User talk:Nicolas.hammond/Archive 1

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Looks like I did this the wrong way around. I created the links, then posted the article on the player. It was easier for me to check the work this way. Guess next time I need to write the article, then create the links.

Speedy deletion nomination of Samuel M. Stayman


A tag has been placed on Samuel M. Stayman requesting that it be speedily deleted from Wikipedia. This has been done under section A7 of the criteria for speedy deletion, because the article appears to be about a person, organization (band, club, company, etc.), web content or organised event, but it does not indicate how or why the subject is important or significant: that is, why an article about that subject should be included in an encyclopedia. Under the criteria for speedy deletion, such articles may be deleted at any time. Please read more about what is generally accepted as notable.

If you think this page should not be deleted for this reason, you may contest the nomination by visiting the page and clicking the button labelled "Click here to contest this speedy deletion". This will give you the opportunity to explain why you believe the page should not be deleted. However, be aware that once a page is tagged for speedy deletion, it may be removed without delay. Please do not remove the speedy deletion tag from the page yourself, but do not hesitate to add information in line with Wikipedia's policies and guidelines. If the page is deleted, and you wish to retrieve the deleted material for future reference or improvement, then please contact the deleting administrator, or if you have already done so, you can place a request here. Tgeairn (talk) 06:33, 17 October 2014 (UTC)

Speedy deletion nomination of Seymon Deutsch (Oct 2014)


A tag has been placed on Seymon Deutsch requesting that it be speedily deleted from Wikipedia. This has been done under section A7 of the criteria for speedy deletion, because the article appears to be about a person or group of people, but it does not indicate how or why the subject is important or significant: that is, why an article about that subject should be included in an encyclopedia. Under the criteria for speedy deletion, such articles may be deleted at any time. Please read more about what is generally accepted as notable.

If you think this page should not be deleted for this reason, you may contest the nomination by visiting the page and clicking the button labelled "Click here to contest this speedy deletion". This will give you the opportunity to explain why you believe the page should not be deleted. However, be aware that once a page is tagged for speedy deletion, it may be removed without delay. Please do not remove the speedy deletion tag from the page yourself, but do not hesitate to add information in line with Wikipedia's policies and guidelines. If the page is deleted, and you wish to retrieve the deleted material for future reference or improvement, then please contact the deleting administrator, or if you have already done so, you can place a request here. Tgeairn (talk) 06:35, 17 October 2014 (UTC)

ANI Notice (Oct 2014)
There is currently a discussion at Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents regarding an issue with which you may have been involved. The thread is Mass creation of American Contact Bridge League articles. Thank you. —Tgeairn (talk) 06:47, 17 October 2014 (UTC)

Yeah. Guess I type too fast. But thanks for the heads-up.
 * Not a problem at all. I apologize for my overly-quick reaction. As others have said below, thank you for your work in an underrepresented area of the project. Cheers! --Tgeairn (talk) 20:45, 17 October 2014 (UTC)

Thank you
Thank you for the creation of articles on notable bridge players. Don't let the problems above discourage you! Please make sure that your links to the World Bridge Federation work (at the moment they all lack the player number and produce an Error 500).

It would probably be best if you slowed slightly down, and added a bit more content to the articles instead. Having some reliable, independent sources (books, the NYTimes articles, ...) about the persons also would help avoid the trouble you have been getting from some people here. As an example, for the article on Seymon Deutsch you could have used this NYTimes obituary as a reference, and added some info from it. This isn't necessary, we are grateful for every contribution you are willing to make, but it would help you to avoid the problems some people have given you. Finally, make sure to check that articles you want to create don't already exist with another title. E.g. your article on Samuel M. Stayman was not necessary, as we already had Sam Stayman about him.

