User talk:SMasters/Archive 26

November 2010 Backlog Elimination Drive Conclusion
Delivered by MessageDeliveryBot on behalf of WikiProject Guild of Copy Editors at 23:59, 2 December 2010 (UTC).

Election question
Who is eligible to vote in the GOCE election? Does a person have to be a GOCE memeber to vote, or can anyone vote? -- Diannaa (Talk) 06:37, 4 December 2010 (UTC)
 * We never really discussed this. It states on the page: "Both project members and interested outside parties are encouraged to ask questions of the nominees or make general comments." But there's nothing about who can vote. What is your opinion? Also, do you know who Lunalet is? The account has been active for less than one week and he is brewing storms everywhere if you take a look at his talk page. – SMasters (talk) 06:51, 4 December 2010 (UTC)
 * No, I don't know who they are yet. I think we have to let anyone vote since the insructions don't specify GOCE members only. Derild has withdrawn from the election, they said they want to withdraw on my talk page so I collapsed their nomination. I am sad -- Diannaa (Talk) 06:58, 4 December 2010 (UTC)
 * That's such a shame! I'm sad as well. Let's hope we survive these next 10 days or so without too much more undesirable incidents. – SMasters (talk) 07:35, 4 December 2010 (UTC)

WikiProject_Guild_of_Copy_Editors/Requests
Replied to your question. -- Redtigerxyz Talk 12:07, 4 December 2010 (UTC)
 * I have completed the copyedit. Cheers. – SMasters (talk) 17:29, 4 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the copyedit and all the best for the elections. -- Redtigerxyz Talk 04:49, 5 December 2010 (UTC)
 * No problems, I enjoyed the article, and thanks! :-) – SMasters (talk) 22:33, 6 December 2010 (UTC)

Completion of Barnstars
I am going to finish up the barnstars now, so if you could do mine that would be perfect. Reaper has done my Caretakers Star, but I get some leader board awards as well. Thanks. -- Diannaa (Talk) 18:34, 4 December 2010 (UTC)
 * OK, sure. – SMasters (talk) 18:42, 4 December 2010 (UTC)

WP:HORROR
It looks like the GoCE has become a thriving copyediting project, on no small part of yours. I sort of want to revive WP:HORROR, it's progress has slowed down a lot as of late. D'you think holding coordinator elections will help, or perhaps any other suggestions? Thanks, -- The Taerkasten ( talk ) 20:48, 4 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Good for you! Personally, I do not think it is the right time to have coordinators. If you do, you might get a few active editors, but they will end up doing all the work. First, you need to build up a community of editors. Hopefully, a place where some of them will call home. Contact existing members, and those who have been working on articles under the scope of the project. I think it is better to hold some kind of community participation project, such as a drive, or some other kind of one-off event first. Try and garner support during this activity and create a buzz in the community first. Then you have a much better chance for getting a larger group excited and enthused about the project. A drive may or may not work. I know the good folks at Wikiproject Wikify are struggling with theirs. Even though it is largely a copy of our drive, it does not have a lot of active participants. Maybe try a one-off event, with clear defined goals, and see how that goes. Maybe have a Valentine's Day contest, which aims to achieve certain predefined goals that run until Valentine's Day 2011? Offer customized, unique barnstars for the contest. That sounds like a lot of fun! :-) (It's just an idea at the top of my head). And some kind of contest leading up to Halloween would certainly attract attention and participation. Those would be my initial thoughts. You might want to investigate how WP:MILHIST got so many people excited to participate in the first place. Once you have a community together, you can discuss how to maintain interest in the group. There is no reason why you can't have a different goal for every month, without even having to hold any drives. These are just some ideas. I guess my thinking is – get the people first and the rest will follow. I may or may not be right, but I would do it this way. – SMasters (talk) 03:43, 5 December 2010 (UTC)


 * Thanks, those are really good ideas. At the moment, I'm the interim coordinator, and we've also got a deputy and assistant coordinators. Apart from that, it's like 7 other active members. I'll hold a discussion on the Project talk page in due course to see what we can do about it. I really don't want WP:HORROR to disappear into the inactive projects. Thanks, -- The Taerkasten ( talk ) 12:30, 5 December 2010 (UTC)
 * OK, good luck with that and feel free to give me a holler if you need any assistance. Cheers. – SMasters (talk) 05:28, 6 December 2010 (UTC)


