User talk:RoySmith

Earth Day 2022 Edit-a-thon - April 22nd - 2PM EST
-- Environment of New York City Task Force

Your GA nomination of Big Duck
The article Big Duck you nominated as a good article has passed ; see Talk:Big Duck for comments about the article, and Talk:Big Duck/GA1 for the nomination. Well done! If the article is eligible to appear in the "Did you know" section of the Main Page, you can nominate it within the next seven days. Message delivered by ChristieBot, on behalf of Chiswick Chap -- Chiswick Chap (talk) 18:01, 4 July 2024 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – July 2024
News and updates for administrators from the past month (June 2024).



Administrator changes
 * Gnome-colors-list-add.svg Elli · HouseBlaster · Pickersgill-Cunliffe
 * Gnome-colors-list-remove.svg Brianga · De728631 · Georgewilliamherbert · Hyacinth (deceased) · ProveIt · The Night Watch

Technical news
 * Local administrators can now add new links to the bottom of the site Tools menu without using JavaScript. Documentation is available on MediaWiki.

Miscellaneous
 * The Community Wishlist is re-opening on 15 July 2024. Read more

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Archive Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 07:59, 6 July 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-28
 Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes
 * At the Wikimedia Foundation a new task force was formed to replace the disabled Graph with more secure, easy to use, and extensible Chart. You can subscribe to the newsletter to get notified about new project updates and other news about Chart.
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 * Editors using the iOS Wikipedia app who have more than 50 edits can now use the Add an Image feature. This feature presents opportunities for small but useful contributions to Wikipedia.
 * Thank you to all of the authors who have contributed to MediaWiki Core. As a result of these contributions, the percentage of authors contributing more than 5 patches has increased by 25% since last year, which helps ensure the sustainability of the platform for the Wikimedia projects.

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 * A problem with the color of the talkpage tabs always showing as blue, even for non-existent pages which should have been red, affecting the Vector 2022 skin, has been fixed.

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MediaWiki message delivery 21:29, 8 July 2024 (UTC)

Your GA nomination of Robert Weinberg (urban planner)
The article Robert Weinberg (urban planner) you nominated as a good article has passed ; see Talk:Robert Weinberg (urban planner) for comments about the article, and Talk:Robert Weinberg (urban planner)/GA1 for the nomination. Well done! If the article is eligible to appear in the "Did you know" section of the Main Page, you can nominate it within the next seven days. Message delivered by ChristieBot, on behalf of Pbritti -- Pbritti (talk) 02:04, 11 July 2024 (UTC)

Fri July 19: Wikicurious in NYC, Editing Wikipedia for Beginners
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--Wikimedia New York City Team via MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 16:51, 13 July 2024 (UTC)

Google Maps
I was looking at the U.S. Route 13 in Maryland article, which is also a good article, and I noticed that the parts addressing the terrain US 13 passes through (such as "US 13 passes through wooded areas") has Google Maps as a source. Do you think I could use Google Maps as a source for I-85 passing through forest and rural areas? Let me know your thoughts and I'll reply back ASAP. Thanks. NoobThreePointOh (talk) 02:34, 15 July 2024 (UTC)


 * Nvm, I figured it out. Do you mind letting me get back on the 17th and finishing up the rest of the article? I'm almost done, and I saw on the GAN page that there are reassessments that have been open for as early as June 14th. I'm not asking for a massive extension, but just for the 17th so that I can get back to my computer and add the citations. I understand if you don't want to grant me the extension, but I have in fact made improvements on my computer, although they haven't been saved yet. NoobThreePointOh (talk) 08:52, 15 July 2024 (UTC)
 * I'm not sure what to tell you. There's a request for reassessment open.  At some point somebody will pick it up and make a decision.  I have no control over when that happens. RoySmith (talk) 14:32, 15 July 2024 (UTC)
 * Ok. All I hope is that I make it back to my computer before it closes and finish up whatever improvements I make to the article. I think I've found out what sources to use for the sentencing and what to remove from the wording. NoobThreePointOh (talk) 16:14, 15 July 2024 (UTC)

Disambiguation link notification for July 15
An automated process has detected that when you recently edited West Farms Soldiers Cemetery, you added a link pointing to the disambiguation page Daily News.

(Opt-out instructions.) --DPL bot (talk) 06:23, 15 July 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-29
 Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Tech News survey
 * Please help us to improve Tech News by taking this short survey. The goal is to better meet the needs of the various types of people who read Tech News. The survey will be open for 3 more days. The survey is covered by this privacy statement. Some translations are available.

