User talk:Rich Farmbrough/Archive/2009 November

Geobox
I see you deprecated Geobox River and Geobox Mountain Range. Can they simply be substitued by Geobox, or do I need to change any parameters? Debresser (talk) 17:51, 31 October 2009 (UTC)


 * If that matters for the answer... on userpages. See Category:Pages using deprecated templates Debresser (talk) 18:12, 31 October 2009 (UTC)


 * Fixed all except one. Since the deprecated templates are at Tfd, that will stop being a problem soon enough. Debresser (talk) 00:09, 2 November 2009 (UTC)

New template
Template:Tone-inline. I had to work on it a little, but now it is presentable. Debresser (talk) 19:20, 31 October 2009 (UTC)
 * Thanks added. Rich Farmbrough, 19:56, 1 November 2009 (UTC).

Your unreferenced tags
Just so you know, on the articles where you've been replacing the Erik9bot category with an unreferenced tag, the date you're entering is November 2006 and not 2009. --Sable232 (talk) 19:26, 1 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Yes, thanks. To avoid swamping the current monthly category I'm using the creation date of the articles. Rich Farmbrough, 19:56, 1 November 2009 (UTC).
 * Ah, that makes sense. --Sable232 (talk) 20:32, 1 November 2009 (UTC)

Re: Template
Not sure I understand what you mean. There is a template for that site, but the documentation says it has to be subst'ed, but it won't subst inside ref tags so I was just copy/pasting the whole thing. --Sable232 (talk) 20:32, 1 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Thanks a ton. That works great. --Sable232 (talk) 22:04, 1 November 2009 (UTC)

SmackBot - The City of London Migraine Clinic
Hi Rich,

I wrote the article for The City of London Migraine Clinic as a volunteer (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_City_of_London_Migraine_Clinic). The SmackBot has put up a notification saying "This article may not meet the general notability guideline. Please help to establish notability by adding reliable, secondary sources about the topic. If notability cannot be established, the article is likely to be merged or deleted."

I don't feel it needs further referencing. Could you help me out by telling me what you feel is missing because I would like to remove the notification as soon as possible. I am also always interested in hearing an experience wiki persons opinion as this is the first article I have written.

Thank you very much, Simon Ssim24 (talk) 17:25, 2 November 2009 (UTC)

Curious
Did you mean to create this category like this: Category:PAGES WITH INCORRECT FORMATTING TEMPLATES USE? JPG-GR (talk) 04:26, 3 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Yes its for cases where Str left overflows and stuff like that. Rich Farmbrough, 04:53, 3 November 2009 (UTC).

The Wikipedia Signpost: 2 November 2009
Read this Signpost in full &middot; Single-page &middot; Unsubscribe &middot; EdwardsBot (talk) 04:58, 3 November 2009 (UTC)

SmackBot bug
FYI, SmackBot replaces content like with

24.60.190.107 (talk) 12:27, 3 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Thanks, that is valid and harmless, if not ideal, behaviour. Replacing "fact" with "Citation needed" is desired, and picking up the un-assigned date  while valid in most cases can't be assumed to be correct. Rich Farmbrough, 22:07, 3 November 2009 (UTC).

Unreferenced template
Regarding this edit,, you added an unreferenced template with a date of January 2007, the first edit of the article.

According to Template:Unreferenced: "The date parameter, which is recommended, is used to indicate when the template was added to a page." Currently these dates should be November 2009. Aspects (talk) 19:19, 3 November 2009 (UTC)

Same comment re 2002_NCAA_Women%27s_Division_I_Basketball_Tournament. (Yes, it does need references, and I'll try to add some.)-- SPhilbrick  T  19:35, 3 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Yes thanks these are some I am migrating from Erik9Bot's category and I don;t want to swamp the November 2009 category with many thousands of entries. Rich Farmbrough, 19:46, 3 November 2009 (UTC).


 * So you are knowingly putting in the wrong date? I notice that you are using AWB to make these edits with what looks like about ten edits a minute.  According to AWB, if you are going to be making this many edits, you should be using a bot to do it.  Also it says you should not be using this for anything controversial.  Two editors bringing up that it is the wrong date seems to me to be controversial. Aspects (talk) 19:52, 3 November 2009 (UTC)


 * Personally, I think it probably is better to use the earlier date rather than the current month. If others dislike that, perhaps an alternative might be to use the date when Erik9Bot added the category to the article? --Tothwolf (talk) 20:42, 3 November 2009 (UTC)
 * That would be better than November 2009 but it would still bunch them all in July, August and September this year. Rich Farmbrough, 20:52, 3 November 2009 (UTC).
 * I hadn't realized he had categorized them that quickly. Sounds like the current solution is for the best then. --Tothwolf (talk) 23:13, 3 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Yes you are quite right and for the bulk of the edits I will be using a bot. As far as the intent of the date parameter since I added it to the template, and my bot maintains it, I have a pretty good idea how it works - the ideal would be to place the date it became unreferenced, but it is not usually worth spending effort finding these dates, also it would mean monthly categories being constantly deleted and undeleted - the important thing is to get the articles into the workflow - where a more accurate date has been available en-masse it has been used.  I would be interested in hearing how using the creation date of the article creates problems, if it does. Rich Farmbrough, 20:52, 3 November 2009 (UTC).

Would it be possible for you to put something in the edit summary to explain that the choice of January 2007 is intentional...to save editors like me the trouble of coming here? Stevage 14:27, 4 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Certainly. Rich Farmbrough, 16:36, 4 November 2009 (UTC).

((ns0)) and ((main other))
Hi Rich. I just stumbled on ns0 which is a template you made. I would like to redirect to main other. This is why: --David Göthberg (talk) 13:39, 4 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Having several templates that do the exact same thing might be confusing.
 * and are parameter compatible so nothing will break.
 * has the additional "demospace" parameter, which is very useful.
 * is part of a series of namespace-detection templates that work the same way and has similar naming.
 * Not much of a reason, but anyway: is the older and more widely used one.
 * Yes there is no reason not to - except that ns0 doesn't have any demo-space cleverness, and didn't even have a parameter 2 until I succumbed. And the reason for that was to maximise simplicity. Rich Farmbrough, 16:35, 4 November 2009 (UTC).


 * Thanks, I have now redirected ns0 to main other, and deleted the /doc page of . As always I felt a bit bad when "deleting" someone else's work. After all, your code was very compact and efficient. (Unfortunately the "demospace" functionality causes fairly complex code in .)
 * And haha yeah, I noticed that your template had evolved towards over time.
 * --David Göthberg (talk) 18:58, 4 November 2009 (UTC)

Template:Infobox Hungarian settlement
Hi Rich,

You never got back to me on this so I basically am "relisting".

I think SmackBot or something else converted about 250 appropriate articles to use Template:Infobox Hungarian settlement (great, thanks!), but unfortunately it was using  instead of   as the field name for the Hungarian Central Statistical Office (KSH) code. I see now e.g. at Magyarcsanád and Taksony that you have changed using AWB to use the correct fields, and I presume that you have done so for all articles?

Nevertheless (and I appreciate that this is really better discussed at the template talk page, and don't mind if you want to move the discussion there) it is probably my turn to fix the template to replace  with , and add a    field (it could just be   if you think that better). I can certainly do this, but would require another run at AWB to fix them all back again. In the alternate I can support both forms, but this is rather a faff since things like the reference, the area and the population is switched on whether the code is present, so would lead to quite a lot of duplication.

On a side note, other information such as the postal area etc. is also readily available from KSH, and could be dated as such. I note from another conversation that there was some mention of the date field on "unsourced fields", and wonder if we should just blanket supply it as a footnote. However, I also note that the blank_ fields in Template:Infobox settlement, while documented, are not actually supported.

Your advice would be appreciated, then I will get on and do it.

Si Trew (talk) 07:33, 5 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Yes I have to go back and review what the situation is there. Rich Farmbrough, 07:37, 5 November 2009 (UTC).


 * I'm a liar, at Magyarcsanád it is still using, not  . I agree with your sentiment that the date should be moved out of the field name (to ksh_code).


 * May I propose that I do that in the template, keeping the existing behavior for, so nothing breaks (under WP:OWNFEET) add ksh_year  for the year of publication, then we can AWB or whatever the articles to migrate to the new field, then remove the old after. That way, nothing breaks along the way.


 * Some backround information that may help you: As far as I know the KSH census data is always published nominally on 1 January, regardless of the actual date of collection, and perhaps we should lose that entirely? As you may have guessed, the reason I put the date in the code when making the template was that every article we did happened to be 2008. Some, now, we find are 2009. In Hungary, censuses for small areas are conducted every ten years but like each tenth of the country does them each of those ten years. The KSH codes are, according to the missus, very very stable.


 * When we translate info for a stub (usually as we are translating somewhere else we check the links and if it is a fairly short article we translate that also along the way, move pics to commons, etc), we do check the KSH and the figures on HU:WP are often out of date. Since our role is basically translation not checking facts etc (that can come after) it is a bind to know then whether to change them, and HU:WP has it so that every edit has to be reviewed by someone else, an admirable policy in some ways but also means that small fixes can take ages to get visible, or are outright rejected by a reviewer on a high horse. I think their basic view is that it is better to aim for a smaller but perfect WP instead of a larger but imperfect one.


 * My very best wishes and I do appreciate your hard work. Si Trew (talk) 08:33, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

Surely you don't entirely disagree with me?
A clever fellow such as you must find yourself leaning at least slightly in my favor. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.100.86.2 (talk) 08:05, 5 November 2009 (UTC)


 * Such a post should be added to one of the Wikipedia pages. :)


 * I found the comment, researched, and moved the articles so the follow a standard style. I hope that is all ok. I could, of course, say THIS ARTICLE IS SHIT. I don't believe it, many people have worked hard at them. Said on user talk and article talk. Si Trew (talk) 18:46, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

Admin
Is there something as being an admin with limited possibilities? There is so many good things an editor can't do without being an admin. Like editing protected pages, or deleting pages (to help out in Cfd), etc.

On that other site I wrote you about, I started working just a few days ago as admin and bureaucrat. Not a big deal to be able to delete a page or set user group rights. Today they also made me webmaster, so now I started working with MediaWiki files like LocalSettings.php. I made a few changes already, but I'll read the MediaWiki manual, and then I'll know more about it. Debresser (talk) 15:58, 5 November 2009 (UTC)


 * That went fine. Debresser (talk) 20:22, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

Si Trew (talk) 19:08, 5 November 2009 (UTC)


 * You will "gnominate" me...? :))) Debresser (talk) 20:21, 5 November 2009 (UTC)


 * Perhaps give it a try? Just let me know beforehand, please, if you do. Debresser (talk) 20:57, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

re Refs on Fort Hood
I have never seen another article use this style of reference formatting, it seems quite odd and awkward. Also, could you please use edit summaries? Thanks, Cirt (talk) 23:06, 5 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Please try to attempt in constructive discussion on the article's talk page instead of engaging in edit warring with no edit summaries. Cirt (talk) 23:10, 5 November 2009 (UTC)
 * As you appear to be ignoring this, and ignoring consensus on the talk page against your edits, please see WP:ANI. Cheers, Cirt (talk) 23:13, 5 November 2009 (UTC)
 * I struck out my comment at ANI, as you now appear to be acknowledging talk page discussion. But in the future please engage in discussion on the talk page instead of edit warring, and please use edit summaries. Thanks, Cirt (talk) 23:21, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

Fort Hood shooting
Hi, I just wanted to say "nice work" on the article, especially with the high number of edits being made, which, I think, has resulted in more than one edit conflict between the two of us! Anyway, it's good to see a neutral, well referenced, structured article taking form. I think you deserve this:

Regards, HJMitchell  You rang?   04:50, 6 November 2009 (UTC)
 * That's nice, thank you! I created it because I was Huggling and I saw the one line added to Fort Hood. Rich Farmbrough, 04:55, 6 November 2009 (UTC).
 * You're welcome. It obviously deserved more than a single line but Fort Hood probably isn't the place. I'm sure I'll see you around! HJMitchell  You rang?   18:10, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

Fort Hood Shooting
Alleged until proven guilty. Casualties implies dead, whereas victims cover dead and wounded. Neuromancer (talk) 08:59, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

Victims implies a value judgement. It is a POV word we should avoid. Casualties does not mean dead. http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/casualty Hasan is an alleged murderer, but not really an alleged gunman - no one is disputing that he was the gunman. He will not be tried for being a gunman, he will be tried most likely for murder. Rich Farmbrough, 09:06, 7 November 2009 (UTC).
 * Oh and you mean "duplicated" not "duplicitous" - the latter means deceiving. Rich Farmbrough, 09:08, 7 November 2009 (UTC).
 * No, I know what duplicitous means, but it's late, and I was trying to be humorous. Apparently I failed. Neuromancer (talk) 09:18, 7 November 2009 (UTC)


 * Webster's defines victime as: one that is injured, destroyed, or sacrificed under any of various conditions 
 * casualties is defined as: serious or fatal accident


 * wiktionary is user editable, and not considered a RS. Neuromancer (talk) 09:18, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

I'm not using it as an RS. I would be if I was citing it in the article but I'm not.
 * None of Webster's definitions of "casualty" are exclusively applied to fatalities.  (Webster's New World College Dictionary)
 * A victim has to be a victim of something - usually an agent with real, imputed or anthropomorphised intent to cause them to be "injured, destroyed, or sacrificed". So by using the phrase we impute intent. Secondly we don't describe (nor should we) Hasan as a "victim" of the police officer that shot him, although his injury was prima face a sacrifice to save the lives of others. Rich Farmbrough, 09:47, 7 November 2009 (UTC).


 * Nor do we refer to Hasan as a casualty. The alleged shooter definitely had to have an intent behind pointing a loaded firearm at a human, and pulling the trigger, then doing the same to 33 more people. Ipso Facto, the shooter had the real intent to cause them to be injured, or destroyed, thereby "victimizing" them. Some of those victims became casualties of the shooting. To categorize the injured as "casualties" is confusing to say the least. Neuromancer (talk) 10:15, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

Weird 'date links'
On my travels, I found this oddball example of how some people link dates. For example, note the string "Vicki Gunvalson (born March 27, 1962 ), at age 47" Due to the scope of the current operation, we will need to go and delink the lone months at some stage later or anyway, so could I ask you perhaps to look at a possible solution to incorporate into one of your bots? Ohconfucius ¡digame! 13:24, 7 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Already doing it, month and days of the week. Rich Farmbrough, 14:06, 7 November 2009 (UTC).