 * Thanks, I'm sure your input will be valuable, when I'm ready to start the discussion.-- The Taerkasten ( talk ) 17:43, 6 December 2010 (UTC)


 * At the moment, I'm going to cleanup all the inactive pages when necessary to get ready for its (hopefully) big revival in the future. It's gonna be tough, but I know it's doable.-- TÆRkast  ( Communicate ) 22:30, 6 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Sounds like a good starts. Good luck! – SMasters (talk) 22:34, 6 December 2010 (UTC)

Pointless AWB edits
Please can you avoid using AWB to perform pointless edits like this and this. That serves no useful purpose, and just wastes the time of editors who spot the changes on their watchlist. -- Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 00:07, 5 December 2010 (UTC)
 * This may seem to be a pointless edit, but it is not at all. s-start is the replacement for previous formats for succession tables. It is part of WikiProject Succession Box Standardization, which aims to fully standardize all succession boxes of Wikipedia. The two articles you mentioned are using start box, which will eventually be phased out. I am helping make these small tedious changes which editors may not normally do. Hope this clarifies. Cheers. – SMasters (talk) 03:11, 5 December 2010 (UTC)
 * I think you may have missed that I am a participant in WikiProject_Succession_Box_Standardization, probably cos I never added myself to the Wikipedia:WikiProject_Succession_Box_Standardization#Members|list of members]]. But check the talk page, and you'll see that have been involved for some years.
 * I think you have misunderstood what the project has been trying to do in standardising boxes. s-start (and its counterpart ) are the most trivial templates of the series: they are simply the start and end of tables, and start box and end box are simply redirects to them. So your edits are just bypassing redirects.
 * Now, if you were bypassing those redirects as part of a bigger edit which restructured the succession boxes themselves to use the new parameters such as,  ,  ,  , or using s-news-ttls-aft rather than   then your edits would be achieving something genuinely useful. But simply bypassing the redirects leaves all the outmoded syntax in place, with all its display problems.
 * I find it very hard to see any chance of the redirects start box and end box being deleted, so I can't see that bypassing them helps the project. -- Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 13:21, 5 December 2010 (UTC)
 * This is currently built-in to AWB. I will bring it up at AWB for it to be fixed. (Please also see below). – SMasters (talk) 16:35, 5 December 2010 (UTC)
 * And if I may add, your AWB edit to Bars Media removed the wikify tag, but without addressing the formatting and internal linking problems, so I cannot see the point of that. Shawn in Montreal (talk) 16:27, 5 December 2010 (UTC)
 * I am currently doing a run to help the folks at WikiProject Wikify, who are currently running a drive. I am nearly finished with the run, which is to help them remove the wikify tag from articles that no longer need them. The run may make some other fixes, but the main aim is to do exactly that–remove the wikify tag. Please be patient, the run will end very soon. I am more than halfway through. Cheers. – SMasters (talk) 16:35, 5 December 2010 (UTC)
 * But Bars Media does still require the wikify tag. And I've restored it accordingly. Shawn in Montreal (talk) 16:57, 5 December 2010 (UTC)
 * AWB treats the wikify tag like this: "Appends wikify if article has < 3 wikilinks or the number of wikilinks is smaller than 0.25% of article's size. Removes tag otherwise." I have manually wikified the article for you. I found just one or two more potential words to wikify, but overall, I do feel that AWB's assessment was pretty much correct. If anything, the article needs a complete rewrite. Cheers. – SMasters (talk) 03:34, 6 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Thanks but I have to scratch my head at a rationale like that, since the wikify template specifically states that "although this template is commonly used when a page has no wikilinks, it is not limited to just that. It could also refer to any form of wiki-markup, such as bolding/italicizing of text or formatting standard headings and layout, including the addition of infoboxes and other templates, ie 'wikipedification'." Just counting the number of internal links in this fashion is guaranteed to produce a large number of false negatives, imo. I completed the 'wikipedification' on Bars Media. thanks, Shawn in Montreal (talk) 15:47, 6 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Thanks but I have to scratch my head at a rationale like that, since the wikify template specifically states that "although this template is commonly used when a page has no wikilinks, it is not limited to just that. It could also refer to any form of wiki-markup, such as bolding/italicizing of text or formatting standard headings and layout, including the addition of infoboxes and other templates, ie 'wikipedification'." Just counting the number of internal links in this fashion is guaranteed to produce a large number of false negatives, imo. I completed the 'wikipedification' on Bars Media. thanks, Shawn in Montreal (talk) 15:47, 6 December 2010 (UTC)