It is obvious that you have a lot of expertise on Bridge, please continue to help us out, it is appreciated. Fram (talk) 08:37, 17 October 2014 (UTC)


 * I would also like to thank you for your contributions, and encourage you to improve our coverage of champion bridge players, who have been under-represented so far. Fram already gave you excellent advice which I wouldn't repeat. Just FYI, I merged Mike Lawrence (bridge player), Sami R. Kehela, Eric R. Murray and Theodore A. Lightner to already existing articles, so you might want to refresh your watchlist; I think I copied over everything relevant, but you might like to double-check. I also moved Lew Mathe to the name by which he (to my knowledge) universally goes. Probably the simplest way to check if the desired article exists is to look at Category:American bridge players/Category:Canadian bridge players. Please don't get discouraged by "maintenance" messages you receive, as with proper sourcing that you started to apply your articles will stay around. Welcome! No such user (talk) 11:01, 17 October 2014 (UTC)


 * P.S. I'm pinging User:Newwhist, one of our most prolific bridge editors, who could probably provide you help and guidance through mazes of Wikipedia. No such user (talk) 11:57, 17 October 2014 (UTC)

Trying to get the WBF numbers fixed. Got a contact there trying to get the data. Quicker than me doing 100+ entries manually. Re: slowing down, when I have volunteer time, I use it. I had some this week for the first time in 2-3 years so I wrote some articles. It may be a while before I'm back. It is difficult if there is already an article on someone, but the links that existed were wrong. If I know how to automatically merge, I would be happy to do that. My goal was to get information published on these players and then have others (I'm recruiting) improve the articles, but by providing sufficient information to get the pages accepted.


 * When someone or something is known by multiple names, we set up Redirects to point to the same page, like Mike Lawrence (bridge player) to Mike Lawrence (bridge). However, when the article does not exist, there may exist multiple red links to different titles. The article creator should check (by searching or by inspecting a category, if it exists) if an entry exists first. If not, upon article creation they (or any other editor) should set up redirects from plausible titles, and investigate if the article should be linked from elsewhere.


 * For example, Bermuda Bowl mentions Lew Mathe several times, but his name (and all the others) should have been a WP:REDLINK, to encourage article creation (and to automatically turn blue once the article is created); that's something that should be fixed. Article on Adam Żmudziński should have a redirect at Adam Zmudzinski, to facilitate searches without diacritics. No such user (talk) 15:03, 17 October 2014 (UTC)


 * Thank you from me too, for using your expertise to help develop a subject area that is under-represented. I'm sorry you met with such a hostile reception, even to the extent of having some of your articles incorrectly nominated for speedy deletion. I do hope your initial experience will not demotivate you - in my limited experience, most Wikipedia editors are a lot more friendly and helpful than the ones you were unfortunate to encounter. Neatsfoot (talk) 17:14, 17 October 2014 (UTC)

I've been a Wikipedia editor for over 7 years, so not exactly a newbie. But I hadn't posted much until lately. I'm thick skinned, so don't worry. Guess when I double the amount of work on contract bridge players in 24 hours some people are going to get upset/concerned. Reasonable reaction.

Please do not post empty sections in articles (Oct 2014)
Please stop creating articles with empty sections. Do not post "2BD" in an article section. Either omit the section, or complete the article draft first (on a user subpage, etc.) before you post it live. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a draft-hosting site. Thank you. Softlavender (talk) 09:25, 17 October 2014 (UTC).


 * OK. Will do for future pages. I was recreating others to finish off the pages so wanted to mark what they needed to do.


 * Thanks for understanding. Could you please go back and remove those sections for the articles you have created. Thanks very much. Please also remember to sign your Talk page posts using four tildes, like this: ~ and also indent your posts using colons so that they nest properly under the post you are replying to. I have done this for you on this thread at present. Thanks again. Softlavender (talk) 23:14, 17 October 2014 (UTC)


 * I've posted to a bridge forum (not WIkipedia) asking the forum readers (not regular Wiki-editors) to edit the section marked 2BD. Let me give them a week or so to do this. I realize it may not be normal Wikipedia practice but the majority of bridge players are 70+ years old, and a lot of the biographies I posted are of older people. If there is little activity after a week or so, I can go remove them. For now, I'd prefer to keep them, bad practice though it may be, to see what reaction I get. I have created some newer biographies, and have removed the 2BD section. Nicolas.hammond (talk) 23:21, 17 October 2014 (UTC)


 * Nicolas, that is not acceptable. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, and cannot have "2BD" in its articles. Remove the sections now, and let yourself or others add them back in as text when they are able. You need to clean up after yourself and not force others to do so. With your speed at the keyboard, this should be no problem. Thank you. Softlavender (talk) 23:25, 17 October 2014 (UTC)


 * Done. Nicolas.hammond (talk) 02:50, 18 October 2014 (UTC)

Nicolas, et al.