References on the Hood shooting article
Hi, a discussion here concerns changes to the reflist format & here. If you need a hand fixing give me a shout. Leaky Caldron  17:24, 7 November 2009 (UTC)


 * Hi. Well done on getting the refs. sorted. I noted a couple remaining - CNNs I think, but I'll leave it with you. I have seen that style used for quite some time and it certainly makes editing easier when text is not clutered up with citation details. I hope you didn't mind me getting involved - I was around on Thursday and chimed in at the time so I was shocked at the changes. Obviously the editor who changed them is not aware of this method - its just a shame he wasted his time. He is still arguing on my talk page that it is "unapproved". If you have any better guideline than the one I provided in my discussion with him it would be helpful - to set the record straight! regards, Leaky  Caldron  09:50, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

Dates again
I have a few lines of code in my monobook (from a script by Lightmouse) which I use to automatically insert an edit summary: 'function edit_summary' or somesuch. To save me typing use dmy dates or use mdy dates each time, and so as not to annoy people by having the template at the top, I would like to build that into the relevant function to write it as the very last line of the file because it's usually part of the same edit. Could you suggest the code needed, please? Ohconfucius ¡digame! 14:18, 7 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Also, I have this on my 'to do' list. Perhaps I could interest you in this task of making the dates uniform and WP:MOSNUM compliant, which needs quite a lot of mechanised work. Ohconfucius  ¡digame! 15:10, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for edit
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AWB: Opening an XML dump across a n./w where I have full rights
Still happening in 4.9+? Can you reproduce it on demand? -- Magioladitis (talk) 12:35, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

Category
Is SmackBot adding dates to Category:Userspace drafts created via the Article Wizard, which is populated by Userspace draft? Debresser (talk) 14:21, 6 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Hm no, I have just added the template but I will need to remember to include userspace in runs Rich Farmbrough, 23:33, 6 November 2009 (UTC).
 * The draft wizard dates them itself it seems. Rich Farmbrough, 23:35, 6 November 2009 (UTC).
 * Did you have Category:Unreviewed new articles? That is the mainspace counterpart of the other category, both used in Userspace draft. Although Category:Unreviewed new articles may be added directly or through New unreviewed article as well, but that is not done. I recently made a very nice change to the template. Debresser (talk) 16:32, 7 November 2009 (UTC)
 * The draft wizard has the dated subcategory itself, but you see it doesn't always work out. Debresser (talk) 16:48, 7 November 2009 (UTC)
 * I fixed all 18 articles that were in Category:Unreviewed new articles. Debresser (talk) 17:13, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

Category:Unreviewed new articles and its subcategories moved to Category:Unreviewed new articles created via the Article Wizard. Debresser (talk) 01:04, 8 November 2009 (UTC)


 * You did something nice with Category:Unreviewed new articles. Do you plan to do the same with Category:Userspace drafts created via the Article Wizard? Debresser (talk) 13:11, 8 November 2009 (UTC)


 * Don't get upset at Category:Articles with invalid date parameter in template. See Bot_requests for the explanation. Debresser (talk) 19:00, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

Something to take your mind off your usual toil
You may find a slight amusement at Template:Time of day in words. Best wishes Si Trew (talk) 01:26, 9 November 2009 (UTC) (, Proper British Time)
 * Chuckle... Rich Farmbrough, 01:29, 9 November 2009 (UTC).

Date on Unreferenced template
Greetings, Rich Farmbrough. I noticed that in some articles you have replaced the category "articles lacking sources" with an Unreferenced template. Fine, but, I believe the Unreferenced template should not be backdated. If you put the current date on the template, other editors will then see how long the article has been tagged. Take a look at Template:Unreferenced, where it says, "The date parameter is used to indicate when the template was added to a page." (If you reply here I will see what you say.) — Mudwater (Talk) 01:36, 9 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Yes, except it's not "articles lacking sources" - it's Articles lacking sources (Erik9Bot) which is about 100,000 strong and not dated. Essentially the Erik9Bot articles would swamp the November 2009 section.  If there were just a few hundred I would simply stick them in there.  I added a footnote to theUnreferenced page.  Rich Farmbrough, 01:59, 9 November 2009 (UTC).
 * I see what you mean, but I think it's confusing to backdate the Unreferenced template. Other editors will get the impression that an article has been tagged for a long time -- more than three years in this example -- when it's only been tagged for a short time.  If the tagging is partly based on the actions of a bot, and results in many articles being tagged for the current month, I don't see that as a problem. — Mudwater (Talk) 02:10, 9 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Yes I understand. When we set up most of the dated categories we did go back to previous database dumps to get the dating as accurate as possible, we would date that way now if it were effective use of resource.  Rich Farmbrough, 02:15, 9 November 2009 (UTC).
 * It's not a question of the date being "accurate", it's a question of what the date means. The general usage on this and many other tags on Wikipedia is that it shows when the tag was added.  Maybe the Unreferenced template should be enhanced to have an additional parameter showing how long the article has been unreferenced, but that's not how most editors are going to interpret the current tag. — Mudwater (Talk) 02:43, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

Dating the tags when they were added (or when the date was added) has always been a compromise. It was one I was aware of when I created the parameter and categories. I am also aware, because I deal with them on a daily basis, that articles move from category to category, and all sorts of strange things go on. It doesn't matter that some articles are "late" - even if it weren't a waste of human time to date the tag at all, people would make so many errors digging back (I get probably a couple hundred misdated tags a day as it is) that adding the current date or better still no date at all is the preferred option for human editors. The important thing is that the articles get references. But having said that I am reluctant to re-create old dated categories (though it happens often enough due to article reversion). Rich Farmbrough, 03:04, 9 November 2009 (UTC).
 * Recreate old dated categories? I think my last post has muddied the waters, so let me restate my message.  By common usage of the Wikpedia tagging system, and as stated in the documentation for the Unreferenced tag, the date in a tag indicates when a tag was added to an article.  Backdating the tags should not be done, because (1) it will give most editors the erroneous impression that the article has been tagged for much longer than it actually has been -- in the example cited above, three years instead of two hours -- and (2) there is not a significant advantage to backdating the tags.  I'm going to copy this discussion section Template talk:Unreferenced so please feel free to reply there. — Mudwater (Talk) 04:02, 9 November 2009 (UTC)
 * This was also discussed previously, see #Unreferenced template in Rich's talk page archive. --Tothwolf (talk) 05:00, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

Rich, perhaps a couple parameters could make this usage more clear? Maybe something like yes and yes to show it was added by a bot (auto) and placed in an older category (backdated) to prevent swamping the current category with 100,000+ articles. --Tothwolf (talk) 05:00, 9 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Yes I had certainly considered a "bot=yes" field - "auto" is better - and backdated is a good idea in principle but not sure the purpose it would serve that the edit summary doesn't. Rich Farmbrough, 12:43, 9 November 2009 (UTC).
 * I'm thinking a parameter such as backdated would help editors who aren't looking at the edit summaries. Many editors look only at the template code and date in the article and won't check to see when the template was applied to the article. I'm a little concerned myself as there are many editors who initiate AfDs for articles going strictly by the date passed to Unreferenced. For example: "Article unsourced for X years ... etc". --Tothwolf (talk) 16:39, 9 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Well it would still be true Esperantujo - unsourced for 8 years. And putting them in the appropriate categorises mean that the oldest can be prioritised. Rich Farmbrough, 18:34, 9 November 2009 (UTC).
 * ...but not tagged as such for 8 years, which I think is the crux of the issue. Using the older maintenance categories makes sense to me, but there should be something explicit such as a parameter that shows other editors that the maintenance template was intentionally backdated when it was added to the article. --Tothwolf (talk) 00:56, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

Defaultsort on species articles
Hi Rich. Just saw this edit and have been pondering the usefulness of DEFAULTSORT on species articles. Would like your input and perhaps a lengthier discussion on the guideline itself in the proper place. If it isn't explicit already, I'd like to suggest an exception for the defaultsort usage guidelines for taxa articles. So, any thoughts? If I wanted to bring this to a wider audience for discussion, where might I turn. Wikipedia talk:Categorization? Cheers, Rkitko (talk) 23:00, 9 November 2009 (UTC)
 * 1) I see very little use for defaultsorts on articles that will only ever been listed next to each other in categories anyway (e.g. Nymphaea lotus var. termalis will only ever be categorized next to Nymphaea lotus, so the capitalization of the second word in the defaultsort seems unnecessary).
 * 2) Unless uniformly applied, the defaultsort with capitalized species, variety, and subspecies epithets tend to make categories alphabetize incorrectly (e.g. Category:Nymphaeaceae, where Nymphaea lotus var. termalis now sorts between Nymphaea alba and Nymphaea caerulea, the former having a capitalized defaultsort and the latter omitting defaultsort).
 * 3) The easiest solution to point 2 is the removal of defaultsorts from taxa articles titled at the taxon name.
 * 4) The defaultsort is likely to be forgotten if the page is moved (either to a common name or an updated taxon name).
 * 5) It's often counterintuitive to new editors who see capitalized species epithets in the edit window; they may even try to "correct" it, not knowing the guidelines.


 * As is often the case, at least some of the taxanomic folk have decided that what most of us consider a bug - case-sensitive sorting - is in fact a feature, and are using case to distinguish between different levels in biologic taxa via sort order (as the underlying scientific nomenclature does in the naming). Sadly, there are signs that the underlying bug bug 164 may actually be fixed next year, which will almost certainly make case-insensitive sorting the default, with no indication that case-sensitivity will even be possible. Studerby (talk) 01:28, 10 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Yes, see my reply to Rkitko on his talk page. The distinction is between the three main levels of sorting: pagename, defaultsort and piped sort. The case-sensitive sort only makes sense in the piped sort.  This is what I was implementing across the taxa when someone decided to object to using the normal rules for defaultsort, despite the fact that it doesn't affect the genus categories.  Rich Farmbrough, 01:34, 10 November 2009 (UTC).

The Wikipedia Signpost: 9 November 2009
Read this Signpost in full &middot; Single-page &middot; Unsubscribe &middot; EdwardsBot (talk) 01:58, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

Speedy deletion nomination of Category:Fictional endangered and extinct species
Please refrain from introducing inappropriate pages, such as Category:Fictional endangered and extinct species, to Wikipedia. Doing so is not in accordance with our policies. If you would like to experiment, please use the sandbox.

If you think that this notice was placed here in error, you may contest the deletion by adding  to the top of the page that has been nominated for deletion (just below the existing speedy deletion or "db" tag), coupled with adding a note on the talk page explaining your position, but be aware that once tagged for speedy deletion, if the page meets the criterion it may be deleted without delay. Please do not remove the speedy deletion tag yourself, but don't hesitate to add information to the page that would render it more in conformance with Wikipedia's policies and guidelines. Lastly, please note that if the page does get deleted, you can contact one of these admins to request that they userfy the page or have a copy emailed to you. ♪ daTheisen(talk) 09:06, 10 November 2009 (UTC)


 * Oh blah, why did this have to be you? Massive guilt on my part now for tagging, after watching you try to fight hard to babysit the Fort Hood shootings article when it was new. Anyway, I looked at the project this is related to, but even this I thought this was a big stretch, especially from an encyclopedic perspective. There's probably a different name you could use that didn't sound so... hyperbolic? ♪ daTheisen(talk) 09:10, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

Proposal
Please have a look at this diff. What do you say? And if you think this is a good idea, would you consider merging Category:Articles for merging with no partner with Category:Merge templates that are incorrectly applied? And BTW, do you have a better name for that category, perhaps? Debresser (talk) 16:13, 9 November 2009 (UTC)


 * Rich? Debresser (talk) 15:27, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

Major Nidal Malik Hasan
The redirect over at Major Nidal Malik Hasan is still pointing to the parent article. Could you get it fixed up? —  C M B J  00:24, 11 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Done. Sadly those redirects were on my mind when I got up this morning. Rich Farmbrough, 01:07, 11 November 2009 (UTC).

Brockton murders
AFAIK, this is yet another "blast of news at event, blast of news at trial (which hasn't occurred), and then nothing" sort of article. NOTNEWS says that events like this need to be historically notable, and I don't believe a single home invasion is anything more than news, considering that all the information is culled from a whopping four sources. There will undoubtedly be more, but the content will be the same. Does NOTNEWs tend to hold up on AfD? MSJapan (talk) 06:50, 11 November 2009 (UTC)
 * NOT does carry some weight, unfortunately. I would recommend notability as the grounds for AfD, if any. Rich Farmbrough, 07:31, 11 November 2009 (UTC).

Bad robot, why do you hate indentation?
Smackbot made changes and left this message "Add references section and/or general fixes".

Why is Smackbot stripping indentation? Does not sound like a general fix to me. The indentation was put there deliberately. Indentation not only helps readability of the page source and it makes it easy for me to navigate using only the keyboard arrow and control keys.

Given that the bot needs to be programmed with a list of tasks I would appreciate if the status message could be a bit more clear about which of those tasks have been performed, and more specifically say what was done rather than "general fixes". Surely each time it goes through a condition the an additional note could be concatenated onto the summary string. It seems very odd that the summary says "And/or" when it is clearly "AND", it is a very definitive thing, when would be it be OR?

Please reply here, I've added this page to my watchlist -- Horkana (talk) 01:08, 10 November 2009 (UTC)


 * Which article? Rich Farmbrough, 01:09, 10 November 2009 (UTC).


 * An episode of How I Met Your Mother. Here's the Diff. I was under the impression that if I used the same indentation consistently for all headings that would be enough to stop bots from reverting it.
 * Ah OK. Not really indentation, but I see what you mean. When an article is without a references section, and needs one there is a lot of analysis to work out where it goes, it is made easier if the formatting of headers is consistent.  As to your other points SmackBot does that task using WP:AWB which allows a custom edit summary up to a point, but there is little value in cluttering  edit history with every thing in the diff, indeed  that is what diff is for. And there is a limit to the length of the edit summary. Rich Farmbrough, 01:06, 11 November 2009 (UTC).


 * No easy way to put References section as the section one space above External links?
 * I suppose I'm thankful you don't further obfuscate the summary with abbreviations but I'd encourage you to make more use of the space available in the summary.
 * I'll have to take a look at WP:AWB. I spot of lot of mistake when I put in decent indentation and clearly read what what is happening. Spacing and pretty printing are seriously underrated. -- Horkana (talk) 01:25, 11 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Suppose there is no "external links"? In that case it goes below "See also" if there is no "see also" after "footnotes" and so on through a fair number of conditions, the mid teens if I remember correctly. Many people see "==" the same as <"{[('¿«»?')]}">.   Rich Farmbrough, 01:32, 11 November 2009 (UTC).


 * If there is no "External links" section it goes after the last section? -- Horkana (talk) 15:41, 11 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Before "Further reading".


 * I see your point. Now though it seems inappropriate to even create a page without including a References section. Thanks for discussing. Please be generous with the indentation, human readable means easier for humans to read (obviously) and hopefully check to avoid errors. -- Horkana (talk) 16:33, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

SmackBot - ZNovember?
Hello Rich,

SmackBot is formatting the date for the issue tag as "ZNovember" as seen here. I think that's not a good thing? 204.153.84.10 (talk) 23:38, 11 November 2009 (UTC)


 * It's not just issue tags. As you can see here, different tags are affected and dates are not only being added, but also replaced. —RobinHood70 (talk • contribs) 23:44, 11 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Thanks, working on it. Rich Farmbrough, 00:04, 12 November 2009 (UTC).
 * Fixed. Thanks again. Rich Farmbrough, 00:13, 12 November 2009 (UTC).