These pointless edits have been continuing. It's no use saying that it is "built into AWB"; you have responsibility for what you do with AWB, and you don't have to save changes when the edit is too trivial. -- Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 17:29, 5 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Yes, I am aware of that. I apologise, I guess after going through hundreds of articles, I became too tired and missed a few. I have now decided to stop completely, and let the folks at WikiProject Wikify deal with this themselves. It is not worth the grief that I am getting for me to try to help them. As I have mentioned, I will bring this up at AWB that this correction is pointless, according to an expert, and see what they say. In the meantime, I will go and do other things where I won't have people shouting at me for attempting to help. Cheers. – SMasters (talk) 03:34, 6 December 2010 (UTC)
 * The good folks at AWB say that this is not pointless at all. They say that it is a big improvement for PDFs. Please reply there if you don't agree as they are the experts on this, not me. Cheers. – SMasters (talk) 22:28, 6 December 2010 (UTC)
 * The answer there doesn't seem right, so I have asked for clarification. -- Brown HairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 22:40, 6 December 2010 (UTC)

History of education in Angola
You call this wikified? I wouldn't have my dog read this article. Slightsmile (talk) 23:25, 5 December 2010 (UTC)
 * I had a good look at the article. Pray, tell me, how else would you wikify it? I can't spot any other necessary links to wikify. AWB treats the wikify tag like this: "Appends wikify if article has < 3 wikilinks or the number of wikilinks is smaller than 0.25% of article's size. Removes tag otherwise." What else would you wikify in the article? I agree with you that it's not a great article, however, there is no need to be rude about it. – SMasters (talk) 03:28, 6 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Its not just about wikilinks but also Layout.


 * How else would I wikify in the article? By leaving the tag alone so someone in the Wikify Project can see it in the Wikify List and work on it. I'm sorry if I sounded mad but for several months this year I used that list as my main tool for my contributions and then started seeing people removing articles from the list that I might have liked to have worked on. If the article is a mess somebody will see it there and fix it up.


 * I see the messages above this one about AWB. How about, like, not using AWB until the many, numerous bugs are worked out. Slightsmile (talk) 04:52, 6 December 2010 (UTC)
 * In case you didn't read the comments above, I am helping the folks at WikiProject Wikify remove unnecessary wikify tags as part of their drive to reduce their backlog of over 20K articles. Perhaps you might be interested in participating in their current drive? As I mentioned, I have had a good look at the article, and there's not much more to wikify for this particular article. Why leave the tag on when there's nothing else to be done for it (in terms of wikifying)? I have added the correct, appropriate tags for you. We are all volunteers here. Please assume good faith on my part. I think AWB made a pretty good assessment of this article as far as the wikify tag is concerned. The other problems above relate to an entirely different problem, which I am trying to help sort out. Most of us using AWB (and there are a few thousand of us), do so in the hope of helping make Wikipedia better. We do so by spending our time and resources (AWB is run locally on our own computers) to do this. Please don't be mad, and please don't bite us. Cheers. – SMasters (talk) 05:27, 6 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Sorry, I just saw that you are a WP:WIKI participant. See my comments on the talk page. Cheers. – SMasters (talk) 10:10, 6 December 2010 (UTC)

Skanderbeg
Hail o master. I was wondering if you could look into this article as its a current a GA nom and a very important one for Albania. I suspect there may be some POV issues and some MOS issues. Can you look over it some time this week? It failed GA a while back, I think it could pass this time with some fixing...♦ Dr. Blofeld  15:05, 6 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Hello Doc, OK, I will have a look at this during the week. Cheers. – SMasters (talk) 22:32, 6 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Doc, can you please do me a favour and put this on the Requests page of the GOCE so that there is a record there? Many thanks. – SMasters (talk) 09:01, 8 December 2010 (UTC)

OK, I've done that. Clint Eastwood is now also listed at GAR.♦ Dr. Blofeld  15:54, 10 December 2010 (UTC)

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