User talk:Newyorkbrad/Archive/2017/Mar

Fixing a ping
Hi. I noticed you tried to fix a ping yesterday. Today while trying to figure out how to add "no ping" I ran across Notifications which says "Note that the post containing a link to a user page must be signed; if the mention is not on a completely new line with a new signature, no notification will be sent." So you need a new line as well as a new sig. Doug Weller talk 10:53, 12 February 2017 (UTC)
 * Yes. The way to think about it is that people often adjust their comments which could potentially send multiple pings, one for every typo fixed in a comment even if the typo had nothing to do with the ping. To avoid that, a notification is only sent if the diff of an edit shows a new comment being added (that is, the edit is new text, not an adjustment to existing text, and has a ping and a new signature). Johnuniq (talk) 01:33, 13 February 2017 (UTC)
 * For whatever it's worth, the ping to Seppi and me, two talk sections above, did not go through to me (but I was watching here, so that was OK). (Maybe that's what Doug Weller was referring to, come to think of it.) --Tryptofish (talk) 02:18, 13 February 2017 (UTC)
 * Thank you all. I knew that to fix a ping requires, re-signing, but not re-signing on a separate line. I suppose the takeaway is to be especially careful about previewing posts with a ping in them. Regards, Newyorkbrad (talk) 15:50, 13 February 2017 (UTC)

Special:Diff/765707186
Why did you revert my edits? They were just questions for the RfA! 95.49.122.192 (talk) 23:41, 15 February 2017 (UTC)
 * They were not useful or appropriate questions. Newyorkbrad (talk) 23:42, 15 February 2017 (UTC)

Your feedback matters: Final reminder to take the global Wikimedia survey
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Of potential interest
If you have a minute to take a look here, I would be interested in your thoughts.

CorporateM (Talk) 13:29, 4 March 2017 (UTC)

March 11: Art+Feminism Edit-a-thon @ MoMA (and beyond!)
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Sunday March 26: Action=History Wiki-Hackathon @ Ace Hotel
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Another recent decision on whether and when courts should cite Wikipedia
Some recommended reading: Newyorkbrad (talk) 00:46, 22 March 2017 (UTC)
 * Texas Supreme Court opinion in D Magazine Partners v. Rosenthal by Justice Debra Lehrmann.
 * Concurring opinion in the same case by Justice Eva Guzman.
 * A webpost summarizing the opinions by Professor Eugene Volokh.
 * Citations to some earlier cases in Socratic form.