User:Full-date unlinking bot‎;
The bot has stalled for three solid days now. I'm dropping you this note because some of us feel that reinforcements are indeed necessary. Please can you see what you can do? Thanks. Ohconfucius ¡digame! 12:29, 12 November 2009 (UTC)


 * This edit was just a test to see if your bot and/or script worked right; you wouldn't try to clean up stuff in User: space on a production basis, right? --Jc3s5h (talk) 21:23, 12 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Not a test, I did that with preview, more documentation. Rich Farmbrough, 21:25, 12 November 2009 (UTC).

Clean-up changes
Rich, please help me understand some of the clean-up changes you are making. Firstly why are you deleting the spaces between the section heading codes (== etc) and the words when the Editor's guidelines, Cheatsheet and the Level 2 editing button all clearly show spaces separating the words from the code. Secondly, what is the logic for removing the links to dates? --Bermicourt (talk) 20:10, 12 November 2009 (UTC)


 * I noted a similar problem when the bot edited Diagnosis of Asperger syndrome. The not only unlinked dates (which is fine); it also removed some blank lines after section headers, changed capitalization of macros, and inserted an unnecessary DEFAULTSORT (with the wrong capitalization?); all this makes it harder to see what happened when comparing revisions, and makes the edit appear to be more serious than it really was. I would have preferred a more minimal edit, something like, which is what resulted after I cleaned up after the bot. Of course this is a relatively minor annoyance, but it'll add up when applied to lots of pages. Eubulides (talk) 21:28, 12 November 2009 (UTC)


 * I've had similar issues with spacing but FYI the unlinking of dates is some kind of style policy, I assume it's official and written down somewhere or another. Unfortunately linked dates can be automatically converted and displayed using whatever local format the user prefers so I'm surprised by whoever came up with this style policy of unlinking dates which leads us back into the mess of different date formats displayed in ways no one is happy with, I'm just not surprised by Smackbot following what does seem to be a policy. -- Horkana (talk) 05:31, 13 November 2009 (UTC)


 * Actually that is exactly the problem. For some time linking full dates was the thing to do, because it formatted dates according to user preferences (and despite the fact that it created WP:overlinking}.  However it was pointed out that while this was great for (some) registered users, mainly editors, others were seeing a mish-mash of date formats in a given article.  Therefore after much discussion (literally years and megabytes) date formatting of that type was deprecated inWP:MOSNUM about a year ago.  Rich Farmbrough, 06:04, 13 November 2009 (UTC).


 * I'm not objecting to the date unlinking at all. I'm objecting to all the other stuff (removing blank lines for no reason, inserting an unnecessary and wrongly-capitalized DEFAULTSORT, changing capitalization of macros, etc.). Surely that other stuff isn't necessary. Eubulides (talk) 07:52, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

FYI
Per your delinking at Sumate, Venezuela uses dmy, not mdy. I'll ask Ohconfucious to fix that one up, since I've seen him do one before. Regards, Sandy Georgia (Talk) 15:14, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

Red Star


Date changes
Dates - can you use that AWB tool to change the dates in the GA list from 1994-02-25 to 25 February 1994 (my preference) or February 25, 1994 since those are easier to read - and prior to this date stuff the default was that dates ISO formatted were automatically converted to one of these formats unless the user had something different specified in their preferences. Thanks -- Trödel 03:15, 14 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Yes, I suppose so. Rich Farmbrough, 06:39, 14 November 2009 (UTC).

Merge template
Is there a better way to fix the merge template in Push–pull workout? Debresser (talk) 17:00, 14 November 2009 (UTC)


 * I saw your fix. I suppose that means there isn't. Debresser (talk) 13:49, 15 November 2009 (UTC)

SmackBot: reordering list-defined references
Here is a bit strange edit:. The good thing is that the bot reordered elements in the text so that a group of footnotes is in numerical order, I like it, thanks. However, for some reason the bot also changed the order of elements inside a reflist. First, I'm not sure if this is necessary at all – it does not change how the page is rendered. Second, I did not see any logic in the order that is produced by the bot: it does not seem to be alphabetical, numerical or anything. Third, the source code contained comments that were related to particular references, and those were misplaced by the bot. — Miym (talk) 12:44, 15 November 2009 (UTC)
 * ✅ Answered on user's talk page. Rich Farmbrough, 15:21, 15 November 2009 (UTC).

Orange Star


OOh Orange! Tasty! Is this progessing up the rainbow or the main sequence? Thanks! Rich Farmbrough, 14:20, 15 November 2009 (UTC).
 * Not a problem! You deserve this award for all your hard work over the years. It's progressing up the main sequence. Cheers, --Meaghan guess who :) 14:44, 15 November 2009 (UTC)

Nepal VDCs
Hi Rich. I don't know if you are still up for doing tasks using AWB but I could sure use your help correcting the settlement naming in infoboxes of the Village Development Committee's of Nepal. You see the articles either don't have any banners or they are wrongly labelled as towns or villages rather than Village Development Committee like Chobhar, Nepal. Would you be so kind as to standardise them all? Also many of them wrongly say so and so is a town. Definately wrong. Most of them except for the capital of the district are rural Village Development COmmittee's or municipalities not towns as such... Himalayan  22:29, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

Rich, great work, but you may wish to adjust the code to avoid [http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Julio-Claudian_dynasty&diff=prev&o ldid=325832924 this]. Thanks. Tony  (talk)  00:30, 15 November 2009 (UTC)

Rich but the point is Maidan, Nepal is not a small town. It is officially a Village Development Committee or at least a village anyway... Himalayan   11:55, 15 November 2009 (UTC)

Messy? Try looking at Indian villages..... Himalayan   17:32, 15 November 2009 (UTC)

Adding Source Parameter
Rich, This is my first time using Wikipidia and I am making a page for Vincent Ostrom for a class assignment. In response to my request to move the page (make it active), you said that I need to "add a source parameter using AWB." I'm not sure what this means, but in looking at the AWB instructions, it looks like one needs to have made 500+ Wiki edits before one can register to use AWB. I'm just starting. What should I do? Is this preventing the Ostrom page from becoming active? Advice would be greatly appreciated! Thanks.-Rachel Feeney User:R.G.Feeney  —Preceding undated comment added 19:50, 15 November 2009 (UTC).
 * ✅ Answered on user's talk page. Rich Farmbrough, 06:21, 16 November 2009 (UTC).

Wikipedian of the Day
Congratulations, Rich Farmbrough! For your kindness to others, your hard work around the wiki, and for being a great user, you have been awarded the "Wikipedian of the Day" award for today, 16, November 2009! Keep up the great work!--Coldplay Expért Let's talk 00:24, 16 November 2009 (UTC) Note: You could also recieve the "Wikipedian of the Week award for this week!

You seem to be getting all the awards lately :)--Coldplay Expért Let's talk 00:24, 16 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Thanks! I shall clear a space on the mantle. Rich Farmbrough, 06:53, 16 November 2009 (UTC).

A possibly erroneous edit?
Recently, you made this edit. Among the other changes you made, you changed the format of the accessdate parameter of the cite web template. Please don't do this. If you check the version of the page before your edit, you'll notice none of the access/retrieved on dates were linked. In fact, the template documentation suggests the date format that was used as an option. I've reverted your edit. You may want to check and see how many other articles (if any) you've done this on.--Rockfang (talk) 09:04, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

I noticed you are still doing it. Could you respond here when you get a moment? Thank you.--Rockfang (talk) 09:42, 16 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Yes at the moment I am dealing with the handful of very early dates. I am cautious about changing date formats, and used to be a champion of ISO style for certain fields, until a number of users convinced me that they actually were unable to read them until the format was explained to them. For that reason, in a relatively small subset of ISO type using articles where it seems unlikely to be contentious I have used spelled out dates instead of ISO type dates.   If you are saying that it is contentious on the accessdate field in those articles, I can easily leave that parameter format unchanged, as indeed I am doing with the cast majority of dates anyway. Rich Farmbrough, 10:27, 16 November 2009 (UTC).
 * Thank you for responding. My request/suggestion is this: inside Cite web if the  |accessdate=  field has something like  1900-12-12 , then just remove the brackets (if possible) and leave the format the same.--Rockfang (talk) 10:45, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

1 zzz08zzz 2009 ...
... modern date style are quite unreadable enough without WP inventing its own months. See this diff at Bury. Regards, Mr Stephen (talk) 12:32, 16 November 2009 (UTC)
 * OH bother. Thakns. Rich Farmbrough, 12:33, 16 November 2009 (UTC).

defaultsort
Hi Rich. Sorry it's taken me a few days to get back to you. I just reverted all of your defaultsort additions to the Drosera articles (WP:BRD). Since this point has at least two editors concerned about it (myself and Hesperian), I'd appreciate it if you might stop adding it to taxa articles while we discuss it. I would like to have this discussion with a wider audience so that we can get a feeling for consensus on this issue. I took a look at the Abies suggestion and it still irks me that this seems unnecessary for the reasons I stated earlier. And think of it less as an exception and more of a guideline on the proper usage - a sort of "use only when needed" guideline, not "use everywhere even when unnecessary" guide. That's my perspective. Appreciate your additional thoughts. Rkitko (talk) 15:49, 14 November 2009 (UTC)


 * Rich, have you had any time to review this? I saw this edit and noticed you have not yet turned off the defaultsort capitalization effort. There doesn't seem to be any guideline or policy that supports this, though there may have been at one time at WP:CAT - it's since been removed as it was disputed, correct? What you're trying to correct seems to be a mediawiki problem to fix. Anyway, I'd appreciate it if you would cease adding the disputed capitalization style to defaultsorts in your AWB edits. Cheers, Rkitko (talk) 03:50, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

Help Required
I need ur help. if you do not know the the solution then please tell me whome to ask. There is a problem with my wikipedia account User:Brainlara73. i get logged in, it logged in, and suddenly when i open my wachlist or any other page of wikipiedia, it is logged off automatically. I think it has been hacked or any other problem. Please Help me out.

Regards. Talha

--121.52.145.185 (talk) 09:26, 15 November 2009 (UTC)
 * ✅ Answered on user's talk page. Rich Farmbrough, 15:21, 15 November 2009 (UTC).
 * ✅ Answered on user's talk page. Rich Farmbrough, 15:21, 15 November 2009 (UTC).


 * cookies are enabled. Problem is still there, it gets logout instantaneously. Is there any way to change password through my email as i can not to view My preferences due to this problem. --121.52.145.185 (talk) 19:14, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

Date delink only once
The User:Full-date unlinking bot is specified to only process articles once, in order to prevent edit-warring between editors who actually understand the articles, and bots which do not. Since your recent series of edits seems to accomplish similar goals to the Full-date unlinking bot, do you promise that you will not process an article that has already been processed by that bot? Do you further promise to coordinate with the bot so the bot will not process any article that you have processed? Jc3s5h (talk) 20:14, 16 November 2009 (UTC)
 * I think that will be unlikely to be a problem. Regardless there may need to be a maintenance phase, and the FDU task is only part of one of many clean-up operations.  Rich Farmbrough, 12:36, 17 November 2009 (UTC).
 * This can be done, from my side at least. Rich Farmbrough, 15:19, 17 November 2009 (UTC).

Request
Hey Rich, I have seen you around similar articles and was wondering if you could take a look at Al Qaeda (may be re-titled Al Qaeda) for WP:SYNTH issues. One user feels that since al-Awlaki is linked to al Qaeda, and Nidal Hasan is linked to Awlaki, then Hasan must be working for al Qaeda. I feel this constitutes a serious WP:BLP issue. Thanks for the help.  Grsz 11  01:58, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

Unlinking bot making heavy weather of it
User_talk:Harej. Tony  (talk)  11:22, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

ISO delinking
Recently, you (with AWB) appear to have started making automated edit like this one with the summary "delinking ISO style dates using AWB". This edit in question does not appear to delink anything; but instead it has changed a large number of YYYY-mm-dd dates inside s to long-hand format. Template:Cite/doc clearly states "Note: Since "the date" is a single parameter in the code, the ISO 8601 date format (YYYY-MM-DD) should be used"; the subject is therefore misleading and the edit non-productive. —Sladen (talk) 14:00, 16 November 2009 (UTC)
 * That of course is wrong, the documentation you were looking at is for an old version of the template. It was probably wrong then as well. Rich Farmbrough, 19:28, 16 November 2009 (UTC).
 * moved back from User talk:Sladen
 * (You may have missed this on my talk page Rich Farmbrough, 19:54, 16 November 2009 (UTC). )

Please leave date format alone when unlinking
I saw a similar to Thiomersal, in which a few dates were delinked but a bunch of dates were converted from the article's YYYY-MM-DD style to some other style. There is no consensus to change YYYY-MM-DD date format to other date formats, and AWB should not be going through articles changing date formats like that. Is there any way that the damage already done can be undone? Eubulides (talk) 17:33, 16 November 2009 (UTC)


 * I've put a list of 1,052 recent edits that (judging from their edit summary) probably involve this undesirable date reformatting into . Can you please take a look at it? Eubulides (talk) 17:51, 16 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Eubulides; the fall-out is wider than just that exact summary; these edits do the same under the opaque summary "Fix error using AWB". —Sladen (talk) 18:06, 16 November 2009 (UTC)


 * I noticed this edit which changed "date = 2002-08-06" to "date = 6 August 2002 " . Please explain the full logic by which this change was made, including any limits on the input range of dates for which the change will be made, and how the format "6 August 2002" was chosen rather than "August 6, 2002". --Jc3s5h (talk) 18:57, 16 November 2009 (UTC)
 * There are no ISO style dates on en.WP ns0 outside the range 1700-9999.  The page in question already had a date in that format so there's little difficulty there. Rich Farmbrough, 19:13, 16 November 2009 (UTC).
 * Yes but it isn't wikilinked. Rich Farmbrough, 17:00, 17 November 2009 (UTC).
 * Why (full logic) was the formatting of dates lying in the year range 1700–9999 changed? —Sladen (talk) 19:33, 16 November 2009
 * Full logic is to get the maximum value from the edits. Per the above discussion I am leaving parameters in ISO style. Rich Farmbrough, 19:57, 16 November 2009 (UTC).
 * Hi Rich, Please could you clarify your response? Why was the formatting changed? --Northernhenge (talk) 22:38, 16 November 2009 (UTC)
 * The syntactic sugar of the date linking means that it can be safely dealt with in ways that would be difficult later- since we don't have ISO style dates in text and they are contentious in other places that is what I was trying to do. Rich Farmbrough, 17:19, 17 November 2009 (UTC).
 * I've raised this issue as an AWB bug report. Semiautomated tools should not be used to install formatting changes like these without consensus. Eubulides (talk) 19:44, 16 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Thanks. It's not AWB, though. Rich Farmbrough, 19:53, 16 November 2009 (UTC).
 * Ah, thanks, and sorry about the confusion. AWB is a complete mystery to me. I'll go report the bug as a false alarm, if you haven't done it already. Eubulides (talk) 20:03, 16 November 2009 (UTC)