When a page or section is under construction, working alone or with others (ess'ly as Nicolas describes, but I expect the number of new player pages is too many for the new editors and I believe that many of the players are not really worthy), you should use template under construction, perhaps with parameter and value section=yes.

If 7 days pass with the template in place and no revision of the page, a robot will delete the template and notify you via your WP:Watchlist (because all these pages are on your Watchlist, hint, hint).

See also increation for use if you are working on the page now (not hoping/expecting that colleagues are on your trail nowadays). That is deleted when hours pass.

--P64 (talk) 18:14, 30 October 2014 (UTC)


 * Hi P64, nice thought but not suitable for these hundreds of articles because we are talking about hundreds of articles, very few of them which will get Biography sections or that even have biographical information available in reliable secondary sources. So what would happen is that bots would delete the templates, leaving hundreds of empty Biography sections. Softlavender (talk) 23:05, 30 October 2014 (UTC)

Ways to improve the articles you've created
First, thanks for creating these; many were long overdue. I have added categories to some of the articles you created. It would be great if you could improve the articles by finding obituaries - some I found for von Zedtwitz and Lightner at the NY Times - and fleshing out their biographies. Also, you can add alumni categories for their alma mater(s), etc. See von Zedtwitz as an example I put some effort into. Happy editing... Carlossuarez46 (talk) 23:26, 17 October 2014 (UTC)

Lead Sections & Content (Oct 2014)
Hi¬ I've just been lookign over some of your recent articles, and I have a couple comments to make (bridge isn't soemthing I know anything about, so I'm not really qualified to make changes...). First, I find the lead sections are a bit short. It might be better to add a little more stuff. Second, the articles themselves are a bit short. Good job with getting a bunch of references, but, there<s seems to be no bios, or written texts; mainly just lists. I hope thiese comments are relevant and helpful. Merci beaucoup! NHCLS (talk) 15:13, 18 October 2014 (UTC)

Suggestion (Oct 2014)
Glad to see that you've resolved the queries about your bulk creations. Once you've created several that everyone seems happy with you might like to apply for WP:PERM/A and make life easier for the folks doing New Page Patrol. Regards, Bazj (talk) 15:18, 18 October 2014 (UTC)

Contract Bridge players - reply (Oct 2014)
You know, I'm not actually seeing much support for what you are saying on my talk page in the comments by others. I tagged them for notability, not speedy deletion. The other editors agree that they should not be speedy deleted and need to be beefed up with addition sources, not that these articles you mass created are OK. That is basically what the notability tag is for. Every article I tagged in essence was sourced to a single source, a clearly non-mainstream publication. I understand you want to compare these to professional athletes, but there is no comparison. Do your champs appear on broadcast TV everyday and make millions of dollars and get invitations to the Whitehouse and are covered extensively in mainstream publications? No, they are not. Just like inductees into my college's hall of fame are not automatically notable, neither are these bridge players. Thus, you need to abide by the WP:GNG, and those article did not, and as such the notability tag is appropriate. If they have non-paid obits in the NYT, then use that as a source to demonstrate these people are notable. Aboutmovies (talk) 22:01, 18 October 2014 (UTC)


