk) 17:07, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

EDIT WAR
&, you guys are in an edit war. I'm not sure of the details, but you really should seek dispute resolution before an admin blocks both of you. Just a little friendly advice.  shirulashem     (talk)   21:48, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

Long story

 * (response moved from User talk:Shirulashem) Thanks for the note. The dispute has gone to the incidents board.  Given the circumstances the admin recommended arbcom.  This particular issue is only one of many, and I am attempting a new approach to the problem, and to see if time and reason will not resolve the issue.  I personally believe folks should work out disputes between themselves and that last resorts really should be just that. -J JMesserly (talk) 22:04, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

start-date description
I hope you don't feel I'm stepping on your toes. I expect your message—User:J JMesserly/start-date wtf—thoughtfully linked from your edit summary, will get a lot of interest. So I aimed to make the page more generally accessible and somewhat more formal. Thanks for doing this. Have you considered making a bot request? —EncMstr (talk) 02:16, 19 February 2009 (UTC)
 * I wear steel toe boots so my toes are fine. Just kidding.  Actually these are all assisted edits, not bot runs.  Currently, I am poking a bunch of different interest areas- sports, air safety, disasters in order to uncover issues before any volume runs.  If anyone objects, I can back them out- no big deal.  I have a bot on Commons, but I do not anticipate any bot run proposals yet.  Due to the variation in the way I am seeing people encode dates, I anticipate that it will be complicated to do this reliably with bots.  -J JMesserly (talk) 02:40, 19 February 2009 (UTC)


 * Indeed I do use Operator (extension), mostly to inspect geolocated microformats. I often disable Operator though:  articles like List of shoals of Oregon make the browser unresponsive for many seconds.  —EncMstr (talk) 03:11, 19 February 2009 (UTC)

ANI
We're not getting anywhere. I've tried to reason with and help you. I've asked you to pause and discuss; all to no avail. I believe that you are currently harming Wikipedia much more than you are contributing to it; and that you probably believe the same about me. Hence: Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents, which I'm sure will, regrettably, upset you almost as much as having to post that note has upset me. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 19:21, 19 February 2009 (UTC)
 * Actually Andy, it doesn't upset me. This interaction is of great interest, because I want to see that wikipedia handles cases such as this in the fairest manner possible.  We are in a way modeling a new form of human collaboration.  Wikipedia is collective consciousness, and in a way we are a society of mind, with each of us expressing different memes- or ideas.  How many of us have not had objectionable thoughts or intuitive thoughts that radically conflicted with our other mental constructs?  What does the healthy mind do with such thoughts?  Suppress them?  Not so fast.  In the real world, many great men had very irascible temperaments.  What the heck- maybe you are a modern day Copernicus, ostracized in part because you hold positions that later turned out to be correct.  It is a romantic narrative, and who knows, maybe some of your positions do turn out to be correct.  So really, I bear you no ill will, and enjoy the process of seeing that your ideas are fairly considered, and that you personally are given the time you need to consider how you wish to proceed.  You will find that I am a very patient man.  I think you have some good qualities, and I admire your spirit.  -J JMesserly (talk) 20:42, 19 February 2009 (UTC)

Hey, J JMesserly
I noticed something with one of your pages that seemed strange... just wanted to make sure this is the actual user. --AmaraielSend Message 01:50, 22 February 2009 (UTC)
 * Yeah that was it. Alright just making sure. I figured that since it wasn't your userpage but one of your subpages it was probably you. But I just needed to make sure before I went off and rvv'd it. --AmaraielSend Message 01:55, 22 February 2009 (UTC)
 * I have a habit of forgetting which ones might have inbound links. Some of the demos are mentioned in some external mail threads and I have to keep them around a while. -J JMesserly (talk) 01:59, 22 February 2009 (UTC)

birth and death date templates for microformats

 * (Discussion of this item from Wildhartlivie has been moved back from User_talk:Wildhartlivie. )

Hi. Could you please direct me to the page where consensus was determined to make massive changes to the birth and death dates in biography infoboxes? Wildhartlivie (talk) 06:27, 27 February 2009 (UTC)
 * My survey is not especially large and has done a few dozen chefs to and a few dozen criminals. I am examining variations in date usage and shall be moving to other person categories.  No exhaustive conversion is being conducted, and in fact many have no date encoding.  The main reason for existence of these templates is microformat emission, and neither birth date and age nor death date and age do it.  Actually, I didn't think anyone really cared.  They still do the df versus mf display- in case that is what concerns you.  -J JMesserly (talk) 06:44, 27 February 2009 (UTC)
 * When I see a number of changes like this on articles that I watchlist because of my involvement in the Crime and Criminal Biography WikiProject and haven't seen discussion of this, it catches my attention. I don't really understand about microformat emission and the discussion doesn't explain what it does to my understanding. I can understand perhaps the Chrysler building example, but please explain to me how changing the date template for Charles Manson or Butch Cassidy will benefit in any way. This is quite confusing to less technically minded. Wildhartlivie (talk) 06:57, 27 February 2009 (UTC)
 * It exposes biographical information on the lives of these individuals to the web. I know you probably have not installed the microformats toolbar for firefox, but if you had you would see that the Events tab for Butch Cassidy and Charles Manson displayed "Invalid - select for more details".  The old date and age templates were not emitting the birth and death dates.  So I fixed that.  Now, they emit the correct information in the way the Chrysler building article does for the Mapping function.


 * So where is the compelling analog of google maps? Well, I can't point to existing applications.  But I can suggest to you that it makes the soil much more fertile for biography, criminology, and genealogy sites if we expose this biographical information so that we can get timelines of the lives of concurrent individuals, and to match up biographies by comparing the events of their lives.  Imagine a google biography and the information it would require to do the same things that google maps does.  It's a chicken egg thing.  Those sites are reluctant to start paying developers to create microformat features unless the data is available.  Folks with the data (us) don't see the relevance until the other sites or applications are available.  So yeah, it is fair to say that this offers only speculative benefit.  If there is some downside to mucking with the wikitext formatting of the date templates (is there any?), then fine, I will leave the criminal biographies alone.  No big deal to me.


 * So what are the real impacts to folks who suspect this is yet another fad that will not amount to anything? Well, the only difference is that the date syntax is different- it's now free form.  That's it.  And on that score, Folks at MOSNUM seem to like the free form ease with which many different forms of dates are recognized.


 * Anyway, I am still far away from proposing large scale bot runs at conversions, and I would appreciate your insights and perspectives on this sort of conversion. I am in no big rush on this, and I want us to get it right, rather than muck around with blind alleys.   Regards, -J JMesserly (talk) 07:36, 27 February 2009 (UTC)


 * I have seen some of your recent edits changing the Birth date and related templates. If these templates are not outputting the necessary microformat data, why not just edit them to do so? Seems like a much easier change to make than editing, assisted or otherwise, the articles in which the are used. Am I missing something? Thanks. – ukexpat (talk) 22:10, 27 February 2009 (UTC)


 * Sorry for the misunderstanding Wildhartlive, my comment above was directed at J JMesserly, not you. – ukexpat (talk) 22:32, 27 February 2009 (UTC)

(undent) Sorry to impose on Wildhartlive. I should perhaps have left this on my own page. Ok, so your question is, why not update the numeric format date templates (those without a dash- start date birth date end date etc etc. to emit microformats (btw- some do, some don't)?  The answer is that wikitext was created to make editing easy enough that anyone can be an editor, and template writers should not simply re-introduce that complexity to get their wizzy toys working.  I recognize microformats templates are in that boat of "dubious value" templates.  Granted, even death date and age is not that hard to understand- You and I probably have little trouble figuring out what to change in

It's pretty obvious which are years and what the earlier date is, so you really don't need to see the docs. But look- we aren't designing for joe cool wikitext hacker. If anything is intimidating for a grandmother, and there is a simpler way, then do it simpler. The real arcane encodings come when you start encoding time of day. In the above referenced MOSNUM discussion you will see one of the authors of the old start date make two different errors in the example he gave on the JFK shooting. Ok, so we don't do time of day a whole lot, but why shouldn't we just express dates and times in free text both for dates and times? Why shift between one and the other? Seems to me that folks shouldn't have to go to a template doc screen to figure out how to specify a date. They already know how to do dates- why try to get them to do it a different way if we don't need to? And they can input it in euro format, American format, stick in day of the week, time zone, place etc etc. None of which the old templates do, and frankly you wouldn't want to do those features because the syntax is already Frankensteinian enough. Just take a look at the JFK example syntax: Note the obscure double pipes in the old syntax, and the note that the values are wrong for two separate reasons- and this from someone reasonably conversant on the template. The bottom value requires no consultation of the documentation (a copy paste from an old news article would work) and is accurate. Really, I don't understand what argument there is in favor of the old syntax other than inertia. Am I mistaken? -J JMesserly (talk) 17:19, 28 February 2009 (UTC)