 * I do not understand what "en.WP ns0" means. I question the claim "There are no ISO style dates on en.WP ns0 outside the range 1700-9999", I have seen such dates, although I can't say if the are in en.WP ns0 since I don't know what that is. --Jc3s5h (talk) 20:04, 16 November 2009 (UTC)
 * English Wikipedia name-space zero (article space). Rich Farmbrough, 20:05, 16 November 2009 (UTC).
 * Well I haven't checked for dates after 9999 to be fair. Rich Farmbrough, 20:06, 16 November 2009 (UTC).
 * YYYY-MM-DD dates are exceedingly rare outside that range in English Wikipedia, but they do exist. For example, the ISO 8601 article uses the date "1582-10-15". Admittedly this is a special case (which I found by searching for "1582-10-15" using Google) but there's no technical objection to dates before 1700 in YYY-MM-DD format. The objections to that format are stylistic (not technical), and understandably so as it often appears out of place when discussing older topics. Eubulides (talk) 20:22, 16 November 2009 (UTC)


 * Mr. Farmbrough edited such a date himself today (see line 81). When I saw the edit, I supposed he relied upon his personal experience enjoying bonfires to realize that despite the requirements of ISO 8601, the date was actually in the Julian calendar and should not be converted. But in view of his claim that no such dates exist, I must suppose he was letting his program run wild with no regard to falsehoods it might produce. --Jc3s5h (talk) 20:32, 16 November 2009 (UTC)
 * You might suppose what you wish. Alternatively you could look further up in the article and see that the date is given in the first sentence of the article. Rich Farmbrough, 20:38, 16 November 2009 (UTC).
 * I do not question that "1605-11-05" was, by happenstance, equivalent to 5 November 1605 in that context. My concern is that since, as far as I know, Greece was the last country to convert from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar, and that was in 1923, any YYYY-MM-DD formatted date in or before 1923 must be manually inspected to determine what calendar it is in, before converting it to any other format. Since Mr. Farmbrough stated, after allowing 1605-11-05 to be converted by his software, that there were no such dates in the English Wikipedia article namespace, I conclude that Mr. Farmbrough did not carefully inspect the date before allowing the conversion, else he would have remembered it. --Jc3s5h (talk) 21:12, 16 November 2009 (UTC)
 * It so happens that I do remember it. The injunction to "Remember remember the fifth of November" ensured that. You will also have seen that I asked for a citation in Stoke Golding as there was no internal support for the date. Nonetheless I think you are living in a fantasy land if you believe that editors are smart enough to take a Julian date, convert it to the proleptic Georgian calender and enter it wiki-linked ISO format, and at the same time stupid enough not to realise that it will  display as a normal format date and hence needs a qualifier. Rich Farmbrough, 21:54, 16 November 2009 (UTC).


 * Since you did not manually inspect such dates, you would not have seen any qualification that might have been present. However, I see that you have wisely given up the practice of reformatting dates in the YYYY-MM-FF format. I sincerely hope you will never resume that practice. --Jc3s5h (talk) 22:01, 16 November 2009 (UTC)
 * OK read between the lines. "I asked for a citation in Stoke Golding as there was no internal support for the date." You are supposed to realise from that that I did manually inspect the date. Rich Farmbrough, 22:03, 16 November 2009 (UTC).

There have been partial or complete reverts of what Rich has done where ISO format is at issue. Not all ISO date formats were changed by Rich: some were simply unlinked, as described in the specs. Often, Sladen or Eubulides have simply reverted Rich, without making the dates uniform. In some cases, after the reverts, the reference section is a messy mixture of date formats: don't people care? I don't think these reversions are quite justified.


 * That's not really a worry Tony, I have always seen the unlinking as just a part of a longer process and I was trying to get some more value out of about 1/2 % of the edits. We can do this later but it will be harder - and it will be later. But it doesn't break the main process. Rich Farmbrough, 17:00, 17 November 2009 (UTC).

However, I must say that the bot was always conceived as performing a narrow, uncontroversial task. I trust that this task has not been widened. I don't know why all of these complaints are occurring now, but did not occur during bot testing. Tony  (talk)  03:01, 17 November 2009 (UTC)
 * None of the changes Rich made seem to have had anything to do with erroneous conversion of Julian to Gregorian dates (or vice versa) - most are articles about modern-day subjects - so I don't really appreciate this red herring; nor do I appreciate what seems like a heavy dose of sarcasm coming from some quarters. I have already left a note on talk pages of Eubulides and Sladen respectively about their edits. Ohconfucius  ¡digame! 03:29, 17 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Ohconfucius: I haven't seen any messages regarding sarcasm on my User talk page... —Sladen (talk) 16:36, 17 November 2009 (UTC)
 * As you will have already seen from my message, I stated above that I wanted to comment about your editing. There was never intended to be any comment to you about any sarcasm on your part, if any. I apologise for the misunderstanding. Ohconfucius  ¡digame! 01:23, 18 November 2009 (UTC)


 * To answer your question, Tony, the complaints are about actions which Rich has performed with AWB, not the date-delinking bot. Ohconfucius  ¡digame! 03:44, 17 November 2009 (UTC)


 * The large volume of changes gives the impression of a fully automatic process. Any hint of a flaw in the logic of an automated process should be pointed out before it causes a large amount of damage. Just because I had not seen the kind of damage I was concerned about was no reason not to point out what seemed like a logic flaw. Later, Mr. Farnbrough informed me that he had manually reviewed the edit I used as an example. I am unable to imagine how he is able to effectively manually review the large volume of edits, but perhaps he has some process that defies my limited imagination. --Jc3s5h (talk) 04:25, 17 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Tony: It would have been wasteful to directly revert the overarching edits completely, as that would have lost other (good quality) changes that were in the same edit but not documented in the AWB summary. It should be clear from the widely varying [and very-specific] summary lines of the ~27 reactive edits that I made, that these were done manually—even then I'm sure they weren't perfect and straight revert followed by a freshly-fixed AWB run would likely have been safer and more reliable.  —Sladen (talk) 16:50, 17 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Rich, the bot was always intended to fulfil a narrow task. That is why it gained overwhelming community consensus. Unless these issues can be resolved soon, I suggest that the removal of triple-unit links proceed without the complication. Then we can debate how the other stuff might be done. If the task is narrow, the speed can be something like what was suggested by BAG, with minimal glitches. Tony   (talk)  02:46, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

date= parsing
In the edit the script does not appear to be actively parsing for ;  it managed to managle   to  —ideally the script could do with tighter parsing rules. —Sladen (talk) 15:54, 16 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Yes it could correct that error, right now the motivation to add features is not high as there is always someone to object to anything. Rich Farmbrough, 17:45, 16 November 2009 (UTC).
 * If something is out-of-spec, it would be preferable for AWB to leave it alone to avoid making things worse. —Sladen (talk) 18:08, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

How is it making things worse? There appear to be about 500 missing "=" signs. Easy enough to fix them up. Rich Farmbrough, 18:11, 16 November 2009 (UTC).
 * If you're keen on helping to fix things up; could you please assist with reverting (or writing a rule to revert) the unintended date changes noted above before embarking on new projects. It would be useful to have an idea of between which times (UTC) the broken YYYY-mm-dd rule was likely to have been active, which summary edits have been used with this rule active, and to confirm that the broken rule has either been fixed, or permanently disabled. —Sladen (talk) 18:56, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

The process should have a hyper-rigid definition of what is and is not a date, and anything that does not meet the definition of a date should not be processed. Among the criteria for being a date should be white space, equals sign, minus sign, hyphen, or some kind of dash to the left, and white space, colon, some type of dash, or terminal punctuation to the right. I suppose within a citation template, the vertical pipe could also be to the left or right. --Jc3s5h (talk) 19:01, 16 November 2009 (UTC)
 * And you think I have processed non-dates? Rich Farmbrough, 19:03, 16 November 2009 (UTC).
 * Is the date being defined by its key, or by it's index? If a citation date is one that starts ,  , ... then yes dates were mis-identified.  If the rule was only looking at the value  ) and relying on that, then no.  Personally I would be happier if the context were carefully included in any rule.
 * Could another tool reliably parse the output generated? No—some formerly good dates ended up with   in them and some lost mark-up (which although undesirable) was clearly separating the datum from the previous word.  —Sladen (talk) 19:28, 16 November 2009 (UTC)
 * OK the zzz syntax was a temporary artifact caused by excluding a class of dates. It took moments to fix.  In the case where  there was a missing = the  question is deeper but not really difficult.  As far as the wiki is concerned both the before and after situations were semantic nulls. Some hypothetical tool might be able to parse one version, the other version, neither or both - in addition to or instead of any combination the valid parameter syntax. In particular the tool I am using can parse either and moreover converts from either to a valid en.wp:template:typical valid version  and took less time to create then explaining this.  So while there is something interesting in what you say it doesn't greatly matter, what we do when we find a problem is fix it and move on.  We should doubtless produce a bulwark against recurrence however that is a council of perfection at the moment. Rich Farmbrough, 19:40, 16 November 2009 (UTC).


 * Why is there this nit-picking? I don't see anything broken. That is an input error totally unrelated to a date or its linking. There's no real reason why the bot and Rich's script should pick up and correct those. In fact, it makes it more complicated to program for. It's not reasonable to have to write the script foreseeing and expect to know when to insert an 'equal' sign and when not to. Ohconfucius  ¡digame! 15:22, 17 November 2009 (UTC)
 * The medical oath is "do no harm" (eg. do not make things worse)—and I would hope that the same applies here. See User:Full-date unlinking bot "The bot will solve simple grammatical errors that the autoformatter will no longer be able to correct (due to de-linking).".  —Sladen (talk) 15:45, 17 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Maybe I'm just thick - still don't get. The autoformatter never did fix missing 'equals' signs, nor palliate their absence. Ohconfucius  ¡digame! 16:01, 17 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Yes but it was an easy fix, some 500 articles have been corrected as a result.  And it draws attention to the fact that the syntactic sugar of the date linking measn that it can be safely dealt with in ways that would be difficult later- since we don't have ISO style dates in text and they are contentious in other places that is what I was trying to do. Rich Farmbrough, 16:45, 17 November 2009 (UTC).

The Wikipedia Signpost: 16 November 2009
Read this Signpost in full &middot; Single-page &middot; Unsubscribe &middot; EdwardsBot (talk) 16:16, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

Lhoka Prefecture
Hi. Somebody keeps disrupting this article by moving it from the correct Shannan Prefecture to Lhoka. Can you move it back and put some kind of protection against moving it or whatever? It is officially the Shannan Prefecture and we have maps, categories and inline text to this effect not to mention books I possess from neutral sources. That area has been called Shannan for centuries! Can you move it back? Cheers. Himalayan   19:09, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

Yes, now, from what I gather it is the "official" PRC new name for the prefecture, despite it being called Shannan for over 1000 years, I had thought initially it was vandalism. Sad really that such a deep rooted name can change just like that. However as Lhoka will not be recognisable to many I've redirected to a double name title which seems the sensible thing to do. Himalayan  20:22, 17 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Ah well we have had Cleveland, and South Kesteven, East Rother and so on, all no doubt with some root in the past. Rich Farmbrough, 12:11, 18 November 2009 (UTC).

SmackBot
Would you please recover the article that was deleted by adding the infobox. Thank you. (Salmon1 (talk) 14:14, 18 November 2009 (UTC))

The article name is Irving Kriesberg. Thank you fvery much. !Salmon1 (talk) 14:19, 18 November 2009 (UTC))

I cannot thank you enough for your help. I will try my best not to repeat my error. Very best regards, (Salmon1 (talk) 14:24, 18 November 2009 (UTC))

ok
hello Rich Farmbrough, thanks for remark, i do it next time. Trabelsiismail (talk) 15:07, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

(Delink dates (WP:MOSUNLINKDATES) using AWB)
Do you have a module for this? --John (talk) 04:44, 15 November 2009 (UTC)
 * I can upload the XML later today. Rich Farmbrough, 08:45, 15 November 2009 (UTC).
 * Hi there, if you would, could you modify your script to not redo the section headers in edits like this? I find them easier to find and read in an edit window when they are spaced. Regards, —<font face="Baskerville Old Face"> Ed  (talk  •  contribs)  08:06, 15 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Sure, no problem. Rich Farmbrough, 08:07, 15 November 2009 (UTC).
 * Thanks dude. :-) All the best, —<font face="Baskerville Old Face"> Ed  (talk  •  contribs)  18:53, 15 November 2009 (UTC)
 * It may be of interest that, when MiszaBot scans a talk page for archiving, it *adds* spaces to the headers which don't already have them. I don't know which style is more standard for the headers, or whether articles and talk pages are expected to have the same style. On my talk page, 'new section' (i.e. the '+' button) creates a header with spaces. EdJohnston (talk) 05:29, 16 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Yes I was aware Mizabot does that. De-facto standard is no spaces by almost 3-1

* Spaces in header 3,571,002. * No spaces in header 9,967,810.
 * Rich Farmbrough, 18:06, 17 November 2009 (UTC).

<-- I came to post on the same topic, so piling on. I've created pretty much 90% of the pages in and, about 70% overlap between the two. When I created them I assumed that linking dates was a necessity as that's how I'd seen it elsewhere. Could you run your module on both these cats, or let me know how I could do it using AWB? Thanks. - Spaceman  Spiff  04:11, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

Settings are here
Use with caution and at your own risk. Rich Farmbrough, 07:44, 16 November 2009 (UTC).
 * Thanks, but I think I'm going to wait a bit to do this, I'm still not too familiar with altering settings on AWB. cheers. - Spaceman  Spiff  15:19, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

New unlinking code
I see the wonderful new AWB code you just wrote, and was wondering if...

you wouldn't mind seeking approval for a second bot to supplement the efforts of Full-date unlinking bot, perhaps using that code? It would be nice to have a bot that runs at the approved speed, doesn't pause for its 8-hour constitutional, doesn't work to rule. ;-) Ohconfucius  ¡digame! 10:43, 16 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Yes I have thought of doing this but BRFA is a little tedious sometimes. It took FDUB months. And I am waiting on an approval as it is. I dare say I'll file one in due course. Rich Farmbrough, 11:09, 16 November 2009 (UTC).
 * Especially as WP:NODEADLINE seems to apply. Rich Farmbrough, 11:11, 16 November 2009 (UTC).
 * Maybe, but it's frustrating to see all the hiccups that FDUB seems to be experiencing I get the feeling you could do the job a hundred times better. Being infinitely simpler than agreeing on a roadmap for universal suffrage in Hong Kong, it would be nice to see the job done before the latter's promised arrival in 2017. Ohconfucius  ¡digame! 13:02, 16 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Especially as we still have to deal with a host of other date formatting issues. Rich Farmbrough, 13:05, 16 November 2009 (UTC).
 * There seem to be some small problems. At least, in year articles,
 * Month day – 11:45…
 * should not be unlinked. I fixed the ones I caught in future years, but I don't know how many past year articles you've mangled unlinked against clear consensus.  — Arthur Rubin  (talk) 02:26, 19 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Thanks for letting me know. Rich Farmbrough, 02:27, 19 November 2009 (UTC).