 * My criteria for adding someone was 10+ North American Bridge Championship wins. I sense a very US-centric bias in your reply, I am not sure that the amount of money some makes, or an invitation to the White House meets the WP:GNG. However, I did list, just for one player, Harry Fishbein, some references to articles in Sports Illustrated, at least in the US this is a main stream publication. I got bored after 10. I don't think it productive to list every reference to every player in every publication. Someone with some subject matter expertise needs to vet these entries. If you don't know the subject, I don't think you can decide who is notable or not. Bridge is covered is most newspapers around the world, US Baseball is not. Whereas your college is not representative of the country, or world, the Hall of Fame I have listed is representative of experts within a country voting on their peers for a Hall of Fame. The majority of the players I listed have been covered in the New York Times at some point. For those that have died, nearly all had obituaries in the New York Times - B. Jay Becker, Carol Sanders, Tom Sanders, Seymon Deutsch, Robert F. Jordan, Edith Freilich, Lew Mathe, Tobias Stone, Phil Feldesman, Waldemar von Zedtwitz, Peter A. Pender to name a few. I think an (un-paid) obituary in the NYT qualifies someone with WP:GNG. The living ones do not have obituaries yet; but as they have the same qualifications as those that did get a NYT obituary, we can assume that they probably will. Nicolas.hammond (talk) 18:06, 19 October 2014 (UTC)
 * I just want to add my thank you for your efforts on bridge players. Some Wiki editors are not aware of the game and error in assuming its best players are not notable; your effective creation of many new articles in a short time-span has spooked them. To avoid negative reactions from these well-intentioned guardians of elevated precision in the interpretation of Wiki policy on notability, it is my experience that when creating a new article, it should have some depth to the lead material and it should have reliable independent sources properly referenced. For some reason people seem to prefer that many small pebbles be thrown into the water over time and get distressed and over-react when a large boulder is tossed in. Also, it might help if you filled out your profile a bit so other editors would know your interests and intentions. Keep up the excellent work and welcome to  the project. I too am interested in bios on players and will try to expand their content. Unfortunately my time is not unlimited but you have re-energized me with a purpose to follow your trail of new articles and add what I can.  Thanks again. Newwhist (talk) 11:50, 23 October 2014 (UTC)
 * Great. See my comments on automating some of the steps for creating new bios.Nicolas.hammond (talk) 13:59, 23 October 2014 (UTC)

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Your articles...
the links to the WBF have a parameter XXX, which breaks the link, can you fix them? Carlossuarez46 (talk) 04:33, 24 October 2014 (UTC)


 * I stopped putting this in new articles. There is a world championship going on in Sanya, I'm trying to get either the information from WBF (supposedly it's on the way), or asking peoplpe there to update. If I can't get it done, will remove. I misunderstood with the word "stub" meant. All the articles I created were initially stubbed so that I could get other to complete (and a lot were finished by others.Nicolas.hammond (talk) 08:38, 24 October 2014 (UTC)


 * The parameter is supposed to be part of the URL which links to the player's profile at the WBF website. For example, Bob Hamman is at http://www.worldbridge.org/Repository/people/person.asp?qryid=3774, so 3774 is the required parameter. The page can be located via search at http://www.worldbridge.org/Repository/people/default.asp, or by googling  site:worldbridge.org. No such user (talk) 12:26, 24 October 2014 (UTC)


 * I know. But rather than have to manually search for 100+ such player IDs, I have someone that is getting me a copy of the WBF database so we can do them all at once. This type of work - manually researching someone's ID is painfully slow and should not be needed. Much better is for someone to write a macro so that we can look up their player ID from a database (somewhere on the Wiki?) and then to use that reference to create a link to their WBF profile. If I can get the WBF DB, can someone else write this macro? Perfect example is the ACBL HOF. They changed this from being a number to a name. Bob Hamman is now "Hamman-Robert". So "we" have to manually edit 100+ files instead of editing one.


 * There is an external tool called AutoWikiBrowser which is quite useful for this kind of semi-automated edits ("macros"). From what I know about it, it's very powerful, but I've never cared to request access myself. The catch is that you need to be granted access by admins, and they do that only for editors with more editing experience than you have (As a general rule, only users with more than 500 mainspace edits will be registered). Or we can ask at Bot owners' noticeboard if they can adjust some of existing bots to do that fully automatically. No such user (talk) 14:55, 24 October 2014 (UTC)


 * Does someone want to put that request in? We have a situation where all of the ACBL HOF links are broken because ACBL updated their web site. If instead of putting each users' credentials in their own file it was all external, it would be much better. Same with everyone's bridge accomplishments. Currently this is manual and a pain to keep up to date. I wrote a program to generate the Bridge Accomplishments. Ultimately this should all be put somewhere rather than having to manual edit everyone's page.Nicolas.hammond (talk) 16:30, 25 October 2014 (UTC)


 * I took a look at the tool. It is Windows based. I can do some of the same on a *nix system by creating the URLs I want the program to open. But still manual after that. I'm not a Wiki macro-writer, but for Bridge we need a macro that will do the ACBL HOF, WBF player information. We really need one that will generate the Bridge accomplishments. The current macros for the ACBL HOF, WBF player information require someone to manually edit every page and enter a unique number to the macro. Much better is to have one file that contains these mappings and we just reference that file.Nicolas.hammond (talk) 16:21, 26 October 2014 (UTC)