 * Talk page hijacking continued. OK point take on the complexity for the regular user issue, but that was not my point. My point was that rather than having to edit articles that use the "arcane codings" templates just to replace them with the "simpler" ones, let's have the template coders fix the arcane templates so that they emit the proper data and so that you and others can better spend their time doing other things than adding the simpler templates. – ukexpat (talk) 20:09, 28 February 2009 (UTC)
 * The short response is: who are these "template coders"? Not me.  I already did it once end-date called by death-date and age, and I don't intend to do it again.  It may appear trivial, but it isn't.  The key problem is that for end dates, the template has to do date arithmetic due to a microformats spec requirement that:  "End dates are exclusive". What does this mean?  If the precision is a minute, and the contributor specified the battle ended at 11:59PM on December 31, then the template must emit a hidden microformat value of 12:00AM January 1, the next year.  Be sure and do leap years correctly on February 28.  Fun?  You bet, especially with the variable degree of precision.  For more info, see dtend docs at the microformats site, especially here- see note 5.  Personally, I'd rather set my bot to convert over the 10K odd dates from the old arcane syntax.  But... That would require a village pump notice a couple weeks minimum assuming quick consensus (unlikely) and a lot better regex's than what I have now.  -J JMesserly (talk) 07:52, 1 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Your proclamations about the nature of the "end date" issue are as false as they were the last time I raised this with you Please stop making such edits, until such tome as you properly understand the issues. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 21:56, 7 March 2009 (UTC)
 * By now, I think that you should have realized that condescension is not an effective strategy with me. Make your case, and assemble your facts.  I will consider your POV on the merits of your case.  -J JMesserly (talk) 04:53, 8 March 2009 (UTC)

Birth and death date changes
I would like to ask you to stop making changes to the birth and death dates in infoboxes. After reviewing your page explaining why you are making the changes I understand you reasoning however this type of change needs to be voted on and agreed upon within the Wikipedia community. If it is agreed that this is needed then we should make the changes to the existing templates not create new ones. --Kumioko (talk) 01:43, 3 March 2009 (UTC)
 * As explained in prior inquiries (see above), this is not part of a large scale switchover, but a survey of how dates are being used. Typically, I do a few dozen using each type of infobox.  Just to give some perspective, there are over 20,000 articles using start date.  Less than four dozen have been changed, and some of them didn't use any date template.    -J JMesserly (talk) 01:55, 3 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Yes I saw but what I didn't see is where you had consensus to us WP articles as your personal sandbox to test your theories--Kumioko (talk) 02:07, 3 March 2009 (UTC)
 * The dates are easier to understand, so I am not sure what you mean by theory. What is your objection to the change?  -J JMesserly (talk) 02:21, 3 March 2009 (UTC)
 * It may be easier to read but you still need to get consensus before you make this type of change and rather than make these types of changes we can just change the existing template rather than changing the date structure on every page manually. There are already too many different date templates and this is just another one.--Kumioko (talk) 02:28, 3 March 2009 (UTC)
 * I wanted to let you know that I intend to revert any of these I run across until proper consensus is reached. I have already changed a few.--Kumioko (talk) 02:41, 3 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Well, that means we don't have concensus. But you agree that it is an improvement?  If you think we already have the necessary date templates, show me a date template that does the JFK shooting (see example above) in a clear manner.  Consider Battle of Corydon.  Take a look at the "Battle of Corydon engagements" infobox at the end.  You want to specify times of various skirmishes with arcane syntax as in JFK example?  I don't think so.  And if people need to achieve concensus before they improve a few dozen articles, then we are in a heap of trouble.  But if you feel that this is so, please direct me to the relevant policies that you feel I have violated. -J JMesserly (talk) 02:45, 3 March 2009 (UTC)

(undent) This is probably of interest to the military history project. I have opened a thread there. I'd be interested in your feedback. -J JMesserly (talk) 03:28, 3 March 2009 (UTC)

Another example
I came across one of these edits and made the following change: (note the change to use the template that calculates the age of death). I found the use of two similarly named templates rather confusing. Birth date and death date versus birth-date and death-date: the hyphen is difficult to notice and not all editors will realise what change has been made. Carcharoth (talk) 05:54, 9 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Replied on contributor's page- a reiteration of MOSNUM discussion last month and above. -J JMesserly (talk) 17:27, 9 March 2009 (UTC)

Geographical coordinates reference
Can you help me? I'm planing on tagging about a dozen or so articles with geographical coordinates of buildings, and I was wondering, do I need to list a proper source for the data. Because I have the information but I don't know an easy way of referencing it. If it matters I'm using the "coord" template. Thanks --Awg1010 (talk) 05:41, 9 March 2009 (UTC)
 * response on user talk page. Please leave further responses there.  I will see them.  -J JMesserly (talk) 17:32, 9 March 2009 (UTC)

Edit summaries
Regarding football infobox doc- the discussion was moved to User talk:DoubleBlue.

birth date vs birth-date, death date vs death-date, etc.
I cannot begin to describe how much less user friendly your new template is, never mind the confusion arising from a hyphen being the only differentiator. Surely it would have been much better if the existing template were simply edited in such a way that the current data entry format was read correctly (it does have a sandbox for testing), without creating the need to re-edit thousands of articles. Also I see no pointers to any discussion on any of the relevant template talk pages. I assume a discussion has been held somewhere, and you are not just making changes blindly? wjemather bigissue 20:09, 12 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Prolonged discussion has taken place on this subject. On the contrary, the new template is recommended practice in the manual of style for dates (see MOSNUM).  The discussion on which was preferable happened last month, with only one person arguing against deprecation of the old template.  No one claimed the new template was less user friendly (discussion here)  Which edits did you feel were less user friendly? -J JMesserly (talk) 20:27, 12 March 2009 (UTC)
 * First of all, as mentioned very early in that discussion, MOS only concerns the output, not the means of getting there. Secondly from other discussions elsewhere, particularly at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Microformats, it would seem that there has been no consensus to change and you are citing unconcluded discussions as a basis for imposing change. Regardless, any proposed changes should have been advertised on the original template talk pages, regardless of where the discussion was hosted. In addition they should have been sandboxed on the original templates and any discussion held there – there was absolutely, 100%, no need to create entirely new templates with the inherent issues that raises. The main problem now, is that does not interpret current (ISO ordered) encoding (yyyy|mm|dd|yyyy|mm|dd) correctly and just produces an error "Did not recognize date. Try slightly modifying the date in the first parameter.". Also, most of us (outside the US) write dates like "13 March 2009", not "March 13, 2009", which seems the only format your templates use. By all means, correct me if I'm wrong. wjemather bigissue  01:41, 13 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Did you look at the documentation? On the contrary, the template handles ISO ordered dates and standard dates (day first), as well as a number of other formats.  Please refer to the documentation for examples of these. template:death-date and age/doc -J JMesserly (talk) 17:09, 13 March 2009 (UTC)
 * It still doesn't change the fact that it does not work when dates are entered as before, for example: 2008 produces 10 (aged Expression error: Unexpected < operator) whereas December 10, 2008 produces December 10, 2008 You see the problem? Also I am still to find anywhere where a consensus was reached to depreciate the existing template and learn why you wouldn't simply edit that template, starting in the sandbox, instead of creating a new one. wjemather bigissue  18:00, 13 March 2009 (UTC)

