User talk:MichaelMaggs/Archive 1

In tall grass
In regard to a grass is not a tree, how many of the ShortDescBot edits were as bad as this? In reviewing several, I haven't seen any others notably bad, though I wonder at the accuracy of "Species of tree" for something like Urera baccifera.

I do wonder about the utility of replacing 'nothing' with 'something', just to have a something, where there is a likelihood for the something being bad. But so much of the editing here at WP is replacing 'something' with "something else" just for the grins, so I'm obviously a idealist. Shenme (talk) 19:17, 30 April 2022 (UTC)


 * Thanks. I'm not sure how the bot decided that that was a tree. I'm sure that with a bit of searching you'd be able to find other incorrect descriptions, but I'm confident that the bot's overall error rate is very low: I've seen fewer than 10 queries/reverts in over 300,000 edits, though no doubt there are more to be found. MichaelMaggs (talk) 22:21, 1 May 2022 (UTC)
 * It's very clear that there are severe issues with these edits. Too much oversimplification on so many of them. Centerone (talk) 23:06, 3 June 2022 (UTC)

GB Patents source
Hi, while I've got the attention of a bona fide patent attorney. Do you have any idea if there is an on-line source for GB patents from the 19th century? They are missing from Espace.net and Google Patents. The earliest patents I can source direct from their publications via Google Books, the Internet Archive or Hathi Trust and the later ones are on Espace or Google Patents but there is an annoying black hole (inhabited by the National Archives and the British Library) for a chunk of material in the approx. 1850-1890 range. Skullcinema (talk) 11:14, 3 June 2022 (UTC)


 * @Skullcinema, Annoyingly, most have never been digitised so far as I know. When Espace was set up, they didn't bother digitising nineteenth century and earlier on the basis that they wouldn't be useful to patent office searchers. No doubt the Board of Trade (or whatever they were calling themselves back then) had no interest in the needs of historical researchers. MichaelMaggs (talk) 12:27, 3 June 2022 (UTC)