Thanks for improving articles
I appreciate your using the bot to tidy up references and formatting and stuff. I wanted to say that I research and write quickly, sometimes copying and pasting whatever date format I come across in my sources, and find it takes too much time to manually switch from 6/04/2007 to the proper format of 2007-06-04. But I trust your bot does this quickly, effortlessly, right? So it's a big time savings for me if I can work quickly.--Tomwsulcer (talk) 00:08, 18 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Please do not allow N/N/YYYY dates to creep into Wikipedia article content or articles; if both of the 'N's are less than thirteen, it's impossible at that point to identify which is the month and which is the day—which is why WP:MOSDATE is really quite clear on this and states; "Do not use date formats such as 03/04/2005, as they are ambiguous" ...None of the decreed date formats allow this ambiguity.  In the case of "6/04/2007" it is impossible for a bot it identify what it might need changing to.   Remember that Wikipedia is about quality, not quantity and it's worth taking the time to decode it to whichever of 6 March, 4 June, 2007-04-06 or 2007-06-04 was intended.  —Sladen (talk) 04:03, 18 November 2009 (UTC)
 * I'll try to switch the slashed dates; but it takes time and slows me down considerably; it's easier to pull off the date in whatever format it is in with copying & pasting; but if I see both number are less than 13 in the slash format, then I'll switch it. Is this a reasonable compromise?--Tomwsulcer (talk) 04:16, 18 November 2009 (UTC)


 * Btw, if the date is 06/04/2007, it's June 4th not April 6th; a bot might not tell you this, but I will. It is the convention in these dates among American English language newspapers to have the month appear first. The bot should be programmed to assume the first number is the month in those situations (when two front numbers < 13 and four digit number in third place then best guess is month is first number, date the second). In Europe, rarely is the slash format used. If you don't believe me, if you look at all the date formats when there are three numbers, delimited by slashes, and the last number has four digits -- in those situations I bet almost all of the first numbers are the month.--Tomwsulcer (talk) 04:16, 18 November 2009 (UTC)
 * No. In Europe (and the rest of the unAmerican world) a date with slashes is dd/mm/YYYY.  (Just like time is written HH:MM:SS not HH:SS:MM).  —Sladen (talk) 04:22, 18 November 2009 (UTC)
 * The use of slashes is pervasive in Europe when a date is to be represented by numbers, and it is as Sladen says. Furthermore, bot conversion issues, if we are to go down that route (and I'm not suggesting that we do), will have to consider include urls, where the use of slashes is extensive. So I urge User:Tomwsulcer not to be expedient with his slash-delimited dates, which are certainly ambiguous. If you can't be bothered to perform such a simple manipulation with the url/source open in front of you, another editor will be forced to open the link to resolve that ambiguity. Ohconfucius  ¡digame! 04:53, 18 November 2009 (UTC)
 * I stand corrected. Didn't know about Europe. As an American, I presumed that such places only existed in myths.--Tomwsulcer (talk) 17:10, 18 November 2009 (UTC)
 * OK the thing to do here is use javascript: I have a tag to switch from mm/dd/yyyy and another for dd/mm/yyyy. Rich Farmbrough, 08:08, 18 November 2009 (UTC).
 * Is this javascript something I can use with my Ubuntu Linux computer and Firefox? If there's some code which is easy for me to use (and which makes less work for people cleaning up after my atrocious formatting) please let me know; I used to be good at computer programming but today sometimes I'm categorized as one of the "blinking VCR types", although I don't know what this means (I think it's a compliment, right?)--Tomwsulcer (talk) 17:10, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

But I was wondering that perhaps you might know something that always is a nuisance for me, and might give me advice? When I finish putting together a new article, how do I find the proper categories? It seems I have to wade through tons of screens. The Wikimedia Commons has this great tool called "Common Sense"; do you know if WP has something similar? So, I could type in things like "doctor researcher medicine person manhattan" and it would find the categories for me?--Tomwsulcer (talk) 00:08, 18 November 2009 (UTC)
 * For articles where I have worked on content I have simply guessed and dug through the category tree - and I do now use WP:HotCat. For other articles  I am afraid I generally  delegate this task to category experts by adding a Uncat tag - the uncategorized backlog is generally the shortest at a few weeks tops. Rich Farmbrough, 08:08, 18 November 2009 (UTC).
 * Thanks! I'll try both! I put them into my help-file code. --Tomwsulcer (talk) 17:10, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

Date formats again being changed willy-nilly
Following up on  above: this morning's big batch of date changes again changed the date formats of articles while unlinking them, for no good reason. For example, to Neurotypical changed "Retrieved on 2007-11-24" to "Retrieved on 24 November 2007" even though the established style in references in that article was to use YYYY-MM-DD format. You indicated earlier that you had fixed your regular expressions to not do that, but apparently it's still doing that.

While you're fixing this, can you please let us know exactly which regular expressions you're using? That might help to avoid future problems like this. Thanks. Eubulides (talk) 19:08, 18 November 2009 (UTC)
 * No if you read the summary it says that it is unlinking named parameters adn converting others to words. Rich Farmbrough, 19:11, 18 November 2009 (UTC).
 * Rich: alot of people have complained—the path of least confrontation might be to stop automated date conversions and stick to the core topic of delinking. Please.  Pretty please.  —Sladen (talk) 19:21, 18 November 2009 (UTC)
 * It's knee jerk reaction. Neurotypical was uniformly ISO free before this edit for example. But of course you are right, let us slow everything to a snail's pace, avoid contentious areas, and take the path of least resistance. Rich Farmbrough, 20:58, 18 November 2009 (UTC).
 * First, that diff's edit summary did not accurately summarize the edit. The edit did not change any "named parameters". More important, the edit changed date formats for no reason. Many editors prefer the YYYY-MM-DD format, and it's inappropriate to install mass changes to some other format. It's irrelevant whether Neurotypical had no dates in older versions; what's relevant for this process is what the article looks like now. Please take more care to not change date formats like this; this repeated format-changing without consensus is worrisome. Also, please publish the regular expressions used to perform these changes, so that we can all help to prevent this sort of problem in the future. Eubulides (talk) 21:59, 18 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Some of us think the YYYY-MM-DD format is an abomination, of course. I have yet to see a real world style guide that recommends it (YMMV).  Mr Stephen (talk) 23:09, 18 November 2009 (UTC)
 * It only arrived by the back-door of auto-formatting. It was the only way to enter the date in one field and have it auto-formatted. Rich Farmbrough, 23:32, 18 November 2009 (UTC).
 * No. YYYY-mm-dd dates are used because they are concise, unambiguous, syntactically definite, sortable, sane (most-significant digit first), intentionally agnostic and language independent.  —Sladen (talk) 23:42, 18 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Just a thought, at least in sortable tables, perhaps dts would help? --Tothwolf (talk) 23:49, 18 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Rich is quite correct. Mr Stephen (talk) 23:51, 18 November 2009 (UTC)
 * I would once again refer Sladen to the comments I left on his talk page. Ohconfucius  ¡digame! 02:27, 19 November 2009 (UTC)
 * For a quarter of the World's population YYYY-mm-dd is their normal preferred date format. —Sladen (talk) 23:26, 18 November 2009 (UTC)
 * No leading 0's used. Rich Farmbrough, 23:53, 18 November 2009 (UTC).
 * Oh and its not YYYY-mm-dd it's either YY-mm-dd or a more complex formulation 2009年2月18日 for example - and it is likely the majority actually write something completely different. since there are a number of scripts in China with their own numeral systems and in some cases more than one numeral system.  Rich Farmbrough, 00:05, 19 November 2009 (UTC).
 * I would recommend a visit over guessing at straws; if nothing else, the passport stamps should provide a lasting reference point.  —Sladen (talk) 00:12, 19 November 2009 (UTC)
 * You can post me the tickets whenever you like. Rich Farmbrough, 00:25, 19 November 2009 (UTC).
 * I fear that the Standardization Administration of the People's Republic of China may disagree. —Sladen (talk) 00:04, 19 November 2009 (UTC)
 * They disagree with themselves as they use YYY年MM月DD日, YYYY年MM月DD日 and MM-DD on their real home page - although the first one is probably a software error. But we al know that standards organisations consume their own dog food. Nonetheless the heading of the "Standardization Law of China" has two other date formats in it:
 * Agency responsible:
 * Issue date: 1988.12.29
 * Implementation date: 1989.04.01
 * (Adopted at the Fifth Meeting of the Standing Committee of the Seventh National People's Congress on December 29,1998)
 * So really that is all kinda fun but not terribly relevant.
 * Rich Farmbrough, 00:21, 19 November 2009 (UTC).
 * I doubt that is true. I think that a very large proportion format their dates as either "18 November 2009" or "November 18 2009", plus or minus a comma. Mr Stephen (talk) 23:51, 18 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Well as Sladen says, path of least resistance applies, so there's no need to publish anything. But the eternal picking at edit summaries doesn't help - nor does using terms like "willy nilly" and "mangle". And if the previous versions are irrelevant how come you changed it from  majority DMY to majority ISO style?   Well never mind, we can sort this stuff out later, it will be harder, and it will be later. Rich Farmbrough, 22:10, 18 November 2009 (UTC).
 * The previous comment does not make it whether that this semiautomated date reformatting will stop. Will it? Eubulides (talk) 23:26, 18 November 2009 (UTC)
 * It has already stopped. Rich Farmbrough, 01:26, 19 November 2009 (UTC).
 * It has already stopped. Rich Farmbrough, 01:26, 19 November 2009 (UTC).

I tend to agree with Rich on the knee jerk reaction thing. That was my reaction upon seeing the dreaded "AWB" edit summary on fully 1/3 of the pages on my watchlist, but ultimately there's nothing wrong with it. Seems like the arguments here are just... arguments. I mean, really: Who cares what China likes? They have their own Wikipedia (and can't even access half of that one anyway). That's really scraping the bottom of the argument barrel. At worst, the changes are quite harmless. I'd say overall, they're pretty helpful. Kafziel Complaint Department 00:19, 19 November 2009 (UTC) ---
 * Well said, Kafziel, it's a red herring. It's what WP wants for itself which is important. Apparently "alot of people have complained", but the only evidence appears to be on this talk page, and the numbers can be counted on one hand, with several digits to spare.  Ohconfucius  ¡digame! 01:34, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

WOTD
Congratulations, Rich Farmbrough! For your kindness to others, your hard work around the wiki, and for being a great user, you have been awarded the "Wikipedian of the Day" award for today, November 19th, 2009! Keep up the great work! Note: You could also recieve the "Wikipedian of the Week award for this week!

<font style="color:#4682b4">Décémbér21st2012Fréak  &#124;  <font style="color:#50C878">Talk 01:24, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

Thank you, most kind! Rich Farmbrough, 01:25, 19 November 2009 (UTC).


 * Congratulations! Debresser (talk) 15:09, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

Cholsey railway station
With you have inserted commas into two dates that ought not have them, being day month year. I shall remove them again. --Redrose64 (talk) 11:49, 19 November 2009 (UTC)


 * Thanks, it is a nice station, except when it is raining. While I have not been there for some years, I would not want to litter it with surplus commas. Rich Farmbrough, 11:51, 19 November 2009 (UTC).
 * P.S. I am checking my alst few thousand edits for more of the same. Rich Farmbrough, 12:04, 19 November 2009 (UTC).

Bot status
Hi, can you use a user with bot status when making massive automatic changes? That would ease for those watching the pages you have been doing those changes. Thank you.--Nutriveg (talk) 13:29, 19 November 2009 (UTC)
 * See what I can do. Rich Farmbrough, 13:30, 19 November 2009 (UTC).

date work
Good work, but please check the MOS for the format for 'dd month yyyy' dates such as '17 November 2009'. I believe that commas are not allowed; they are only used in the 'month dd, yyyy' format, such as November 17, 2009. I am saying nothing about which format is preferred; I am only discussing the comma. Hmains (talk) 04:25, 18 November 2009 (UTC) That is correct, the question of whether to remove the comma is not trivial "... the troops moral fell to an all time low by 19 November, 2009, however, saw a new turn of events...." Rich Farmbrough, 08:09, 18 November 2009 (UTC).
 * Yes, I believe that to be the case. Ohconfucius  ¡digame! 04:45, 18 November 2009 (UTC)
 * But I certainly should not be adding commas. Rich Farmbrough, 08:50, 18 November 2009 (UTC).
 * you are/were doing so Hmains (talk) 04:52, 20 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Yes, thanks, fixed the problem (code fork), working on the symptom. Rich Farmbrough, 07:39, 20 November 2009 (UTC).

FYI
Since you partook in the first nomination, and I do not regularly see you on WP:CFD, I'd like to inform you of this nomination. Thank you, Debresser (talk) 15:08, 19 November 2009 (UTC)


 * Thank you. I think this time there is a real chance. Debresser (talk) 13:33, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

Double listas
Hi, on various pages including, and  you added an extra listas parameter instead of filling in the existing blank one. I know that you're busy unlinking dates these days, but I figured I'd point this out for when you return to listas work. Of course, these edits were two months ago, so you may have already fixed your AWB settings.... M AN d ARAX <font color="6600FF"> • XAЯA b ИA M  18:02, 19 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Thanks, I believe that is resolved, but I will bear it in mind. Rich Farmbrough, 19:14, 19 November 2009 (UTC).

Need your expertise
Hi Rich, another editor is considering asking for an upgrade on the article for "Echoes", the song from Pink Floyd. However, there's a huge white patch that I've seen a hundred times on Wikipedia, where the text vs. the infobox leaves a big blank spot. Could you have a look at it, and either fix it, give me a name of another editor who could do this, or ask me to bug off if I'm wrong to consider the layout of the piece? It would of course, be gratefully appreciated, as I am computer illiterate for the most part. --Leahtwosaints (talk) 22:20, 19 November 2009 (UTC)
 * You can use TOC left - I have put it in, but the TOC is quite short (a POWr TOC one might say) so the layout might be too busy like that. I tend to only use that with very long thin TOCs, 30 lines of years for example.  Rich Farmbrough, 22:26, 19 November 2009 (UTC).