←There is a concensus that the new template is preferred. If you want to use the old syntax, use the old template. What's wrong with that? -J JMesserly (talk) 18:11, 13 March 2009 (UTC)
 * You keep claiming consensus but where? Show me the discussion. By the way, yes I did read the docs, and even though you have changed them greatly today, they are still very unclear. Why would you want two templates doing the same job, surely one has to be made redundant? wjemather bigissue 18:28, 13 March 2009 (UTC)
 * ? I did show you the discussion: MOSNUM.
 * Gerry Ashton strongly approved based on handling of Julian
 * Ohconfucius "completely agree"
 * Tony1 "The community takes a conservative line now on needless complications in date formatting."
 * Pigsonthewing does not favor deprecation of the old template, but did not make the argument that the old template was preferable over the new template.
 * MOSNUM enjoys heavy participation, and there was only one in opposition, and this was to deprecating the old template, not opposition to the new template or switching from old to new. The MOSNUM page currently reflects guidance suggesting the new instead of the old template.
 * Now, you started this thread out by stating you cannot "begin to describe how much less user friendly your new template is". Can you give me some further explanation?  Do you feel that
 * {{ produces {{Death date and age|2008|12|10|2000|11|23|df=y}}
 * is more user friendly than
 * {{ produces {{Death-date and age|10 December 2008|23 November 2000}}
 * People in the cited thread felt the old syntax was needlessly complex. Why do you feel that the latter example is less user friendly?  Do people naturally think of pipes or ISO order when they think of dates?  Most people would disagree with you, but the fact of the matter is that users can use ISO order if they really want.  That issue aside, I'm not really sure what you want me to do differently.  The old template is not deprecated, you can use it all you want.  The new template is used by over 1000 articles so it is not suitable for a sandbox, and it delivers benefits that the old template does not.  So what exactly do you want me to do that I am not doing?  Are there particular areas of your interest where you would not like to see use of the new template?  -J JMesserly (talk) 19:24, 13 March 2009 (UTC)
 * As stated previously, I don't think MOSNUM was the correct place to be holding the discussion, since it is patently not a style issue – a point that was clearly made during that discussion. Also, there is no mention of birth date or death date anywhere in that discussion. My attention was drawn to this when you changed the documentation for Template:Infobox Golfer without any explanation, discussion or even an edit summary. This change has since been reverted (not by me), due to the apparently simpler format in use previously – I'm not sure if the editor even noticed the hyphen inserted. Problems have also been encountered with Template:Infobox cricketer biography (see discussion at Cricket WikiProject) since changing over to the new template. As you say, it is obviously too late to go back and start again, so we'll just have to try and deal with the confusion that has been created by having a second template with a barely noticeable hyphen. I really have no preference for either template, but personally, I think inputting numbers is far simpler, and also less prone to typing errors. wjemather bigissue 20:17, 13 March 2009 (UTC)
 * It was my error not to include the standard summary. As you can see, the change to the infobox regarding the microformat change was summarized with my usual link to a more in depth explanation.  On the doc change, I did contact the person who reverted, and they appear to have no answer to my point regarding the strengths of the new template User_talk:Tewapack, or whether the suggested further explanation for the doc page.  Still, if you folks in the golf community feel strongly about it, you guys are the experts on what golf contributors would likely feel most comfortable with, so I am for whatever that community decides.  I think the free text template should receive fair consideration though.   Regarding MOSNUM, the retort in that discussion was that ease of wikitext coding is very much an issue of concern.  It cuts at the very reason wikitext was invented- so that it be as easy as possible to edit, so that everyone and anyone could be an editor.  The MOSNUM community is very much interested in the finer points about dates- eg time zone esoterica, uncertainties about Roman period dates, etc. etc.  So it was an appropriate forum for a discussion.  Certainly it is not the only forum to discuss it.  Regards, -J JMesserly (talk) 20:40, 13 March 2009 (UTC)

Errors in your birth-date and death-date template in Leopold and Loeb article
The template you added to this version of Leopold and Loeb [] contains an error in the death-date and age section. I'm not sure what the error was, but it meant that neither of these bits of date was displayed. I fixed the problem although, again, I'm not sure just where the problem lay. If you're going to be adding this template to many articles, you should make sure that it doesn't cause similar problems. I checked a number of your recent edits with this template, and they all seemed fine, but that might be because they show only death-date and not death-date plus age. (message unsigned, left by User:Interlingua talk
 * It was nothing wrong with the template. Actually the bugs are in the old template you used.  #1 it needlessly uses arcane syntax causing simple errors such as yours (transcribing the death date as August 8).  #2 it needlessly restricts contributors from using templates or links in the display.  Your edit destroyed the intent of the original contributor that made date links (I don't care one way or the other on those, but the contributor can use other templates like old style dates which most people agree are desirable).  Anyway, my stupid error was in not seeing the mistake my script made that introduced a misplaced paren and moving the square bracket to the correct location.  I confirm these changes one by one manually, and it looked right at first glance.  I will have to be more careful eyeballing these in the future.    Also, note that even if you had picked up the date in the old template (august 30) the death date of Nathan did not match the date in the body of text.  This lack of agreement is obvious now because it uses natural dates.  It is hard to spot in the numeric form you used.  -J JMesserly (talk) 16:35, 14 March 2009 (UTC)

Category navigation templates.
Do you have a generic disagreement with the use of any category navigation templates? You commented with your change that the nav template removed has "nothing to do with 1880s ships". You left the other nav template that allows navigation to other ships in other periods. How do you know a visitor trying to find an image on commons doesn't want some other category in the 1880s? -J JMesserly ( talk ) 22:45, 9 March 2009 (UTC)
 * I don't have a "generic disagreement"... but if users go to a category about ships they don't want to see links about art, culture, sport, whatever... they want to see images about ships. Just because something totally unrelated was around in the same era does not make a connection. Also, the template occupies a ridiculous amount of space on the screen and overshadows the real content. I don't think "How do you know a visitor trying to find an image on commons doesn't want some other category in the xxxxs" is a strong argument fot its inclusion. regards. Rod. Rcbutcher ( talk ) 22:08, 11 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Well Rod, our category system tends to pigeonhole content. Our search system sucks because not a lot of text is associated with images.  No one interlinks pages, so what that leaves is 4 million islands of content in category pigeonholes.  Navboxes offer a way out of the commons trap.  I can symphathize with your remarks about the decorative elements or the other things of the same time period.  Those decisions are up to editors whether to include or not include.  But at the very least, the navbox cell with all of the decades for ships is useful, and if that were displayed you would presumably have no trouble with its inclusion with this category.  Is that correct? -J JMesserly ( talk ) 04:30, 12 March 2009 (UTC)
 * I agree that we need more than just categories to help users navigate commons.. ideally we need accurate and detailed text descriptions for images so people can use Google-type searches - that seems to be the Internet standard. But as you said, because most images lack detailed text. I feel that Navboxes will help so long as they are relevant and unobtrusive - just occupying a few lines at the top, and pointing to associated subjects. e.g. just arts, military, politics or science of the period... e.g. the ship decades navbox is useful.. ultimately though, we need to get descriptions (i.e. metadata) added to images to enable Google searches. I would be interested in participating in a study group to discuss this. Rod. Rcbutcher ( talk ) 08:45, 16 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Rod, the last discussion we had related to this wound up in the same quandary, with some opposed to any automated solutions for injecting text search targets into commons even if the text is in hidden navboxes. Village_pump/Archive/2009Feb  The opposition POV is roughly summed up as "don't spam commons with wikipedia text".  There are automated solutions to the text search problem, but I don't see much hope of achieving that without a concerted effort to press through a concensus on the question.  This will require lengthy and sustained discussions spanning months.  Are you willing to commit that kind of time?  I will, and I am not married to one versus another approach.  If you have an alternate idea along the search line of inquiry, let's discuss it.  Anything is better than nothing.   Really, we have 4 million files there, but they are useless if no one can find them through search, cat or navbox navigation.  -J JMesserly (talk) 16:23, 19 March 2009 (UTC)

Birth date vs marriage date
You script has taken the birth and death dates after the names of spouses and used them as if they were marriage date spans in many of the ones that were on my watchlist. If you multiply that by the number you changed I am sure there are tens of thousands of errors introduced. That was always a problem by not having (m. year-year) used earlier and as a standard for marriage span years. When I suggested it years ago it was rejected as "instruction creep". A percentage of all biographies have birth and death years after the spouse. I just checked everyone on my watchlist, and your script added the birth and death dates of the spouse as the marriage span, so I think you can estimate that a large portion of the ones changed were incorrect, since it made no distinction between them. --Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ) (talk) 09:26, 19 March 2009 (UTC)
 * It wasn't automatic. It is true that a large number of dates designated in parens with spouses are birth and death.  Most are not.  The script only located use of a spouse parameter that had a date in parens.  It then presents the information to me.  Obviously, when the begin date corresponded to a date near the time of the article subject's birth date, I declined to accept the addition of the marriage script.  One example I declined is Dorothy Quincy.  By and large, most of these are trivial.  Dates that say (since 1971) or (1976-present) or are less than 14 years are clearly not lifespans of spouses.  However, human knowledge is required for others.  Dolores Hope had a marriage of exceptional duration (1934-2003).  I happen to know that this is not Bob Hope's lifespan although it could have been given the length.  So I ok'd that one.  I do mess up.  Looking at the logs, last night I before I retired I see I ok'd a number of highly suspect ones for example Joseph Nathaniel French, to Amie Gertrude Lathe, but shouldn't have.  I will go back through them and back out the ones that there is any doubt on.  -J JMesserly (talk) 16:11, 19 March 2009 (UTC)