Any literary editors around?
I'm looking for some guidance on categories to add an article into. Everything I try turns out to be a redlink, so I must be doing it wrong. Newyorkbrad (talk) 15:21, 22 March 2017 (UTC)
 * I look at similar articles and copy from there. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 16:45, 22 March 2017 (UTC)
 * If you're not sure, just shove it into a high-level category (Category:American authors, Category:Songs etc) and someone will come along fairly soon to add new categories. Don't overthink it—categories are useful for the internal administration of Wikipedia, but the readers couldn't care less. (The WMF probably have the raw figures—paging WhatamIdoing—but I'd lay money that incoming traffic to any article via wikilinks in other articles is orders of magnitude higher than traffic via categories, given that I'm certain 99.9% of Wikipedia's readers don't even know that the category trees exist.) The important thing is that the article is linked on other articles on which you think there's a reasonable possibility that readers of Article A will also want to know about Article B. &#8209; Iridescent 16:52, 22 March 2017 (UTC)
 * I haven't heard any information about page views for cats, but I'd follow Iridescent's advice.
 * 762,167 people read Valentine's Day on 14 February. (I picked it because the big seasonal spike might be handy for comparisons.)  Just 78 people looked at Category:Love that day, and 91 people looked at Category:February observances.  (I picked these because they're most closely related to the subject.) That's about a 4500:1 ratio in favor of the article.  Even if every single person who visited those categories came from the Valentine's article, and even if every single person who used the categories was a non-editor, then less than 0.02% of readers used those categories.  This suggests that categories are generally unpopular.
 * But every single person was not an editor, of course. One of the things that we know is that readers are more likely to use mobile devices than desktop computers, and that editors are very much more likely to use desktop systems.  So here's a different way to look at this question:  just 32.5% of the people reading that article were on a desktop computer, but 98% of people visiting Category:Love and 80% of people visiting Category:February observances were using desktop computers.  This suggests that editors are at least several times more likely to visit the categories than non-editing readers.
 * My conclusion is basically the same as Iridescent's, then: categories are nice, but 99.9% of readers aren't using them.  WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:48, 23 March 2017 (UTC)
 * Going back to the original question: Adding Category:Poems to The Inner Room is fine. Someone had already added the obvious Category: Works by Arthur Conan Doyle, so you could check whether Category: Poems by Arthur Conan Doyle exists (it doesn't at present), but there are tools to find articles in the intersection of two categories anyway. If you do feel the need to overthink it, then a more algorithmic approach would be to look at the Category:Poems page and decide whether any of the sub-categories there would be more appropriate, following down the tree. Category:Poems by date → Category:Poems by year → Category:1898 poems is a possibility; as might Category:Poems by writer's nationality → Category:British poems; however Category:Poetry by writer is a dead-end in this case. That approach is usually possible whenever you can identify a top- or high-level category, although it's somewhat time-consuming. Also enabling HotCat in your Preferences/Gadgets takes out some of the tedium by suggesting auto-completion alternatives as you type. Hope that helps. --RexxS (talk) 00:04, 24 March 2017 (UTC)
 * Thanks everyone for your comments. I thought about "1898 poems" but I'm not sure it fits; the poem was published in 1898, but may have been written a couple of years earlier, and in fact, because of its implicit reference to events in Doyle's life, his biographers might be quite interested if they could pin down the date it was actually written. There is no "poems by Doyle" category because this is his first poem to get an article, and I'm not sure how many more there will be. Regards, Newyorkbrad (talk) 15:07, 24 March 2017 (UTC)
 * I added that category to the article. If someone thinks of a better one, they'll change it. Categories change all the time. Jonathunder (talk) 15:13, 24 March 2017 (UTC)
 * Okay. Thanks. Regards, Newyorkbrad (talk) 15:14, 24 March 2017 (UTC)
 * I suspect that "Poems by year" will refer to date of publication as often as not, but your point about the uncertainty remains – although we should remember that categories are primarily intended for navigation to related articles, so poems published in the same year are about as related as poems composed in the same year (i.e. not very well related at all). An option could also be Category:Poems by date → Category:Poems by decade → Category:1890s poems, which might make more sense if it were better populated (but the gnomes insist on diffusing entries down to the most specific category as if that were necessarily a good thing). Cheers --RexxS (talk) 15:23, 24 March 2017 (UTC)
 * I suspect that "Poems by year" will refer to date of publication as often as not, but your point about the uncertainty remains – although we should remember that categories are primarily intended for navigation to related articles, so poems published in the same year are about as related as poems composed in the same year (i.e. not very well related at all). An option could also be Category:Poems by date → Category:Poems by decade → Category:1890s poems, which might make more sense if it were better populated (but the gnomes insist on diffusing entries down to the most specific category as if that were necessarily a good thing). Cheers --RexxS (talk) 15:23, 24 March 2017 (UTC)

Maybe, once in a blue moon, you can go home again after all ...
... or, lagniappe while chasing song memories on Youtube. See Echo Beach. Newyorkbrad (talk) 21:15, 24 March 2017 (UTC)

Mackenzie Ziegler
This article has received lots of IP vandalism since its creation. If you think it appropriate, would you kindly semi-protect it for a substantial period of time? Thanks for any help. -- Ssilvers (talk) 04:08, 25 March 2017 (UTC)
 * Looks like another admin already got to this. Regards, Newyorkbrad (talk) 19:30, 26 March 2017 (UTC)

You've got mail!
Lepricavark (talk) 17:38, 31 March 2017 (UTC)