Help
What is wrong with the url and title in the example here? Debresser (talk) 12:30, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

Clarify
Could you help clarify the "piping" issue in Categories_for_discussion/Log/2009_November_19, please. Debresser (talk) 13:32, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

Section heading style
I'm puzzled... User:SmackBot makes edits, removing the spaces from eg  to make  ; yet User:MondalorBot does. Which style should I follow for new section headers that I add to articles? --Redrose64 (talk) 13:39, 20 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Whichever you like. On the whole SmackBot leaves these alone, certainly for it's main task of dating maintenance tags.  The substantial majority of headers in articles have no extra spaces, presumably in analogy to other delimiters like  {} <> but if you use the new-section tab you will get spaces, so I would conclude editors in general prefer without - though I have heard both points of view. Rich Farmbrough, 14:05, 20 November 2009 (UTC).
 * I left Mondalor a note. Rich Farmbrough, 14:22, 20 November 2009 (UTC).

Quick question regarding...
Hi Rich Farmbrough. I'm Nonamer98, and I'm relatively new to wikipedia. I know the basics, but there are a few things that still puzzle me.

In the edit summary, how do you make it so that it says something like "Reverted/undid edit identified as vandalism by..." (I emphasized the important part)

Is there a format or something that I can't find? I know what vandalism looks like, and I only revert clear cases of vandalism.

You're input is greatly appreciated. Nonamer98 (talk) 03:05, 19 November 2009 (UTC)
 * It depends, you could type it in the edit summary box, or past it there, but I expect you are seeing use of a tool like WP:Huggle. Rich Farmbrough, 08:42, 19 November 2009 (UTC).


 * You might be right. Here's an example I found on my watchlist:"Reverted 1 edit by 24.186.95.71 identified as vandalism to last revision by Rich Farmbrough."
 * I want to make it so that it says the bold part. Any input? Thanks! Nonamer98 (talk) 17:46, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

Stubs
You recently accidentally deleted some links to stub using AWB (I have restored them). No doubt AWB mistakes these for something connected with stub-articles. This is not the first time this has happened (I believe). Is there some mechanism for protecting content from AWB? --catslash (talk) 22:33, 20 November 2009 (UTC)
 * I made a change to the article. You can use Nobots (qv) in a similar circumstance, but it should only be a stop gap. If possible I will file a bug report tomorrow. Rich Farmbrough, 23:40, 20 November 2009 (UTC).

Congratulations!
Wow! Congratulations on passing the 500,000 mark! Heh, I thought it was a big deal when I hit 50,000 edits about ten days ago; now, that seems so tiny compared to your half a million. Anyways, keep up the good work, and I'll be seeing you, as always, popping up all over my Watchlist. M AN d ARAX <font color="6600FF"> • XAЯA b ИA M  09:40, 21 November 2009 (UTC)

Brazil
Hello, Rich! Good morning! Or at least, I hope it's morning where you live! Anyway, the article Brazil is blocked due to a dispute over a content. I would like to know if you would be interested in giving your opinion to end it once and for all. In case you do not know much about the subject, I could explain it better to you. This is the link. All help is needed. Thank your very much and kind regards, --Lecen (talk) 11:35, 21 November 2009 (UTC)


 * I am answering you in here, hope you don't mind. Because in the Brazilian census, the mixed-blood population is all grouped in the "Pardo" category. Brazilian experts divide this category into several subcategories: the Caboclos (descendants of whites and Indians), Mulattoes (those of whites and blacks), cafuzos (those of balcks and Indians), Ainocôs (those of whites and Japanese) and Juçaras (those of white, black and Indian). Their geographic distribution across the country is not equal. For example, in the Amazon rainforest (also known as the Northern region of Brazil) where very, very few African slaves were sent to, the Mulatto and black population is a rarity, while the Caboclo is the predominant one. In the Southeast (Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Minas Gerais, etc...), due to the coffe farms and gold mines where many African slaves were brought to work, from the 17th to the middle of the 19th century, there is a large population of Mulattoes. This is not what I am talking, but what experts on that field say. The other editor claimed that 85% of the population in the Amazon rainforest is black. He got a newspaper article whose author simply added Pardo to black category from the official census and said that both combined were a black population. Yes, it's an obvious mistake from the author of the article, but that's his problem. So, this is it: the dispute is between sources based on Brazilian academic experts and a source based on a newsparer's article. --Lecen (talk) 12:07, 21 November 2009 (UTC)


 * I agree 100% with you. Are you going to "pick" a side on that one or do you prefer to stay away? The article is blocked and the matter must be resolved sooner or later.


 * But sharing with you my personal opinion, it does not make any sense to say that a Brazilian is black because it has 10% of black genes. Because all Brazilians (including blacks) have at least 40% white genes. So, everyone is white now? Anyway, that was a newsparer article written by an unknown and non-specialized author. It shouldn't be taken as a source when all Brazilian experts do not agree with it. --Lecen (talk) 12:32, 21 November 2009 (UTC)

List of centenarians
Hey Rich,

Thanks for taking the time out to fix the commas in the dates, but this this date is contained in the title of reference, and is therefore a direct quote, so shouldn't it be left out? Cheers, CP 15:28, 21 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Yes indeed. Rich Farmbrough, 15:31, 21 November 2009 (UTC).

More work for you!!!
Hi, Rich! You probably aren't going to be as excited as the title of this post suggests, but I do indeed have work for you, if you have time and are willing to help. Basically, the gist is that I have upgraded Infobox Russian district to be more like Infobox Russian inhabited locality, which means that the newly upgraded template also contains the "date=" parameter used internally to date uncited fields. Could you, please, add it to your bot workload the same way you did for the inhabited localities? Thanks much!—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); 22:45, November 2, 2009 (UTC)
 * The date param did not add correctly here. Best,—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); 22:04, November 3, 2009 (UTC)

Alexey Steele
Hello, Rich, I added a feature article from the LA TIMES concerning painter, Alexey Steele, and although I do not imagine myself to be as smart as a computer programmer like yourself, I think that confers notability on the man, since there are very few artists in the USA who ever manage to get a single word written about themselves in the LA Times, let alone an entire two page feature article. But I leave it to your judgment and discretion to determine if the tag should be removed or not. Cheers.

Big Media Articles (talk) 02:19, 22 November 2009 (UTC)


 * Rich, I also forgot to mention that I added a reference about Steele receiving the Artemis Award in Athens, Greece not too long ago, an award received by only 14 individuals including a Nobel Prize winner, an Emmy winner, etc. It seems to confer international notability upon Steele, since I doubt there are many USA-based painters who have received any such acclaim from outside America. Let me know your thoughts. Cheers.

Big Media Articles (talk) 02:48, 22 November 2009 (UTC) ✅} Rich Farmbrough, 09:23, 22 November 2009 (UTC).


 * hello, Rich, thanks for sending me the notes. Based upon Steele's history section, I thought you placed the notability tag on his listing but if not, then my error, and sorry about that.  Based upon your comments, I will remove the tag, since you do not seem to object.


 * As for Dr. Devra Davis, she did, in fact, belong to the group awarded the Nobel Prize in 2007, as per the following paragraph, taken from a news service:


 * "She also served as a Lead Author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change -- the group awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007."


 * It is not unusual for members of a Nobel Prize Winning Group of individuals to be credited on a personal basis...for example, Doctors Without Borders won a Nobel Prize in 1999 and the key members of the group (at that time) are often credited individually with having won the Nobel.


 * Anyway, thanks for such an expeditious response to my queries. Cheers.

Big Media Articles (talk) 09:49, 22 November 2009 (UTC)


 * Her work on AR3/WG3 should be noted in her article, not the Noble though, since that was the 2001 report - and lead author sounds impressive - the chapters she was a lead author of had 15 and 10 lead authors (less "contributing" authors). Also her work on the short term benefits of reducing fossil fuel consumption


 * Davis, D., 1997: The Hidden Benefits of Climate Policy: Reducing Fossil Fuel use Saves Lives Now. Environmental Health, Notes 1-6.
 * Davis, D.L., A. Krupnick, and G. Thurston, 2000: The Ancillary Health Benefits and Costs of GHG Mitigation: Scope, Scale, and Credibility. Expert Workshop on Assessing the Ancillary Benefits and Costs of Greenhouse Gas Mitigation Policies, March 27-29, Washington, DC.


 * Rich Farmbrough, 11:50, 22 November 2009 (UTC).


 * Rich, it looks like you are 100% correct. I salute you for sleuthing the issue and getting to the heart of the matter, VERY impressive!  Well, I still am inclined to believe Steele is notable in his own right, not simply by process of association, IMHO.  Cheers.

Big Media Articles (talk) 20:07, 22 November 2009 (UTC)

Request
Hi, Rich. Could you run SmackBot on references errors, please? Debresser (talk) 10:57, 22 November 2009 (UTC)


 * The last entry in the log is of 18 November. Debresser (talk) 11:59, 22 November 2009 (UTC)

Date format damage
As politely as I can ask, in the sweetest of cute fluffy cutesy baby rabbit voices, please could you curtail the use of unvetted high-speed automated rules to attack YYYY-mm-dd dates. Eg. this edit has modified an article that exclusively used YYYY-mm-dd dates in its references section and now introduced multiple formats... (MOS:NUM). —Sladen (talk) 21:37, 22 November 2009 (UTC)


 * This edit introduces European dates into the references section where all but one full dates was in YYYY-mm-dd and the one exception was in US-format. —Sladen (talk) 23:05, 22 November 2009 (UTC)


 * This edit delinks and unilaterally converts YYYY-mm-dd dates, but then fails to delink the US-format dates in the same sentence. —Sladen (talk) 23:21, 22 November 2009 (UTC)


 * This edit converts YYYY-mm-dd inside a named date parameter, despite the summary line suggesting that is not the case. —Sladen (talk) 23:21, 22 November 2009 (UTC)


 * This edit also converts a YYYY-mm-dd date, despite the references section using exclusively YYYY-mm-dd dates. —Sladen (talk) 23:21, 22 November 2009 (UTC)


 * This edit unilaterally converts a date where the references section uses ''exclusively' YYYY-mm-dd dates. —Sladen (talk) 23:41, 22 November 2009 (UTC)


 * These consecutive edits convert YYYY-mm-dd dates in tables that consistently and exclusively use YYYY-mm-dd dates for brevity, making a mess of the tables. —Sladen (talk) 23:41, 22 November 2009 (UTC)


 * These consecutive edits converts a YYYY-mm-dd date in a references section that exclusively uses YYYY-mm-dd dates. —Sladen (talk) 23:41, 22 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Actually not, it turns out. the first one had another dmy date in the ref section, the second didn't change the ref. Rich Farmbrough, 11:27, 23 November 2009 (UTC).
 * This edit converts YYYY-mm-dd dates to European dates, despite every date in the article being in YYYY-mm-dd, except one, which was in US-date format... —Sladen (talk) 23:41, 22 November 2009 (UTC)


 * This edit converts YYYY-mm-dd to European, despite the majority of the references, and the rest of the article using US-format dates. —Sladen (talk) 23:41, 22 November 2009 (UTC)


 * I see Rich has reverted them all. In the meantime, I have delinked all the dates, and have aligned them in the correct format, as appropriate for the article. Ohconfucius  ¡digame! 07:00, 23 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Thanks, I actually reverted most of them, some Sladen had sorted a couple I fixed up. Rich Farmbrough, 11:02, 23 November 2009 (UTC).
 * As a general point, the above twelve highlights were from a consecutive range of 25 edits that happened to be on Special:Contributions at the time I looked. If the same ~50% failure rate has indeed been extrapolated across all of the recent AWB date edits, then there will have been an immense amount of inconsistency introduced.  —Sladen (talk) 16:12, 23 November 2009 (UTC)

Oh-N-Oh!
This diff has picked up 0-6-0 as a date instead of a railway engine type. Regards, Mr Stephen (talk) 22:40, 22 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Oh dear, I know they are railway configurations and thought I had dealt with that. As well as football line-ups and a few other things, well I'll checkem out. Thanks. Rich Farmbrough, 22:48, 22 November 2009 (UTC).
 * OK I picked up another one, and a couple (so far) of articles that needed linking, and put hat notes about 4-2-4 and 4-4-2 (which I'm pretty sure I disambiguated a couple years back). So a worthwhile exercise. Rich Farmbrough, 11:04, 23 November 2009 (UTC).

US format date cleanup
This edit changes "August 15th 2007" to "August 15 2007", rather than "August 15, 2007" (MOS:DATE). —Sladen (talk) 23:01, 22 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Hm well it should be "August 15th, 2007" but that is certainly worth looking out for in general. I'm working through the other items too. Rich Farmbrough, 00:18, 23 November 2009 (UTC).
 * No. It should be "15 August 2007" or "August 15, 2007".  And this edit (made eight minutes ago) should not have had a comma added.  —Sladen (talk) 00:38, 23 November 2009 (UTC)
 * As in the fact that it was an ordinal did not mean that the comma wasn't required. Rich Farmbrough, 00:43, 23 November 2009 (UTC).
 * Eh? WP:MOSDATE allows precisely three full date formats;  your edit took a full date in one of those formats and changed it into none-of them.  As did this edit and this one (both since the above).  —Sladen (talk) 00:57, 23 November 2009 (UTC)
 * "August 15th 2007" isn't one of the three allowed. The other two are revised already.  Thanks. Rich Farmbrough, 00:59, 23 November 2009 (UTC).
 * Ta—my apologies for the statement "your edit took a full date in one of those formats", which was incorrect and thank you for having fixed it (and the other two noted). —Sladen (talk) 01:03, 23 November 2009 (UTC)

Dates for preferences
Hi. In the course of other edits, I have delinked your purposeful date-linking here. Sorry, but I don't see how MOS:UNLINKDATES (and the bit about autoformatting) doesn't apply here. Persuade me otherwise if you wish. Cheers Bjenks (talk) 05:03, 23 November 2009 (UTC)
 * You are quite right to unlink them. If you read the history you will see I was self reverting.  This was as a response to the above:

"These consecutive edits converts a YYYY-mm-dd date in a references section that exclusively uses YYYY-mm-dd dates. —Sladen (talk) 23:41, 22 November 2009 (UTC)"


 * Thanks for re-unlinking. Rich Farmbrough, 11:23, 23 November 2009 (UTC).

Your correct edits
Hi your edits were very good but have been reverted on topic Islam and Sikhism Thanks 5705noreply (talk) 05:06, 23 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Thank for letting me know, a bot will pick that up later. Rich Farmbrough, 11:30, 23 November 2009 (UTC).

The article 1787
Sorry, I had to revert your edit to get at some vandalism. Thought I'd let you know in case you wanted to re-do it. &mdash;Aladdin Sane (talk) 19:20, 23 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Oh thanks, you could have just deleted the vandalism though. No need to un-do, un-do in a simple case like that. Rich Farmbrough, 19:24, 23 November 2009 (UTC).