Your post about partial dates at Template_talk:Infobox_cricketer_biography
Hello; thanks for your views on this subject. Would you be willing to repost the comments mentioned above on WikiProject Cricket's main discussion page at WT:CRIC? It seems to me that it's a subject which is of interest to people working on cricket articles generally, and your comments would reach a rather larger audience there. I've given my own views on the Template talk page nevertheless. Loganberry (Talk) 14:48, 23 March 2009 (UTC)

Geographic dimensions
There is a discussion about how to input map scale data in the coord template here. If you have any interest in this you might want to join in. The idea is to scrap the idea a map scale and define the area of interest in terms of a linear dimension. I don't know if that kind of data is of interest in terms of hcards. I suggested that the data be inserted in generated web pages as a class but I don't know that much about it. -- droll  &#91;chat&#93;  02:23, 27 March 2009 (UTC)

Partial dates with regard to cricketer bios
I've never heard of its being a problem, certainly, and if such a case came up it would almost certainly get wide coverage in the sources I read regularly. That's not to say that there's no chance it ever could be an issue, but it shows no signs of being one at the moment. For example, Wisden Cricketers' Almanack devotes a hundred pages each year just to a register of past and present cricketers, including full dates (where known), and would have more if space weren't limited. Similarly, most of the English counties (the top level of domestic cricket here) integrate their official websites with CricketArchive, which gives full dates. I tend to think that if the main print work, the main online work and the player's employer all give full dates as a matter of course, it would actually be a bit odd for WP not to! Loganberry (Talk) 16:10, 2 April 2009 (UTC)
 * Thank you. Since you are well read in this field and you know of no controversy about players raising it as an issue, then perhaps pressing this issue would be of no real service to the players.  I intend to drop it.  By the way, as I understand the language of WP's policy on living people, the principle is not overridden because of the existence of multiple occurrences in publications.  In the case of actors on WP, it is common practice to shorten to include only the birth year, even though there are large numbers of publications with this information.  As institutions become smarter about identity theft, this hopefully will fade away as an issue.  Cheers.  -J JMesserly (talk) 17:52, 2 April 2009 (UTC)

Wildhartlivie (talk) 01:17, 3 April 2009 (UTC)

An issue that I need to raise
I need to comment on something that has no bearing on what we are saying here, but does concern at least my response time to post. I have a vision disability that results in my taking more time than most others need to formulate a response to a post or in hunting for diffs in postings and finding past discussion. After a period of time, it causes sufficient headaches that I have to stop for a few hours. Just for purposes of clarity in case anyone should wonder why it takes so long for me to respond. I don't especially want to post that on community talk pages but I thought it should be noted. Wildhartlivie (talk) 17:54, 3 April 2009 (UTC)
 * There is no time imperative. In any future interchanges if there is some sort of timeliness required I will be mindful of this.  I do appreciate the difficulties.  One of my first products for which I received a patent was a low cost braille printer.  Some of that equipment at the time was bloody expensive.  My printer was 1/20th the cost of similar performance machines, and did well in the marketplace.  -J JMesserly (talk) 00:37, 4 April 2009 (UTC)
 * Thank you. There are so many adaptive devices for various disabilities that it is amazing. I have Eales disease. I don't use Braille devices at this point and hopefully will never have to do so, but there certainly are days I can't see very well. Wildhartlivie (talk) 10:43, 4 April 2009 (UTC)
 * When I did my work in this field, the only devices were exceptionally expensive, and in my country there was not very much public assistance to pay for them. I reverse engineered a heavy duty impact printer and changed the programming so that it would create braille dots from text fed to it.  I also altered the mechanism and some of the electronics, then solicited the design to two competing companies who manufactured such devices.  The highest bidder won, and it did quite well in Europe and the US for a few years.
 * Anyway the high costs, limited capability and restricted public assistance for providing these devices are nowadays trends that are in decline. It's still a huge challenge and there is much more that technical folks can do to be of service to the limited vision community.   -J JMesserly (talk) 15:25, 4 April 2009 (UTC)

MandelBot
Greetings. Are you still interested in Bots/Requests for approval/MandelBot? If so, could you let us know the current status there? All the best, – Quadell (talk) 14:11, 8 April 2009 (UTC)

death date and age-exact age
The warning you made about this template was due to the fact that the persons age cannot be known with precision if the precise day of both birth and death is not known. Is that correct? If so, then if the day or month were omitted for either birth or death, would it be satisfactory for the template to state instead "Age (approx.):" ? -J JMesserly (talk) 20:10, 8 April 2009 (UTC)
 * Personally, I don't like it for two reasons. First, I don't think it's really necessary or useful to list people's approximate ages (although possibly for certain cases). Secondly, it presents BLP concerns, although admittedly minor ones. We already have enough people complaining (at OTRS) about us listing their actual verified age, I can only imagine how many people would complain about our guestimates. That said, this is only my opinion. If other editors are clamoring for such a feature, I wouldn't really care that much one way or the other. Kaldari (talk) 21:30, 8 April 2009 (UTC)
 * Okay. I am interested in whether it answers your objection to examples such as with the Harriet Tubman article, that you posted on the  [talk page]. -J JMesserly (talk) 01:53, 9 April 2009 (UTC)

Nsaa (talk) 21:23, 10 April 2009 (UTC)

Your page
From the title it looked like you intended the page you created at J JMesserly/tbd- julian errors to be in your userspace so I moved it to User:J JMesserly/tbd- julian errors. If this was not your intention I apologise, the redirect page created has been nominated for deletion and you should be able to move it back easily soon if that's what you want to do. Regards, Guest9999 (talk) 18:03, 14 April 2009 (UTC)

Incivility
I requested that you refer to WP:CIVIL before, but now I am going to ask you to do so again. Please stop quoting other editors out of context, and twisting what they have said.

Your constant striking of proposal to be replaced with solution, suggests that I have changed my position, which as I have made perfectly clear is untrue. To dismiss my arguments as not serious is also unacceptable. I could go on, but won't. wjemather bigissue 07:47, 16 April 2009 (UTC)
 * It is perfectly Civil to dismiss an unsupported argument. Anyway, when the combat of ideas devolve into combat between personalities, then reason has failed and both individuals have failed.  You have provided no evidence to support the fantastic and repeated assertion that the substantial opposition to plain text syntax will magically evaporate on the template talk pages.  I ridicule the audacity of this unsupported assertion.  It deserves all the attacks I have heaped on it, and actually I held back.  But please understand that I am not ridiculing you.  By the way, there is a great book entitled Civility by Stephen L. Carter that you might be interested in.  It explores in depth what WP:CIVIL only scratches at.