Recent changes
 * Octicons-tools.svg Wikimedia developers can now officially continue to use both Gerrit and GitLab, due to a June 24 decision by the Wikimedia Foundation to support software development on both platforms. Gerrit and GitLab are both code repositories used by developers to write, review, and deploy the software code that supports the MediaWiki software that the wiki projects are built on, as well as the tools used by editors to create and improve content. This decision will safeguard the productivity of our developers and prevent problems in code review from affecting our users. More details are available in the Migration status page.
 * The Wikimedia Foundation seeks applicants for the Product and Technology Advisory Council (PTAC). This group will bring technical contributors and Wikimedia Foundation together to co-define a more resilient, future-proof technological platform. Council members will evaluate and consult on the movement's product and technical activities, so that we develop multi-generational projects. We are looking for a range of technical contributors across the globe, from a variety of Wikimedia projects. Please apply here by August 10.
 * Editors with rollback user-rights who use the Wikipedia App for Android can use the new Edit Patrol features. These features include a new feed of Recent Changes, related links such as Undo and Rollback, and the ability to create and save a personal library of user talk messages to use while patrolling. If your wiki wants to make these features available to users who do not have rollback rights but have reached a certain edit threshold, you can contact the team. You can read more about this project on Diff blog.
 * Editors who have access to The Wikipedia Library can once again use non-open access content in SpringerLinks, after the Foundation contacted them to restore access. You can read more about this and 21 other community-submitted tasks that were completed last week.

Changes later this week
 * This week, dark mode will be available on a number of Wikipedias, both desktop and mobile, for logged-in and logged-out users. Interface admins and user script maintainers are encouraged to check gadgets and user scripts in the dark mode, to find any hard-coded colors and fix them. There are some recommendations for dark mode compatibility to help.

Future changes
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 * Editors who upload files cross-wiki, or teach other people how to do so, may wish to join a Wikimedia Commons discussion. The Commons community is discussing limiting who can upload files through the cross-wiki upload/Upload dialog feature to users auto-confirmed on Wikimedia Commons. This is due to the large amount of copyright violations uploaded this way. There is a short summary at Commons:Cross-wiki upload and discussion at Commons:Village Pump.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe. You can also get other news from the Wikimedia Foundation Bulletin. 

MediaWiki message delivery 01:29, 16 July 2024 (UTC)

Re the wikirefs tool
Just tried it on The Argosy (magazine) and got an internal server error; my mistake that it should have been Argosy (magazine) (which it coped with), but presumably it doesn't like being asked about non-existent pages. I like what I see of the tool so far, particularly that it preserves links in the references. I could imagine an option to restrict what comes back to only refs with links, or only ones without. Perhaps an option to ask for X randomly selected ones, and an option to copy them to the copy-paste buffer in some appropriate wikitext form -- I use a standardized bullet list with wording that you can see here, for example, but anything pasteable into a GA or FA review would work.

One thing I find myself doing in spotchecks is that I get an intuition pretty quickly about whether there are problems to be found, and if I suspect problems (I'm more right than not, but my instincts are not infallible on this) then I'll go looking for structures that I know from experience are more likely to reveal errors. A couple of examples:


 * Direct quotes, e.g. in reception sections, are rarely wrong, so if I'm hunting errors I'll often skip these.
 * Situations of the form "Here is a sentence with multiple clauses,[1] with a citation halfway through. Here's a second sentence with the citation at the end.[2]" often failed verification on the second half of sentence 1.
 * Paragraphs with one or two cites at the end of each sentence are rarely wrong. The longer the series of sentences cited to a single source, the more likely an error becomes, though this is not as reliable in producing errors as the previous case.
 * Declarative sentences that assert things such as names or dates are less likely to be wrong.
 * Multiple citations, perhaps surprisingly, don't seem to be correlated with reliability -- that is, picking something to verify that has multiple citations doesn't seem to increase the chances of finding an error.
 * Flowery, unnatural, old-fashioned or highly academic or formal language is a moderately strong indication of possible close paraphrasing, *unless* the rest of the article is like that too, in which case the odds are evenly distributed between the author being a formal writer, a non-native speaker, or a bad writer, depending on what the oddity in the language is.

This all means that in some cases I don't want a random sample; I want to bias the selection toward certain types of spotcheck.

Thanks for working on this -- I can see it being pretty useful once you get it a little further along. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 02:16, 16 July 2024 (UTC)


 * Thanks for the comments. Yeah, dealing with non-existent titles in a useful way is probably #1 on my to-do list. RoySmith (talk) 02:44, 16 July 2024 (UTC)

DYK for Big Duck
Complex / Rational 00:02, 19 July 2024 (UTC)

DYK for Domestic duck
Complex / Rational 00:02, 19 July 2024 (UTC)