Template
Since I noticed that Category:Articles with invalid date parameter in template has been populated by them same articles for a few days, I decided to fix them. And walked into Template:Failed verification that does not yet have the substitution detection. Debresser (talk) 21:50, 23 November 2009 (UTC)

Dates, dates, again, again
Rich, pardon WP:STALK, but please strongly consider whether it's really possible for a human to accurately edit and review at seven articles per minute: —Sladen (talk) 22:53, 23 November 2009 (UTC) (All from the top of Special:Contributions).
 * 1) This edit converts a YYYY-mm-dd where the references section exclusively used YYYY-mm-dd.
 * 2) This edit rewrites + breaks three URLs by inserting random spaces.
 * 3) This edit hides an in-line link, despite WP:OVERLINK/WP:EGG ("avoid linking ... the names of major geographic features and locations"), and then inserts three instances of "January2002" [sic].
 * Look at the next edit. Rich Farmbrough, 02:08, 24 November 2009 (UTC).
 * Ta for the date fix. Can I reiterate WP:OVERLINK—we're trying to get rid of useless links, not add more!  "Ohio" does need adding as a separate link (especially when the previous sentence has the abomination "U.S. state of Ohio").  Same applies to Wisconsin, Oregon. Michigan, Scotland...  —Sladen (talk) 02:53, 24 November 2009 (UTC)
 * 1) This edit converts a YYYY-mm-dd in a named parameter; which previously the summaries rules were claiming to avoid.
 * Yes because I was first asked not to chage acessdates then ref date= then... so  I threw that out if the window as a rule. In this infobox this is a better format.


 * "references section exclusively used" - There's only one ref with one date - no need to overegg the pudding ;-)
 * Agreed the script needs to avoid this sort of false positive
 * Agreed, this is one of those potentially ambiguous date formats probably best left for humans to resolve.
 * This is not a "parameter" in that no calculation or interpretation depends on it. Space is not an issue, so I see no particular reason for this to be in 8601.
 * Ohconfucius ¡digame! 01:54, 24 November 2009 (UTC)

SmackBot
The SmackBot bot seems to have placed an advert tag on the article on Evan Kohlmann. I am surprised at this, thinking that either this would be a tag that only a real human being should apply, because it requires real human judgment -- or alternatively, if we can trust a bot's heuristics to apply it, the edit summary should link to the rules the bot used.

Is the bot still applying this tag? Geo Swan (talk) 02:54, 24 November 2009 (UTC)


 * The important phrase here is "(One intermediate revision not shown)". Rich Farmbrough, 09:42, 24 November 2009 (UTC).

The Wikipedia Signpost: 23 November 2009
<div style="margin-top:10px; font-size:90%; padding-left:5px; font-family:Georgia, Palatino, Palatino Linotype, Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Read this Signpost in full &middot; Single-page &middot; Unsubscribe &middot; EdwardsBot (talk) 13:14, 24 November 2009 (UTC)

Barnstar

 * Thanks Chris, much appreciated. Rich Farmbrough, 13:45, 24 November 2009 (UTC).


 * Damn! Beaten to it! Well, congrats and well done anyway, Rich [[Image:Smile.png|16px]] --  Phantom Steve  ( Contact Me, My Contribs ) 13:53, 24 November 2009 (UTC)

AWB
How can I change  to   using AWB? Debresser (talk) 15:19, 22 November 2009 (UTC)


 * Rich, do you have time to explain this to me. I just found out that I can use AWB on Innerpedia as well, but don't know how. Debresser (talk) 12:56, 24 November 2009 (UTC)

There still remains something to fix. Sorry, but the regex article is still a bit hard for me, so if you could please help. Debresser (talk) 22:40, 24 November 2009 (UTC)

List of artists who have covered Bob Dylan songs
I noticed you have changed the format on the headings and subheadings for the article. In my opinion I think it's less easy to read as a result. Is it possible for it to be changed back or has it been discussed somewhere that the new format is better than the previous one? If the page is to be kept in the current format should pages such as List of artists who have covered Van Morrison and the Beatles songs be changed as well to show consistency? Thanks Kitchen roll (talk) 21:59, 24 November 2009 (UTC)
 * ✅ Answered on user's talk page. Rich Farmbrough, 22:02, 24 November 2009 (UTC).
 * Thanks Kitchen roll (talk) 22:09, 24 November 2009 (UTC)

AWB rules
Could you please check/tweak some AWB rules: this edit (a) breaks an image link; (b) replaces hyphen with &amp;nbsp; instead of endash; (c) inserts the seventh month as September, not July (d) and linkifies a d-m-YYYY date. Same here, breaking a  link. Thanks, —Sladen (talk) 16:03, 24 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Shouldn't be a problem now. Thanks. Rich Farmbrough, 16:21, 24 November 2009 (UTC).

This edit, appears to have made the article's table a mess of inconsistency. —Sladen (talk) 23:14, 24 November 2009 (UTC)

I don't understand how your AWB script works: of two identically formatted (ie linked, ISO) dates in one article, it only converts and delinks one... Ohconfucius ¡digame! 01:34, 25 November 2009 (UTC)
 * It's avoiding accessed on, retrieved on and archived on. Rich Farmbrough, 03:01, 25 November 2009 (UTC).


 * Then it could still result in inconsistencies within reference sections, violating WP:MOSNUM. If the 'date' parameter is converted whilst leaving 'accessdate' untouched, there will be at least two different date formats in the refs section. Ohconfucius  ¡digame! 03:35, 25 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Well people argue(d) that acessdate= should be left as ISO even if the date is words, then other people argued that date= should be left as ISO too... basically I was only looking at  about 1% of the dated articles and reduced that further to about 1/3 of 1%. Rich Farmbrough, 03:40, 25 November 2009 (UTC).


 * Congratulations due—this is the first I've seen "Rich Farmbrough" appear in my Watchlist, reviewed the last dozen AWB steamroller edits and not found major carnage. —Sladen (talk) 03:55, 25 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Please fix the AWB rules to check if the NNNN exists in the article title before removing the "'". —Sladen (talk) 16:54, 25 November 2009 (UTC)


 * A number can be a name. A person or object with a name can possess something. Therefore a number followed by apostrophe-s is potentially valid. Since you do not read articles carefully enough after editing them to decide whether the added "s" indicates a time period or possession, you should not make such changes. --Jc3s5h (talk) 17:40, 25 November 2009 (UTC)


 * Eg. B movies (Transition in the 1950s): "such as rape in 1950's Outrage (released by RKO) and 1953's self-explanatory The Bigamist". —Sladen (talk) 18:58, 25 November 2009 (UTC)

Please try to leave the comment  intact. —Sladen (talk) 02:38, 26 November 2009 (UTC)

Have a break
Have a wikibreak. The articles on my watchlist invariably you have done more harm than good. I know you are a good editor. Take a break. Si Trew (talk) 16:54, 25 November 2009 (UTC)


 * Or if not, just shut up. Your edits are generally destructive. You love the plaudits but never respond to anyone who has genuine, real criticisms of your editing habits. Sheesh, your bot works OK most of the time, and you AWB to fix some other stuff. Other editors actually make stuff are annoyed (at least one, guess who) when your bot or yourself under AWB "corrects" something that was perfectly correct under WP.MOS and so forth, let alone being referenced and for facts, wikified and stuff.


 * It is quite easy to just fuck up other editors' contributions. Harder to fix them. You still after three attempts to ask you to discuss about Hungarian templates have not even bothered to respond. I go WP:ANI I know I will lose but you are a nuisance if you do not listen to humble editors who are actually making content. There is a place for doing it, SmackBot does it well, but you don't even bother to look at the articles before AWB. There may have been a lot of consideration into how to put it, before you "correct" it. With translated articles especially, it is very hard to translate and you trample all over it.


 * Totally fed up with your editing style. But I do truly believe you are a good faith editor, even though you could not deign to my last three requests to sort out the Hungarian templates. I would have done the work, just needed you to give direction. You could not be bothered. So you like to have a big edit count, I think, and don't care about the content.

Wishes, Si Trew (talk) 17:05, 25 November 2009 (UTC)

You?
Is it you who has fixed almost half of the articles in Category:Cite web templates using unusual accessdate parameters? Debresser (talk) 19:13, 25 November 2009 (UTC)
 * No I did few, but I want SmackBot to do it. BRFA has bee waiting a couple weeks seems like.  I think Rjw was working on it.  Rich Farmbrough, 19:16, 25 November 2009 (UTC).

Happy Thanksgiving!
<font color="Orange">December21st2012Freak  <font color="Brown">Happy Thanksgiving! 16:35, 26 November 2009 (UTC)

Date out of Nihongo template
Could you stop putting dates out of Nihongo template? I don't think that's the convention. -- Taku (talk) 18:23, 26 November 2009 (UTC)

Bot-related opinion
I think your opinion would we welcomed at WP:VPT. Oh, and well done for the awesome milestone achievement. OrangeDog  (τ • ε) 12:30, 27 November 2009 (UTC)

Unwelcome template
Template:Formatfootnotes Debresser (talk) 21:21, 25 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Hmm - doesn't that depend when it is used? For example see footnote 1. Rich Farmbrough, 21:34, 25 November 2009 (UTC).
 * What do you mean? Debresser (talk) 21:59, 25 November 2009 (UTC)
 * If editors will start adding a template to articles with or without references error, that is going to be a capital mess. Debresser (talk) 22:00, 25 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Mr. Farmbrough's suggested usage is what I intended it for, there are lots of articles cited like that, which would be better served with ref tagged references. --<span style="border:2px solid black;background:black;-webkit-border-radius:16px;-moz-border-radius:16px;color:white;width:20px;height:20px">( ƒî ) »  22:36, 25 November 2009 (UTC)
 * You mean for cases where a footnote is not defined as such? If so, perhaps make a new error category for that. We have a few already, for various types, but all are sorted into by MediaWiki. Making a new category, to go with the new template, would seem reasonable to me. Manually or with a maintenance template adding the category does not. Debresser (talk) 22:40, 25 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Why didn't I do that in the first place? --<span style="border:2px solid black;background:black;-webkit-border-radius:16px;-moz-border-radius:16px;color:white;width:20px;height:20px">( ƒî ) »  22:45, 25 November 2009 (UTC)

Rich, may I draw your attention to this edit of mine? Debresser (talk) 23:07, 25 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Sure. Rich Farmbrough, 23:41, 25 November 2009 (UTC).
 * I have a feeling this template is going to be popular. It might make sense to turn it into a dated template with monthly categories from the beginning. Debresser (talk) 23:19, 25 November 2009 (UTC)


 * Thanks for all your work here. I try when I make a template to give reasonable error messages, rather than it just say nothing or whatever, which is very hard to debug. This is a great advance, at least to see and know something is wrong, rather than it just swallow erroneous input. You will see at my testcases (e.g. Template:Hungarian settlement rank name/testcases or Template:Ordinal to word/0 to 19 I don't just test the cases that work, I test the cases that do not work. I hope this gives editors using them, which are few I admit, an idea of when they are sending it broken input. I am a software engineer after all. Si Trew (talk) 07:47, 28 November 2009 (UTC)


 * I'm a liar cos there are no testcases for the rank name. I am going to fix the doc, too, now that Mayar Téleüles Infobox has gone. I will try to do this at the others in that cat, but could do with a second set of eyes in case I miss any. Si Trew (talk) 07:50, 28 November 2009 (UTC)

Thanks
Thanks for this fix. Thought I went back and added the reflist template, but obviously not! Cheers Nouse4aname (talk) 16:06, 27 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Welcome. Rich Farmbrough, 16:07, 27 November 2009 (UTC).

List of cities, towns and villages in Hungary
Hi Rich,

I have conglomerated this from List of Towns and Cities in Hungary A-M and List of Towns and Cities N-Z. Since it it is a list I can't see the point of having it split. Now I need your help.

The population figures - ignore that they are not quite matching the articles themselves, for now - are pushed together with the postal code. Which makes Bácsalmás have a population of 7,1611,6430, which of course is nonsense. I have gone through "A" and split them with align=right, but you may be able to do better with a bot I think. They are in separate table fields, just not aligned properly. And of course under WP:MOSNUM the spaces should be replaced by commas. Could you do this with a bot? It is fairly simple really but you are the bot expert not me.

I dunno whether to link the county names cos it could well be WP:OVERLINK. If you want to, subst.

I should appreciate your advice. Letter A is now OK except if I made silly mistake, but the rest still needs doing. Si Trew (talk) 09:16, 28 November 2009 (UTC)


 * Thanks Rich, much appreciated. Si Trew (talk) 01:08, 29 November 2009 (UTC)

900 (number)
I don't think removing your edit removing DEAULTSORT has anything to do with MOSUNLINKDATES. I'm not saying the edit is inappropriate, just that it's trivial. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 07:16, 29 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Thanks. Rich Farmbrough, 10:56, 29 November 2009 (UTC).

Template:Infobox Hungarian settlement
Please don't forget this. I did ask you politely about the way to fix this up (with a bot assist and some template changes), twice. The second time you did not reply (as far as I can tell). I don't mind doing the template fixup but need your consensus first, if we need to run SmackBot over it. Si Trew (talk) 11:17, 18 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Yes I know, I will try to remind myself about this and see what to do. Rich Farmbrough, 11:30, 18 November 2009 (UTC).

need to re-read/ Rich Farmbrough, 08:40, 21 November 2009 (UTC).
 * User_talk:Rich_Farmbrough/Archive/2009Nov
 * User_talk:Rich_Farmbrough/Archive/2009Oct


 * OK the problem here is simply as you identified that we can't use parameters inside a ref. May relate to an existing Bugzilla bug. That aside I have tweaked the template and some documentation, it is not perfect because we are assuming 1 January 2008, but we have to hope that the above bug is fixed in the next couple of years then we can use in the ref. Rich Farmbrough, 19:20, 25 November 2009 (UTC).


 * But we have a good reference already. Why do we want to get rid of it? Rich Farmbrough, 19:40, 25 November 2009 (UTC).


 * But the parameters are wrong. Get it? I put in a couple of parameters, you disliked the name of it, I attempted to discuss but your bot went and changed them all anyway as a fait accompli. So then I asked whether to change the template, three times, no reply. So I think you just think it is just job done and move on to your next project to destroy. Stay and fix this with me please, I asked you three times with no reply at all, and all we have to do is agree on the names in the template then run the bot to fix what you have broken. And you have broken it, regardless of what you say. The template automaticaééy reffed and you broke that. Can we please sort it out because I am losing my good faith in you, I think you just get a good project in your head and forget the mess behind you. Si Trew (talk) 20:28, 25 November 2009 (UTC)


 * To get to details: Let's have ksh_code (not ksh_code_2008), fron other advice these seem very very stable. From before the Communist era. I am working on maps on these too, and they are very stable. Let's add a date field ksh_date and we then stick them together when necessary. Then we link area and population to the automatically provided ref. And I wrote KSH (Hungarian Central Statistical Office) and did all the links and know that is quite stable, as much as e.g. INSEE or whatever. So is that OK? But I need your bot then to run over and fix the articles it broke. Si Trew (talk) 20:35, 25 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Yes I agree with ksh_date. We already have population_as_of. But as you found out in October and I found out today you can't use parameters in refs. So it makes more sense to use the refs that have been generated already. We can even drive the bot off the parameters by creating a tracking category "Hungarion infoxes with  ksh code but no footnote". Rich Farmbrough, 20:46, 25 November 2009 (UTC).
 * currently has both footnotes. which is better? the one with the link or the one without? Rich Farmbrough, 21:37, 25 November 2009 (UTC).