 * Re the plain text suggestion you made: I now know that you intended only to state that a technical solution was possible.   Sure.  But such statements are truisms.  Anything is possible in software.  So the suggestion of the syntax was of little consequence if you weren't willing to support it, which you only today explicitly stated you neither were supporting nor were opposing in your note to Nsaa.  It's like saying at a travel agency, we could go to Tahiti, but I'm not saying we should or shouldn't.  You could go to Bankok too... or any of 10 thousand other destinations.  In a negotiation if you haven't stated a position you are supporting or are willing to support, you quite simply are not making substantive effort to reach common ground.  I think that is quite transparent to most viewers and possibly yourself concerning the plain text syntax "solution" you mentioned.  You are ok with that terminology to refer to it, correct?   Anyway, the strike out is a joke about my possibly understandable confusion that you were instead proposing something.  It was just in fun.  In sincerity, I liked the syntax you suggested.  Tony would object on keystroke count, but you can't please everyone.  I won't do the strike out thing any more since it clearly did not amuse you.  -J JMesserly (talk) 08:46, 16 April 2009 (UTC)


 * Fine, I will accept that you were meaning to be jovial, but that is not the way it came across. I have made no such assertion that opposition will disappear at the template talk pages. My response in giving a solution, was to your statement that is was either prohibitively difficult or would result in endless unnamed parameters making use of the resultant template difficult. I feel by doing this, I have helped enormously, and to have you dismiss my contribution to the debate as lacking effort is insulting. I have not just made my position clear. I stated here on 13 March that I "have no preference", and stand by that. I simply would like to have one template for each application, so that we have consistency and editors can be comfortable with what they are doing. I feel that can only be achieved by inviting comment from all relevant quarters. <sub style="color:#007700;">wjemather <sup style="color:#ff8040;">bigissue 11:10, 16 April 2009 (UTC)
 * I agree with your statement that a greater number of people need to express their opinion on this, and as I said, I liked the named parameters. Whether or not any of our efforts helped enormously is a question for history books that will never be written about our efforts at Wikipedia.  We will all be dust but Wikipedia will go on and on.  What really matters is whether Wikipedia benefits.  It does not benefit from the perpetuation of  templates with unnecessarily obscure syntax that undermine the goal of wikitext.  There was an opportunity to provide some leadership to bring together consensus, but your inclination was not to assist what both Nsaa and I understood at the time to be a compromise position.  Your actual meaning may be consistent with long held views, but to achieve consensus sometimes requires adjustments.  Perhaps when a similar opportunity arises in the future you will make a different choice.    -J JMesserly (talk) 17:46, 16 April 2009 (UTC)

Common Alexander Turnbull
Thanks for all the copyright tagging support. It's all far more complicated than I thought. If Commons do decide to chuck them out for not complying with their laws (even though these NZ photographers would have ever sought US copyright, I'm sure, and would waive them if they could be raised from the dead long enough to sign the paper) perhaps WP will take them as Fair Use, considering they're PD in NZ, and there are no copyright holders?Gwinva (talk) 05:07, 21 April 2009 (UTC)

re: Upcoming bot run
Thank you for waiting for my reply. I don't have an objection to converting the birth year templates if it is only on 590 articles. Wildhartlivie (talk) 02:51, 24 April 2009 (UTC)

must, should, may
I'm sure they're already used to that purpose. Has it all been changed? Tony  (talk)  05:01, 29 April 2009 (UTC) PS Do you have examples of where these words are not used in the ways in which you set out in your post at MOSNUM talk? If so, they'd be necessary evidence to prompt a review of the whole guide WRT this usage; however, I fear that Anderson would step in and challenge every use of anything stronger than "may". He's been at this for a long time; I'm sorry if I seemed snappy before, but another Anderson war is just what I don't need at the moment. Tony  (talk)  11:12, 29 April 2009 (UTC)
 * "It is very very odd that wikipedia works at all." Indeed! And it's odd that the English language holds together as a very cohesive structure, such that style guides can be shared by so many speakers so widely flung around the planet. It's such a big and baggy language, but we usually all agree on what good and bad writing are in specific cases. That is the genius of English. WP itself—the very idea of a wiki—is by coincidence rather like anglo-saxon culture, which for centuries has been marked by a flexibility and suppleness in the way public life and decision-making are conducted at the local level. It's one reason representative democracy grew in anglophone culture so well, I think. Off to bed, rather too late. Tony   (talk)  17:26, 29 April 2009 (UTC)

Like your work
Just a note to express thanks for the work you have been doing on various energy articles. I have observed many of your edits and they are sound improvements. Regards, -J JMesserly (talk) 18:53, 5 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the note, and likewise thank you for your many edits on the topic. 8) -- Beland (talk) 08:37, 6 May 2009 (UTC)

WP Energy
Hi. As a participant of the WP:Energy, I would like to ask you to comment the request for tagging WP:Energy articles by bot. The list of potential categories for tagging is located here and the discussion about which categories should be excluded from this list, is going on at the WP:Energy talkpage here. Your comments are welcome. Beagel (talk) 12:20, 16 May 2009 (UTC)


 * Hi, J. Concerning your proposal I would like to support this. I wonder if you could assist with the implementation of this proposal, because I am personally not sure how that should be done technically. Thank you in advance. Beagel (talk) 11:03, 14 June 2009 (UTC)

Template:Time and place is
Hi,

you have created this wonderful template Time and place is, I already have used for several cities. I am not very familiar with templates and I wonder how to get cities like Munich or Amsterdam to the list of "major cities in the xxxxs" or countries like the Netherlands to tle list of countries. greetz --AnRo0002 (talk) 20:03, 18 June 2009 (UTC)

vcard context problems with (marriage) event within infobox_person
Hi, The    structure produced by the marriage/event templates overrides the intended values of the Infobox Person template when viewed with Operator (Firefox), Oomph (IE), or other browser microformat add-on. You can see the difference using one of these tools to view Einstein (no marriage template) and Edison (with marriage template). Do you know of any way to disable the fn and org class declarations (and possibly vcard) when the marriage/event template is applied within a biographical infobox table? TIA Rostdo (talk) 19:35, 29 June 2009 (UTC)
 * I see at this late date that there is no vevent for the marriage event on edison. Perhaps someone simply removed the support.  I am involved heavily on an experimental wiki that has a great deal of bearing on how we do biographical events in the future at WP.  Until this is more fleshed out, I intend to take an agnostic approach to microformats.  If you are unhappy with the fix that resulted in the removal of the marriage event in the Edison article, let me know at I will take a closer look at what was going on with your report of an apparent conflict between the vcard and vevent spans.  J JMesserly (talk) 18:05, 12 August 2009 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the response. Yes, the last mods removed the worst of the problems.    The main point was that WP ought to avoid generating microformats that appear as garbage in the major browser plug-ins.  Sure, the plug-ins aren't consistent or always correct either, but it's a reasonable sanity check on generated page quality.   My impression is that the micorfomats folks will have to add a few more structural constraints or modifications will continue to step on each other in this sort of wiki environment. Rostdo (talk) 17:07, 13 August 2009 (UTC)
 * "WP ought to avoid generating microformats that appear as garbage in the major browser plug-ins". Have you looked at the specification for dtend?  The non inclusive idea is ill considered.  Have you examined the articles that have been geocoded? Those look pretty sloppy in Operator.   This is an early period and there is really only one decent MF add on, so on one hand we want to be supportive of the new initiative by generating data that it can leverage, but on the other hand be conformant to specifications that by their early provisional nature represent a vague and shifting target.  I don't know what the difficulty with vcard/vevent was in this instance, but it is perfectly correct to have both vcards and vevents for an article.  They are designed to support this.  I presume there was something wrong in the implementation that created a glitch, but it is difficult to say without recreating the state of the templates with a series of sandboxed code.  J JMesserly (talk) 19:55, 13 August 2009 (UTC)
 * The issue is specifically the nested class="vcard" of the marriage (or other) template within the span of the class="vcard" of the infobox (or other) template.  There is insufficient information (or structural rules) for  processing tools to determine the relationship between the outer and inner vcards. So, in good software tradition, they guess.... differently.  Don't see that the dtend spec has any bearing on this.  Yes, I know it's early and evolving; the reason for bringing it up is so it can be considered as things progress.  Seems declaring the inner vcard class within the vevent rather than at the same level might help - does this make sense? Rostdo (talk) 18:04, 15 August 2009 (UTC)

I would have to muck with it to remember what it was I was doing and give you an intelligent answer. Is this going to help many users? I still don't see microformats in FireFox so the only people that have the ability to even see any difference is very small (operator users), right? J JMesserly (talk) 00:47, 16 August 2009 (UTC)

Marriage template
Thanks again for the marriage template, I use it in every biography now. It solved that problem of confusing the birth and marriage years. Excellent job. --Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ) (talk) 00:54, 24 July 2009 (UTC)

Greetings
I was wondering if you could assist me with an issue. On the Anglo-Saxon Wikipedia, we recently had a conflict about whether we should use certain characters to represent certain sound environments in writing, or not. (specifically, whether to use a special form of the letter g, ȝ, for the /j/ sound, or just a regular g, which can also be used for English "G") Ultimately, no agreement was made, and for now, we simply create duplicate pages, so that there will be no conflict about the issue. For example, the word ȝearƿe may also be written as gearwe, pronounced as yar-way.