 * I'd like to mention again that you should not be expecting others to clean up after you, Nicolas. Clean up after yourself. If you are unwilling to do that, then remove the malformed parameters. And in the future, please do not make mass additions of any sort to Wikipedia untill you know and understand exactly what you are doing and until the information you are adding is complete per Wikipedia guidelines. Thank you. Softlavender (talk) 20:02, 24 October 2014 (UTC)


 * What you are missing, I think, is that for all of the articles I created, I created them as a stub. The Wikipedia definition is, "When you write a stub, bear in mind that it should contain enough information for other editors to expand upon it.". I deliberately put the XXX in the articles, because at the same time I wrote the articles, I was recruiting people at the World Championship event in Sanya, and also on Bridgewinners, to become Wiki editors and expand these articles. My plan was to either remove the XXX, or fix them myself, after others had a chance to edit and expand the articles. It worked. There are now some new bridge wiki-editors. I've found that if you asked someone to do something specific, e.g. edit the XXX and replace with something they looked up, that they will also edit other things. But... there were about 130 still left so I went through and either added the link, commented it out, or removed all of them. The correct way of doing this is to have a database file that maps names to the WBF player IDs so we do not have to manually search each and every player's ID.Nicolas.hammond (talk) 16:28, 25 October 2014 (UTC)

EN.wiki biographies, technical (ongoing) (Oct 2014)
Hi, Nicolas. These points are general to English Wikipedia biographies WP:BIOG, if i understand correctly. Anything specific to contract bridge articles I will say in WP:WPCB project space where we met.

This is "ongoing" because I plan to add items to the list at the top rather than extend this section in the usual fashion by formal reply at the bottom. Feel free to reply, and I'll participate in replies as usual, but I'll feel free to extend the list by insertion also. The first item shows a revision by another editor, (semi)automated?, with my remarks hoping to be useful.
 * 1. diff 20141030 --don't create section External links until at least one Ext link is listed (normally a bullet item); template message boxes don't warrant a section (even if they include external links, eg authority control) --DoB missing is considered redundant to YoB missing, despite we occ'ly have birth month/day without year
 * 2. diff 20141020 --the orphan tag, semi-automated, implies there were no redlinks; the person was not redlinked using your pagename, hint, hint --AWB edit summaries are semi-automated and commonly misleading because the crucial words "also General fixes" appear late or, as here, crucial words are appended rather than inserted at the front
 * 3. (see 2) After adding the diacritic mark, by page move to Björn Fallenius, see what links here.

--P64 (talk) 17:38, 30 October 2014 (UTC) --17:50, 30 October 2014 (UTC) --P64 (talk) 17:54, 30 October 2014 (UTC)

4, maybe, no time to refashion this in sequence.

Regarding the "2 Larry Cohens" problem you mentioned to JH:

That doesn't mean Larry Cohen (bridge) and Larry T. Cohen are inappropriate page names. It does suggest avoiding "Larry Cohen" as a linkname, and probably using "Larry N. Cohen" as linkname for the former.

FYI. By design Talk:Larry Cohen (bridge) is one place to suggest we WP:Move over redirect to. That requires assistance by an administrator, unlike move to a pagename that is not in use, such as my recent move of to Billy Rosen. (The ACBL [NABC Winners database doesn't even recognize "William Rosen".)

To delete a redirect --eg, if its accidental misuse seems likely, as your point suggests may be true for Larry Cohen (bridge) after a move of that biography to Larry N. Cohen-- also requires an administrator. There is a process Redirects for Discussion, WP:RFD.

--P64 (talk) 01:57, 1 November 2014 (UTC)

Disambiguation link notification for August 11, 2016
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 * Spingold
 * added links pointing to John Hubbell, David Carter, Larry Gould and Fred Kaplan


 * Vanderbilt Trophy
 * added a link pointing to Fred Kaplan

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 * It would be nice if there were tools to help with this. There is no simple way of automatically detecting missing links for a large number of people other than by adding the link and seeing what is broken or relying on this tool. For the moment, I will keep using this useful tool, probably in ways not intended by the original author. I fixed all of the links above.Nicolas.hammond (talk) 11:04, 11 August 2016 (UTC)