 * There is a trick to get you to do elaboration in refsm i.e. swindle the parser. Someone put it on my talk, I will put it here if you think it useful (or you can check ny talk) Si Trew (talk) 22:15, 25 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Thanks, "tag doesn't do it, that is just "&lt;lt;"... Rich Farmbrough, 23:34, 25 November 2009 (UTC).

(oudent) You're right, I hadn't read it really, and it is just saying use. I thought there was something more curious, though, a little trick that would get round the parser and do that kind of trick, like one does with {{{tlx|!}} and so on. But this isn't it.

It's not good form to edit content on user talk pages. You just can't help yourself can you. Si Trew (talk) 07:27, 26 November 2009 (UTC)


 * OK so i am trying to get to the nub of the gist here and Csomád as you pointed out is a great exannple. From the KSH code it generates the link to the KSH inline, in the infobox. There is then a reference to the KSH generally. Then one to the KSH with the name of the place and it links to it with the KSH code.


 * The first and second are my doing, the third is yours (or your bot's). As I see it, the third is far nicer, but requires a bot to do it cos one cannot do it by constructing the reference using #PAGENAME and etc. to pull it together. So, to propose:


 * Add ksh_code_2008 as a synonym for ksh_code. Add ksh_date
 * Run bot to replace ksh_code_2008 with ksh_code in existing articles
 * When done, remove ksh_code_2008
 * Then try to sort out the mess with multiple references. I did attempt to use a footnote for this, but footnote_blank in does not work. Or if it does it must have a bizarre set of rules which are not documented. Which means, it does not work.

I will do the first bit now, as nothing gets broken. I was hoping to avoid the duplicatio, but so be it, nothing then gets broken by doing so. YOu might end up with three references in Csomád, who knows (and that is on the list for our translating it from HU:WP. So far we are only down to the end of A.)

Best wishes Si Trew (talk) 07:40, 26 November 2009 (UTC)


 * Now you've broken it. It is t his that frustrates me. I try and try and try to get a consensus how to do it, and still you go ahead and break it. Because I wanted to keep ksh code 2008 until your bot cleared t hem up. But you took it out and broke it. SHeesh, I could have broken it myself, that would not be difficult, the whole point was not to break existing articles. See WP:OWNFEET, please. Si Trew (talk) 08:01, 26 November 2009 (UTC)


 * I edited Abony to use the new fields. It is broken, it complains there is no cite ref. It is broken. Si Trew (talk) 08:11, 26 November 2009 (UTC)
 * The behaviour is documented (could be better). When you add ksh_code you need to add the population_footnotes.
 * I may be wrong Simon but I think the only broken articles were Ráckeve and Abony. Both fixed.
 * There were 6 articles using ksh_code_2008 - all fixed. 5 needed a population_footnotes field. Some of these you had removed the footnote.
 * All articles that have a ksh_code have a population_footnotes field. Most of these you had removed the footnote.
 * We don't need ksh_date, we have population_as_of.
 * Currently every article has a "}}" at the beginning. fixed
 * There is a limit to the number of hours I am willing to spend trying to "trick" the parser into doing stuff it should do anyway. I have probably spent dozens of hours on that, sometimes I have succeeded, sometimes not.
 * If you get auto ref generation working, great, let me know how.
 * Meanwhile either:
 * cut and paste the population footnotes field.
 * if you add ksh_code to a significant number of articles I can run AWB to add the footnotes (I set it up and there were only a handful (well 2 + 5) of articles that needed it)
 * or you could make a subst template
 * It is possible it might make sense to replace the static part of the url with a literal template Ksh url (should be KSH url really). That way if they change the structure of their site we just have to make one change.
 * Rich Farmbrough, 09:25, 26 November 2009 (UTC).
 * Incidentally the broken items should have showed up at Category:Hungarian settlements with KSH code lacking footnote. Rich Farmbrough, 10:42, 26 November 2009 (UTC).


 * OK that all sounds good. I know I am a bastard engineer who just wants it right. Of course I could have fixed Abony but wanted to leave it as an example of how it could go wrong. Can you say, we are now definitely all on ksh_code not ksh_code_2008? The ksh_date I am not sure about. population_as-of totally understand, but also the area figures come from there too. I would suggest that keep as ksh_date and just feed it to population_as_of, do you agree? The population density, given area and poulation, is computed with in  which is somewhat annoying as one cannot then just put in free text, e.g. to knock down the precision or whatever. I think that it should be a free form text field, what do you think?


 * Thanks for all your work here and thanks for putting up with a grumpy bastard (i.e. meself.) I am glad we got it fixed. Now I can use it with confidence in many other Hungarian geo articles I have to edit. Si Trew (talk) 11:04, 26 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Yes all articles are on ksh_code.  ksh_date/population_as_of - well either are a bit kludgy - but we could I suppose feed ksh_date as an alternative "population_as_of = {population_as_of|{ksh_date|}}" (with all the extra {})  - then if there were an <area_as_of> in the future we could do the same.  The other question is whether we should make sure people can add sources other than KSH, I guess as it stands they can but inelegantly. Rich Farmbrough, 12:26, 26 November 2009 (UTC).
 * BTW, for the record, Abony is the best tst case because it uses the template and has most of the fields, and, er, happens to be the first in the list alphabetically. Coincidence? Test Acsa and Sulyap to make sure, I think that uses
 * Nothing uses . Acsa is fine, Sulyap, maybe has a diacritic? Rich Farmbrough, 12:45, 26 November 2009 (UTC).


 * My typo there, it is Sülysap. It should have redirect without the diacritic, but I missed the S. It is the missus' home town so we did that one first (and improved the Hungarian, it is odd with the HU:WP, they seem to like removing information instead of adding it.) So it is basically, from your stance, a random article.


 * I dunno why you say nothing uses . Did you change them to use ? I checked "what links here" and it does seem nothing links to it. I dunno know whether it is better to delete it, now that Hungarian Infobox settlement works pretty well, or to leave it be, as it does no harm. What do you think? If you proposed it for deletion I would be neutral, but I can see a good argument for it being deleted. Frankly only Monkap and I actually do the translations of these articles and we can get along quite fine with the English version. Should we delete it? Si Trew (talk) 17:52, 26 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Yes we translated them all months ago. We can delete it, (easy enough to undelete) if we aren't bringing any more articles/infoboxes over using automation. Rich Farmbrough, 21:22, 26 November 2009 (UTC).


 * OK let's delete it, if you PROD it I will support as author and say it is no longer needed. It is a bizarre way to learn a language, I know what a mayor is (polgarmeister) and a county (megye) but not how to say yes or no.


 * I could speedy it but would likely be declined, better for you to PROD it I think. Si Trew (talk) 06:27, 27 November 2009 (UTC)
 * I speedied it as an unused template. Rich Farmbrough, 10:08, 27 November 2009 (UTC).


 * OK, slightly surprised it was accepted at SPEEDY, but one less thing to worry about. Thanks for all your work here. Thanks Rich, it is very much appreciated. Si Trew (talk) 07:42, 28 November 2009 (UTC)


 * I see you added infoboxes at Mezőberény. Thanks for that. It's referenced from László Németh, which we are currently translating, but it's hard going at that article. Thanks once again, your help in improving these articles I truly appreciate. Si Trew (talk) 16:38, 29 November 2009 (UTC)

SmackBot and obsolete parameters
Since you are dealing with films can you also remove obsolete parameters from Infobox film? Check Category:Film articles using deprecated parameters. -- Magioladitis (talk) 13:29, 29 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Yes sure. Rich Farmbrough, 16:42, 29 November 2009 (UTC).

Removing stub tags
Bots should not remove stub tags from articles that have been manually assessed as stubs. I, personally, assessed Virtual Pool franchise as a stub, because it is missing probably at least 50% of the information it needs. Smackbot had no business making up it's "mind" that I'm wrong. If it is just going on article length or some rubric like that, it needs to stop. At very, very least it should never countermand WikiProject tag assessments on the article's talk page (as long as one still says "Stub", it's still a stub, unless a) only one such project tag says so, and b) that tag has yes). I would also suggest strongly that it never remove stub tags when there is more than one stub tag, since it is fairly likely that this represents the human-mind judgement of 2 or more editors. At any rate, "stubness" is principally a factor of logical article depth and completion, not length in bytes or characters. —  SMcCandlish  &#91;talk&#93; &#91;cont&#93; ‹(-¿-)› 22:18, 29 November 2009 (UTC)
 * "A stub is an article containing only a few sentences of text" - and stub-class assessment is a separate matter. This article is certainly not a stub in my opinion. It needs a expand tag not a stub. Rich Farmbrough, 22:35, 29 November 2009 (UTC).

SmackBot
At this edit, SmackBot deleted an image, leaving the summary "Standard headings &/or gen fixes. using AWB". It happened nearly two years ago, and it seems no one has noticed until now. Can you explain the edit, please? Moonraker2 (talk) 22:20, 29 November 2009 (UTC)


 * This is my mistake, and it was the next edit. Moonraker2 (talk) 22:23, 29 November 2009 (UTC)

About the edit filter
Yesterday, I accidentally tripped filter 263 (Serafin - talk page abuse) and my autoconfirmed status had been revoked. I was trying to warn an IP about vandalism on an article on a profane word when the filter "recognize" that I abused the talk page (because of the profane word, when it is actually referring to the article). Fortunately, it's a false positive and I believe the filter has been fixed by User:Zzuuzz. See here. Will I ever trip the filter again and have my autoconfirmed status revoked if I warn a vandal regarding the article on a profane word on his talk page now, since the abuse filter is already fixed? Merlion 444  10:08, 30 November 2009 (UTC)
 * ✅ Answered on user's talk page. Rich Farmbrough, 15:21, 30 November 2009 (UTC).

R.F. 2015-10-22Z23:02

Date Maintenance Tags and General Fixes
Hey there, What does "Date Maintenance Tags and General Fixes" mean? I read it in the edit summary on Karl Rove. Is this automated? If so, it's really cool. How did you invent it? Any way to get an automaton to do all the editing on controversial topics? Would save a lot of green house gases from being expelled into the atmosphere. LOL. Malke 2010 (talk) 15:17, 30 November 2009 (UTC)
 * ✅ Answered on user's talk page. Rich Farmbrough, 15:21, 30 November 2009 (UTC).


 * Wow, that is very cool. I've always wondered about the "citation needed" thing.  So when you put up "citation needed" it gets dated and then how does the system notify editors that they need to kick into gear and get a real source up on the article?Malke 2010 (talk) 15:24, 30 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Amazing, the size of it all. Truly defines the term "work in progress."  Well, now that I'm aware of this sort of thing, I will be very diligent in seeing to it that any articles I work on are properly cited.  I'm also amazed by the "dead links" tool.  Brilliant, whoever figured that out.Malke 2010 (talk) 15:32, 30 November 2009 (UTC)

accessdate= improvement
This edit; rules for improvement... —Sladen (talk) 15:30, 30 November 2009 (UTC)


 * you've got it. Debresser (talk) 16:17, 30 November 2009 (UTC)

Pages with citation templates etc.
Although I agree with the move, there are 20 templates that sorted into Category:Cite web templates using unusual accessdate parameters, and you changed only Cite web to Category:Pages containing cite templates with deprecated parameters. The others are found on User:Debresser/My_work_on_Wikipedia. So it is either change all, or change none. Debresser (talk) 15:37, 30 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Thanks saved me visiting your talk page to ask. Rich Farmbrough, 15:48, 30 November 2009 (UTC).
 * My pleasure. I made all the new monthly maintenance categories (apart from 3 that had been created already today). I am very anxious about the Cfd templates. I'd hate there should be complaints now that we've finally got those categories renamed. See above Debresser (talk) 16:01, 30 November 2009 (UTC)

Will you do talkpages, userpages and wikipedia pages as well? I'll of course fix anything you leave, but I do think your AWB does it 10 times quicker than I do. Debresser (talk) 22:36, 30 November 2009 (UTC)

Bot status (again)
You still didn't get a user with bot status to perform those massive automatic edits so I'm unable to automatically differentiate these irrelevant bot edits in my watchlist.--Nutriveg (talk) 18:22, 30 November 2009 (UTC)

Cite journal
Hi, has broken linking of short-notes to references (including Harvard referencing) for. The field is documented as ref, which is how it's used in hundreds of articles; but the template no longer recognises that - it's now looking for Ref. Parameter names are case-sensitive, and it appears to be normal to use lower-case parameter names unless there is a good reason not to; I can't find a policy doc, but see User:Slambo's comments here. --Redrose64 (talk) 18:56, 30 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Yes there are guidelines. Mea culpa. Rich Farmbrough, 19:00, 30 November 2009 (UTC).

Spanish municipalities
Perhaps you'd be interested in copying infoboxes from Spanish wikipedia. They are in big need of sorting out and are very inconsistent. Even the ones were currently have are a mess with paramaters and dividers in the wrong place and just yuck. See User talk:Plastikspork. We have a wrapper template Template:Infobox Spanish municipality. I believe you can copy most of the infobox and it will wprk we now just need to find a way to transfer both maps and them to display like Nerha for instance. If you could discuss it with Plastikspork we can find out whats best and then if you are interested paerhaps you could do the prelimary interwiki copying and then Plastikspork at a later date can convert to infobox settlement. Either way it needs some discussion first to ensure it is done as efficiently as possible and to save possible time later.... Himalayan   21:23, 30 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Yes, we should coordinate the effort if you, Rich, want to help. I have a PerlWikipedia script that can transfer infoboxes from the Spanish language wikipedia, to the English language wikipedia, and perform various automated edits (ala AWB).  I ended up using PerlWikipedia since it wasn't clear to me how to do this with AWB. I am planning to have a look at it later today. Thanks! Plastikspork <sub style="font-size: 60%">―Œ <sup style="margin-left:-3ex">(talk)  21:47, 30 November 2009 (UTC)

The lists can be found in the categories of Category:Municipalities of Spain,,, Using Plastik's script it should work.... I'd say the vast majority are in need of replacement or are missing or have out of date data or have a grye infobox and needs replacing etc so it would probably best to do most of them and overide the current infoboxes (which even if they have an infobox settlement it is infobox city or a mess in terms of order...). This will also ensure standardisation later. I think the top 10 spanish cities are OK though.... Himalayan   22:01, 30 November 2009 (UTC)