The reason that many users make a distinction between the two types of G's, is that G may be pronounced as a standard G, or as a Y, depending on the environment. But often it's not always rather obvious as to how it's spoken, according to its own rules. C may sound like either k or ch, same idea, for instance. When coupled with a front vowel (i, e) then it is ch. When with a back vowel (a, o, u), it's k. But the Anglo-Saxon word for chicken is written as cicen. The rules would tell you that this is spoken as chi-chen, but it's chi-ken, just as in modern speech. We make this distinction with the letter C by using ċ for the ch sound, thus giving us ċicen. Some users greatly depend upon the ċ, others loathe it.

I thought that perhaps the  {{#if:  function could be helpful for this, or a customized version of it. Ideally, at the top of each page, there would be small "buttons" to press so that the user can choose to view which version of the page he is able to read the best. This is currently how we do it, but it requires making duplicate pages, as well as manually converting the characters for the secondary page. I felt that an auto-conversion for viewing would reduce the need for double-pages, as well as greatly reduce the effort to fulfill this solution.

The letters ȝ and g must be able to appear side-by-side on the first option, but appear as g and g on the second. The same with ƿ and w being together for the first, but appearing as w and w on the second. ċ and c on first, c and c on 2nd.

Since you seem to be familiar with the  {{#if:  funtion, I figured I would ask you. Your efforts are superbly appreciated by us all. —<b style="font-size:medium; color:#000000;">ᚹᚩᛞᛖᚾᚻᛖᛚᛗ</b> ( ᚷᛖᛋᛈᚱᛖᚳ ) 02:54, 11 August 2009 (UTC)


 * Additionally, for an example, view the two versions of the pages for the game Street Fighter IV: (version 1) and (version 2) —<b style="font-size:medium; color:#000000;">ᚹᚩᛞᛖᚾᚻᛖᛚᛗ</b> ( ᚷᛖᛋᛈᚱᛖᚳ ) 02:59, 11 August 2009 (UTC)

Bug in template:Death-date and age for people whose lives span 3 centuries
Writing in article Helge Ingstad gives: 29 March, 2001. Clearly, the age should be 101, not 109. I'm going to leave the article with the template reference and hope that you fix it shortly. Hgrosser (talk) 01:30, 29 September 2009 (UTC)

The bug is not that it spans 3 centuries, it's the comma in the death date field that trips up the template: shows correctly as 29 March 2001. Hgrosser (talk) 01:46, 29 September 2009 (UTC)

Category:Reliability interconnections
Hi, J JMesserly. I proposed to merge Category:Reliability interconnections to Category:Electric power transmission systems. You could comment it here. Beagel (talk) 09:11, 5 December 2009 (UTC)

COMMONS-Category Category:Altenbeken in the 2000s and others
Hello J JMesserly, in the NaviBox of Category:Altenbeken in the 2000s (and all other cities) links "About Altenbeken" always to this USA-Seite. Can You help me? Regards, --R. Engelhardt (talk) 21:14, 26 December 2009 (UTC)

"M" but not Peter Lorre
Someone has been mucking with the template and it no longer shows (m. 1890-1953). --Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ) (talk) 06:17, 8 December 2010 (UTC)

Nomination for deletion of Template:Vevent date
Template:Vevent date has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the template's entry on the Templates for discussion page. — This, that, and the other (talk) 01:10, 23 January 2011 (UTC)

Disambiguation link notification
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Electric power transmission systems
There is a discussion, which articles should be included in the category:Electric power transmission systems. Your opinion is appreciated. Beagel (talk) 06:08, 23 February 2012 (UTC)

Dead link in article 'List of HVDC projects'
Hi. The article 'List of HVDC projects' has a dead link that could not be repaired automatically. Can you help fix it?

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Orphaned non-free image File:Melissa Harris-Perry Show logo 2012.png
 Thanks for uploading File:Melissa Harris-Perry Show logo 2012.png. The image description page currently specifies that the image is non-free and may only be used on Wikipedia under a claim of fair use. However, the image is currently orphaned, meaning that it is not used in any articles on Wikipedia. If the image was previously in an article, please go to the article and see why it was removed. You may add it back if you think that that will be useful. However, please note that images for which a replacement could be created are not acceptable for use on Wikipedia (see our policy for non-free media).

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Methyl formate and other refrigerants
Hi there

You seem to have an interest in refrigerants. Could you take a look at methyl formate and discuss the use of this compound as a refrigerant, either historically or currently? Thanks! --Rifleman 82 (talk) 15:48, 10 May 2012 (UTC)

RE: I think you are right.
I think some would argue that the image should only be used for an article about the show but not for the bio. But there is currently no article on the show. I don't intend to remove the image from the bio, but I suspect someone will. Cresix (talk) 00:16, 13 May 2012 (UTC)

Request for help concerning energy...
Hi,

I noticed you listed yourself as a participant of the Energy WikiProject.

There are 2 new outlines in this area that attempt to consolidate Wikipedia's coverage of their respective subjects, gathering and organizing the articles about them into one place and including descriptions for convenience. The purposes of these outlines are to make it easier for readers to survey or review a whole subject, and to choose from Wikipedia's many articles about it.

The new energy outlines are:


 * Outline of solar energy
 * Outline of wind energy

Please take a look at them, and....


 * if you spot missing topics, add them in.


 * if you can, improve the descriptions.


 * add missing descriptions.


 * show parent-offspring relationships (with indents).


 * fix errors.

For more information about the format and functions of outlines, see Outlines.

Building outlines of existing material (such as Wikipedia) is called "reverse outlining". Reverse outlines are useful as a revision tool, for identifying gaps in coverage and for spotting poor structuring.

Revising a work with multiple articles (such as Wikipedia) is a little different than revising a paper. But the general principles are the same...

As you develop these outlines, you may notice things about the articles they organize. Like what topics are not adequately covered, better ways to structure and present the material, awkward titles, articles that need splitting, article sections lacking Main links, etc.

If you have any questions, please feel free to ask me on my talk page or at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Outlines.

Thank you. Sincerely, The Transhumanist 00:47, 2 June 2012 (UTC) P.S.: see also Outline of energy

DYK for Liberdade class underwater glider
Graeme Bartlett (talk) 08:02, 4 June 2012 (UTC)

Disambiguation link notification for January 28
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Nomination for deletion of Template:Marriage
Template:Marriage has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the template's entry on the Templates for discussion page. Lady Lotus (talk) 12:44, 16 September 2013 (UTC)
 * It seems to me all the votes are to Keep, so I see no need to weigh in. Perhaps you now understand that it's purpose is not as trivial as you had assumed.  J JMesserly (talk) 04:05, 18 September 2013 (UTC)

Nomination for deletion of Template:Marriage
Template:Marriage has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the template's entry on the Templates for discussion page. — &#123;&#123;U&#124;Technical 13&#125;&#125; (t • e • c) 21:37, 22 February 2014 (UTC)

Hawaii edit-a-thon!
Hello. I'm interested in attempting to put together an edit-a-thon for Hawaiian cultural topics something during the Makahiki festival perhaps around the month of November. The hope is that our lackluster coverage of Hawaiian mythology could be improved with help from the Bishop Museum, Hawaii Pacific University, and the Honolulu public library. I am in the process of making initial contacts with these organizations as well as Wikimedia DC's GLAM project. If this sounds like something you might be interested in participating in, or perhaps helping to coordinate, could you please add your name to 2014 Makahiki Edit-a-thon?--v/r - TP 07:43, 10 June 2014 (UTC)

Sudbury
Thank you for the additions and updates on the article. I appreciate it.Bettymnz4 (talk) 12:55, 19 November 2014 (UTC)

Looking for editors to help with an Asian Pacific American edit-a-thon in Honolulu
Aloha!

Last summer I moved to the Seattle area after 14 years in Kailua on Oahu. I immediately fell in with the Cascadia Wikimedians User Group as it formed, joined its board and became its first president as well as the GLAM representative for Washington State.

Recently, Adriel Luis, Curator (Digital & Emerging Media) at the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center, contacted me about setting up an edit-a-thon like the previous Wikipedia APA edit-a-thon. In addition to discussing one for Seattle, he wrote:

It's awesome to learn about your past in Honolulu - I'm actually going to be there for another SmithsonianAPA project mid September, and thinking that this could be an opportunity to do an event there as well! I have lots of contacts with UH and the museums, but do you know of any contacts on the Wikimedia side out there?

As I was working two jobs while I lived on Oahu, I did not have the opportunity to meet your or any other Wikipedians at the time. Hence, the reason why I am contacting you now.

If you would like to help, please contact me through one of these methods:
 * Email me directly at [mailto:peaceray@cascadia.wiki peaceray@cascadia.wiki]
 * Use Special:EmailUser/Peaceray to email me
 * Leave a message for me on my talk page.

Mahalo,

ArbCom elections are now open!
Hi, You appear to be eligible to vote in the current Arbitration Committee election. The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to enact binding solutions for disputes between editors, primarily related to serious behavioural issues that the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the ability to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail. If you wish to participate, you are welcome to review the candidates' statements and submit your choices on the voting page. For the Election committee, MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 14:00, 24 November 2015 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject United States/The 50,000 Challenge
--MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 02:40, 8 November 2016 (UTC)

Start-date/end-date question
Hi there, regarding start-date and end-date, can you tell me why they always output DMY date formatting when only the year month and day are specified, but when time or anything else is included they obey whatever the input format is? For example, January 12, 2005 outputs January 12, 2005, but January 12, 2005, 18:47:08 outputs January 12, 2005, 18:47:08? If this could be fixed, I'd be very grateful. — Huntster (t @ c) 05:35, 13 November 2016 (UTC)
 * It's an exceptionally complex template. I'll take a look at it if I can in the next few weeks, but I am way way busy in real life now.  J JMesserly (talk) 01:34, 20 November 2016 (UTC)
 * I certainly understand. Thanks for taking a look. — Huntster (t @ c) 01:39, 20 November 2016 (UTC)

New Challenge for Oceania and Australia
Hi, WikiProject Oceania/The 10,000 Challenge and WikiProject Australia/The 5000 Challenge are up and running based on The 10,000 Challenge which has currently produced over 2300 article improvements and creations. The Australia challenge would feed into the wider region one and potentially New Zealand could have a smaller challenge too. The main goal is content improvement, tackling stale old stubs and important content and improving sourcing/making more consistent but new articles are also welcome if sourced. I understand that this is a big goal for regular editors, especially being summertime where you are, but if you'd like to see large scale quality improvements happening for Oceania and Australia like The Africa Destubathon, which has produced over 1700 articles in 5 weeks, sign up on the page. The idea will be an ongoing national editathon/challenge for the region but fuelled by a series of contests to really get articles on every province and subject mass improved. The Africa contest scaled worldwide would naturally provide great benefits to Oceania countries, particularly Australia and attract new editors. I would like some support from existing editors here to get the Challenges off to a start with some articles to make doing a Destubathon worthwhile and potentially bring about hundreds of improvements in a few weeks through a contest! Cheers.♦ --MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 02:12, 24 November 2016 (UTC)

Your inactive bot(s)
Hello J JMesserly. We currently show that you are the operator on file for at least one  account that appears to be inactive. Please see the discussion and list of bots here: Bot owners' noticeboard. If you are no longer operating your bot, no action is required - your bot will be marked as retired and have the bot flag removed. Should your bot be retired and you wish to revive it in the future, please request bot authorization at WP:BRFA. If you are still in control of your bot (including knowing its hopefully strong password) and wish to maintain the bot flag, please sign the table on the linked discussion. Thank you, — xaosflux  Talk 14:41, 26 November 2016 (UTC)

Talk:Liberal eugenics
Hi there.

Just dropping you a message to say that I responded to your comment at Talk:Liberal eugenics from 2013!

Yaris678 (talk) 19:34, 30 October 2017 (UTC)

Your access to AWB may be temporarily removed
Hello J JMesserly! This message is to inform you that due to editing inactivity, your access to AutoWikiBrowser may be temporarily removed. If you do not resume editing within the next week, your username will be removed from the CheckPage. This is purely for routine maintenance and is not indicative of wrongdoing on your part. You may regain access at any time by simply requesting it at WP:PERM/AWB. Thank you! &mdash; MusikBot II  talk  20:22, 12 December 2017 (UTC)

MandelBot
Hello J JMesserly! While doing periodic cleanups I found a bot account of yours: MandelBot that does not appear to have been used since: 20090424230932. Have you retired this bot and no longer require a bot flag for it? Please ping me if replying here. Best regards, — xaosflux  Talk 15:17, 25 June 2018 (UTC)

Nomination for deletion of Template:Event
Template:Event has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the template's entry on the Templates for discussion page. Andy Mabbett ( Pigsonthewing ); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 11:31, 19 August 2019 (UTC)

Nomination for deletion of Template:Map-loc
Template:Map-loc has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the template's entry on the Templates for discussion page. ‑‑Trialpears (talk) 00:42, 12 November 2019 (UTC)

Citation template stuff
If most of that citation work at Trumpism is yours, I'm very impressed; you have way more patience for this political stuff that I could muster! However, I wanted to point out that various citation template parameters were being misused (some of them severely, e.g. abuse of quote to inject non-quotation editorial notes, etc.). Others were redundant, pointlessly included as empty, given in unnecessarily long versions, etc. If you see my big cleanup edit just now (I I successfully integrated all your new material between my edits, but will give it another once-over), you can see the citation cleanup, which completely dominates the edit. I know these templates are complex, but it's important to get them right because they emit various forms of hard-coded metadata and are otherwise acted upon in an automated fashion. "Citation mess" just creates incredibly tedious cleanup work for others to do later.

If the bulk of that had nothing to do with you, and your recent cite additions were they way they were simply due to copy-pasting from extant citations that were in the page then filling in new detail, sorry for the false alarm. :-)

PS: I liked the more detailed and direct book paraphrase you swapped in, in place of the iffy summary version from some random website. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  10:27, 21 November 2020 (UTC)
 * , I generally edit more technical and boring articles, but after viewing the article in october, I felt that it would benefit from higher quality support for information being conveyed in the article.  I use a template with a bunch of blank fields and sometimes I clip out the blanks I know will not be used, but was unaware that blank fields would pose a problem for template writers.  I have written some fairly complex templates on wikipedia and other wikia and that sort of error check on a field is trivial.  Please direct me to any template where this is an issue and I will look at the code.  Nonetheless, I agree that it would be better on my part to be better about removing empty fields as a matter of tidiness/ kruft removal.
 * I have indeed in many cases been sloppy, ignorant or have intentionally reused fields for things they were not intended for. I realized my error a month or so ago about pages not referring to the book length.  In the case of footnote placement, do they also go after commas?  Because I thought they occurred prior to punctuation after viewing some editor come in and make a whole bunch of movements of the foot prior to punctuation.  So I followed suit.  Regarding the misuse of quote- I see the fix you put in, but I chose not to do it that way because most will not see it- well at least those who use hover the foot to popup the sfn, then in turn hover the abbreviation to display the  the biblio reference popup.   I would presume this is the common usage for readers serious about citations because it is time wasting and unnecessary to scroll down then scroll back up to the foot and biblio sections.  Is the notation in the title that it is an epub version enough to telegraph to the interested reader that they should be cautious about potential pagination mixups? Does the reuse of the quote field really mess up any metadata?  I don't see the downside, but if you think there is one and is more important than the risk that some readers will be confused about page numbers that don't match up with the print edition, then I can go along with you on it.  J JMesserly (talk) 02:21, 22 November 2020 (UTC)

Representative Graphic at Trumpism
That works for me, thank you for asking! I don't have a picture, but if you do please feel free to swap it out. --Bad Graphics Ghost (talk) 19:42, 23 November 2020 (UTC)

Operation Warp Speed
On my talk page, you said: "BioNTech is part of Operation warp Speed because of contract commitments to buy BNT162b2. However, a reasonable reader of the article's section "Companies not receiving research funding" might conclude that this successful vaccine was not developed with research funding, but it was, and the support was substantial.  My edit excluded that possible misperception. Of course I agree that the German funding was not part of Operation warp speed, and that was the very point.  I would probably be able to go along with any other rewording you propose that makes such an exclusionary statement, but if you have no objections I will then restore my sentence of clarification."
 * Hello. Respectfully, I can't agree with you. The OWS article is about American government investments in R&D and/or contract manufacturing. Pfizer and BioNTech are quite adamant about German/EU funding - no American money - being used to develop the vaccine, example here. Zefr (talk) 23:49, 9 December 2020 (UTC)
 * , just to clarify, are you saying you do not agree that a reasonable reader might be confused on this point about whether Operation Warp Speed did or did not help accelerate development of their vaccine? Articles make exclusionary statements all the time, but not for unlikely misconceptions.  So are you saying this is an unlikely misconception?  If so, then why do you think Fortune magazine spent an entire article clarifying what role Operation Warp Speed did and did not play in its development?  See Germany funded the development of Pfizer’s COVID vaccine—not U.S.’s Operation Warp Speed  Their article is an important fact about Operation Warp Speed, but by your logic this information has no relevance to the article because it mentions a non operation warp speed program to make the point.  Am I understanding your position correctly?  J JMesserly (talk) 01:03, 10 December 2020 (UTC)
 * We already discuss the initial confusion here with refs #45-9, which seems clear enough, and was in the global news by other sources over several days in early November. Your edit was incorrect and off-topic by my understanding, which follows the sources. You can raise this on the OWS talk page, if you wish. Zefr (talk) 01:46, 10 December 2020 (UTC)
 * , thank you for that confirmation. So you do agree that it is proper to bring up facts about the Operation Warp Speed over which the public is confused.  The cites you feel are sufficient all have to do with Pfizer whose role was not in the development but the manufacture and distribution of the vaccine.  Does the article answer the question what Operation Warp Speed money did or did not go to the developer, BioNTech?  No. It goes into some length about Pfizer's statements and philosophy about accepting public money, but there is nothing about the party actually doing the R&D on the vaccine development (BioNTech) and whether Operation warp speed played any role in financing it.   Are you ok with a contrasting summary statement such as, "Although financing the vaccine's development at BioNTech was aided by public funding, it did not come from Operation Warp Speed.", supported by a citation to either the reuters or fortune story?  If not, why not?  J JMesserly (talk) 03:01, 10 December 2020 (UTC)
 * Best to open a talk page discussion and get consensus among other editors for whether this is needed, WP:CON, and not get into an edit war. Nothing further to say on this topic. Zefr (talk) 03:41, 10 December 2020 (UTC)
 * , I don't understand the assumption that another editor might think the alternative to dialog would be an edit war. Please instead assume good faith.  My long experience at WP is that what is best is to reach common ground and proceed from agreed on points supported by facts.  It is unfortunate that this was beyond our reach.  J JMesserly (talk) 05:06, 10 December 2020 (UTC)

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Disambiguation link notification for March 1
An automated process has detected that when you recently edited Trumpism, you added a link pointing to the disambiguation page CPAC.

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Stop edit warring
You're edit warring before having a discussion on the talk page. Stop it. Benicio2020 (talk) 14:52, 16 March 2021 (UTC)

Stop.
Adding the wiki links like you did here and on other articles is disruptive because it does nothing but cause a referencing error. Disruptive editing even if in good faith can be still against policy. Ⓩⓟⓟⓘⓧ Talk 05:47, 19 April 2021 (UTC)
 * I went back and reverted the links I mistaken placed in citations that had urls but missed this one. Thanks for bringing this one to my attention.  I have reverted it.  As far as I know the links on the other pages are good, but I shall double check.  I would request though that you not use the imperative in your requests to other editors.  I have a thick skin and you were correct, so it meant nothing to me, but it could cause others to feel you are assuming good faith.  J JMesserly (talk) 07:21, 19 April 2021 (UTC)
 * , this isnt the first time you’ve been told about this. So I feel the language used in this warning is warranted. Ⓩⓟⓟⓘⓧ Talk 13:52, 19 April 2021 (UTC)
 * As a wikipedian since 2006, I have heard many such statements, but really, there is no justification for failing to assume good faith. It's a good maxim.  I made an error and had someone else inform me of the same error besides you which I prompting rectified.  So your haste in piling on assuming bad faith would be understandable if you were less experienced.  Let's leave it there.  J JMesserly (talk) 21:50, 19 April 2021 (UTC)

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sfn errors
Wait one minute? My edit was three minutes after yours, and you are the one who missed the page number. You've got two "Wheatcroft 2000" in there now. But I'll wait. DuncanHill (talk) 01:19, 24 December 2022 (UTC)


 * Look, I appreciate your well intentioned "help", but you do not comprehend that due to server lag it can take more than 5 refreshes before I get a response. Unlike previous edits which performed edits on the entire article, I have found that section edits work much faster but do not allow error checking. Unfortunately, there is a peanut gallery attempting to give me pointers on errors, but it is not all that helpful.  Anyway perhaps you can comprehend why the tools you recommend are useless.  I already have removed the clutter of over 60 inline references from this article which have accumulated over the last 12 years, so really, can you please indulge me a little patience before introducing intermediate edits which add needless waste of time to ascertain what your "contribution" entailed? J JMesserly (talk) 01:38, 24 December 2022 (UTC)


 * Perhaps you should use Template:In_use if you don't want anyone fixing the errors you intrude upon their watchlists. I shall try to remember that you resent anyone trying to help you. DuncanHill (talk) 01:45, 24 December 2022 (UTC)
 * Assumption of bad faith is not particularly helpful on wikipedia. I understand your good intent.  You simply did not comprehend the situation.  J JMesserly (talk) 01:55, 24 December 2022 (UTC)

Unclosed ref tags
Hi, J JMesserly, in a discussion at WT:CITE, you twice coded " " in a discussion, intending only to mention such tags, and not to generate a reference, which is fine. But that character sequence, including the left and right angle brackets, is understood by the wikimedia software as special, and it considers the entire rest of the page as a reference of some sort (of course, that doesn't work). Additionally, various syntax highlighting programs will be affected adversely as well. In the future, please use any of these solutions, when mentioning ref tags on Talk pages: This also applies to anything that looks like an Html tag, i.e., anything between angle brackets. Hope this helps, Mathglot (talk) 08:04, 9 March 2023 (UTC)
 * Skip the angle brackets entirely, maybe just adding the word 'tag' (like I did above), and just say, "a ref-tag" or similar.
 * Encode the leading angle bracket using an Html entity, like this:, so that   renders   on the page, without triggering the software to treat it like a ref-tag.
 * Keep the angle brackets, but embed the whole thing in, like this:.


 * Oh so they never protected that in the editor (I guess it is a pretty simple implementation)- in the blur of activity I never noticed they weren't showing up. I am very old school and actually am more accustomed to straight wikitext.  So this new editor doesn't do much more than add html tags and do indents.  Frankly I am much more used to the old style when we did messages with nowiki and indent colons etc.  All this "help" in these editors do- If they want to help so much they should consider that folks might actually might want to add coding statements in their messages.  But I grumble too much.  Adding indents and simple font changes is an improvement from expecting all contributors to understand arcane syntax.
 * Actually I am pretty comfortable with complex wikitext. At one time I wrote a lot of templates.  Some of them like Template:Marriage are still in pretty heavy use.  If you want to get your head around how the evaluation engine works, take a look at that code.  Thanks for the note.J JMesserly (talk) 09:07, 9 March 2023 (UTC)
 * They were showing up—not sure of the internals, but guessing there's either a character limit, or else perhaps a newline terminates the interpreter's search for an end-ref, and it just leaves the begin-ref hanging there unclosed. The only ill effect (that I know of) is mangling syntax highlighting, but as I do rely on that somewhat, it's something I think worth fixing; most others don't bother (if they even notice it at all). Thanks for the link. Mathglot (talk) 21:02, 9 March 2023 (UTC)
 * The template in its current state has many more features in its current form than what I created in 2009. If you are into making contributions with templates, a consideration is not to make the parser do so much work on a commonly used template that you are imposing loads on WP servers that aren't worth the benefit.  J JMesserly (talk) 23:23, 9 March 2023 (UTC)
 * Fixed your last message at the page here; old habits die hard! Mathglot (talk) 22:53, 10 March 2023 (UTC)
 * I'm old. Perhaps early senility. Thanks again, and warm regards.J JMesserly (talk) 23:00, 10 March 2023 (UTC)

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Speedy deletion nomination of Category:Unconfirmed uses of sfn style 2


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Invitation to an in-person meetup in Mohua / Golden Bay
Thinking about your summer break? Think about joining other Wikipedians and Wikimedians in Golden Bay / Mohua! Details are on the meetup page. There's heaps of interesting stuff to work on e.g. the oldest extant waka or New Zealand's oldest ongoing legal case. Or you may spend your time taking photos and then upload them.

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