User talk:SMcCandlish/Archive 39

=February 2010=

Yank Adams
Hope you're recovering from the pummeling. Just so you know I massively expanded Yank Adams this morning. It should be on the main page in a few hours. The organization sucks quite completely but there's now quite a lot of information at least.--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 21:59, 31 January 2010 (UTC)
 * Yeah, I was just looking at it, coincidentally. Wowzer, great job!  And thanks for the well-wishing.  Actually, I've been exceedingly frustrated this week, with people process-wonking me to death (yeah, me, the so-called process wonk). I've been working off-site on ver. 1.4 of WP:Cite4Wiki quite a bit and may stick with that for a while, just to get away from people hounding me. At least they can't revert everything I do to my own addons.mozilla.org uploads. Ver. 1.4 is going to be pretty interesting, by the way. Need to add more major newspapers to its auto-formatting features before I go live with it, though. If you use Firefox on Windows I can send you a beta of it. — SMcCandlish   Talk⇒ ʕ(Õلō)ˀ  Contribs. 22:30, 31 January 2010 (UTC)
 * Glad you like it. As I intimated higher on this page, and have now confirmed, Yank was a household name at one time, very famous. There's a gorgeous exhibition poster of his on page 167 of the Billiard Encyclopedia. If I remember, you have the book. You wouldn't perchance have a good resolution scanner would you? I don't (I do at work but lugging that book in, well you know how heavy it is). It would make a nice addition.
 * --Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 03:45, 1 February 2010 (UTC)
 * I'll see about scanning the page (will have to look for it - 3rd ed.'s page numbering is different after a point). My scanner's not supergreat, but it doesn't suck too bad. I hope. — SMcCandlish   Talk⇒ ʕ(Õلō)ˀ  Contribs. 04:11, 1 February 2010 (UTC)

Done! See last 2 items at User:SMcCandlish/Gallery. — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ʕ(Õلō)ˀ  Contribs. 00:27, 2 February 2010 (UTC)
 * Great! It'll make a really nice addition (and will balance out the left-right image staggering). Thanks.--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 11:28, 2 February 2010 (UTC)
 * You might consider using it as the main image; the top-right one isn't so hot. — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ʕ(Õلō)ˀ  Contribs. 13:59, 2 February 2010 (UTC)
 * Good idea but too late. It's on the main page now:-(--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 14:55, 2 February 2010 (UTC)
 * Me no seeum. Does the change go live tomorrow? Searched main page for "Yank", "Adams", "finger", "billiard", etc. — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ʕ(Õلō)ˀ  Contribs. 21:40, 2 February 2010 (UTC)
 * You wouldn't find it with those searches (and I'm not sure a picture would have worked with the hook I had, which tried to draw people in by stating something true, but puzzling (I am so sick of hooks that are not "hooky" at all, à la, did you know "...that some bridge was built somewhere?")). The hook was:*... that both the Comte de Paris and the Prince of Wales enjoyed the services of the Digital Billiard Wonder?--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 23:17, 3 February 2010 (UTC)

Horizontal option
Cite4wiki looks very cool. Can you attach the beta in an email? (yes I'm windows based, and use Firefox pretty much exclusively). I use User:Mr.Z-man/refToolbar (turned on in preferences → gadgets) for some citation preformatting, though once I'm involved in an article, I find it easiest to just grab past citations and change the parameters, especially when I have used the same source and accessdate earlier in the article. I have never liked the look of vertical spaced citation formatting when I'm in edit mode. I much prefer as compact a reference as possible i.e., with no spacing at all.--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 03:45, 1 February 2010 (UTC)
 * ... I prefer citations in the vertical format; you might try boosting the number of rows in your editbox (prefs, under editing; check 'Widen the edit box to fill the entire screen', too;). Cheers, Jack Merridew 06:39, 1 February 2010 (UTC)
 * Yeah, I do that myself. I vastly prefer the vertical cites, since it is easier to find them, read them and ensure they are coded properly. I will provide an option to use horizontal ones, though. — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ʕ(Õلō)ˀ  Contribs. 19:46, 1 February 2010 (UTC)
 * Will e-mail it to you. I haven't figured out yet how to create preferences options in FFox add-ons, but if you have even really meager JavaScript sense you can easily modify the source to not use vertical citations. — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ʕ(Õلō)ˀ  Contribs. 04:11, 1 February 2010 (UTC)

(outdent) Update: Horizontal version will be available as a 1.4 downloadable add-on variant, but won't be the default. — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ʕ(Õلō)ˀ  Contribs. 19:46, 1 February 2010 (UTC)
 * Good stuff.--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 11:28, 2 February 2010 (UTC)

Site query.nytimes.com
Very fucking cool! A few bugs: this is what I got from a NYT article I used it on: Some suggestions: Make it cite news, not cite web; make work=The New York Times. --Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 05:09, 1 February 2010 (UTC)


 * The script wasn't detecting "query.nytimes.com", only "nytimes.com", so I'll add that one. In the interim, try just www.nytimes.com articles to see the customization at work. The www.nytimes.com detector already fixes the work, and new version will do same for query.nytimes.com.
 * — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ʕ(Õلō)ˀ  Contribs. 19:46, 1 February 2010 (UTC)

Site-specific datamining
[As note above] this is what I got from a NYT article I used it on: Can it scrape the date? The date for any newspaper citation is never "2010" of course. --Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 05:09, 1 February 2010 (UTC)


 * For now anyway, the date is something that will need to be manually fixed. For known news sources, the date will (in 1.4) actually show up as an error if it is not manually fixed, for the very reason you point out; for cite web sources, the year is okay as a default, but not for online newspapers, which always give a full date for every article. Obviously, the title will need also adjusting if the site adds "... - View Article - The New York Times" crap.  Given enough time, I can script that kind of stuff away, I suppose, but the problem is that if it ever changes by even one character, then the script will have to be updated. For NYT in particular and some other newspapers, I could probably scrape the date (I'd be surprised if it were not in a span or div I could identify by name/id), but the same caveat applies that if NY every changes anything about this, then the tool breaks.  Something I'll consider for 1.5.
 * — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ʕ(Õلō)ˀ  Contribs. 19:46, 1 February 2010 (UTC)

PDF datamining
All New York Times PDFs (example) have "Published: January 29, 1878" at the bottom, and that part of the PDF page (unlike the body text of the article) is OCRed, so I would think you could get it recognized. --Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 05:09, 1 February 2010 (UTC)


 * PDFs: Not in the picture, really. JavaScript works on Web pages per se; any PDF you are actually reading online in your browser is being read in a PDF viewer plugin to which the JavaScript has no access at all. Anyway, I'll have a look at the URL you've given here and see what JS can do with it; if the PDF's being loaded in a frame or something, I might be able to get details from it. — SMcCandlish   Talk⇒ ʕ(Õلō)ˀ  Contribs. 19:46, 1 February 2010 (UTC)
 * — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ʕ(Õلō)ˀ  Contribs. 19:46, 1 February 2010 (UTC)
 * PS: Redevelopment of this tool in Java might be able to directly deal with PDFs, but that's for someone else to look at; I don't speak Java. — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ʕ(Õلō)ˀ  Contribs. 20:04, 1 February 2010 (UTC)

1.0 formatting issue
fyi, on Cite4Wiki, I get a few garbled characters after the closing ref-tag. I just tried to paste them here in nowiki-tags and MediaWiki got rather confused by them. Fine work, otherwise. Cheers, Jack Merridew 06:39, 1 February 2010 (UTC)


 * I was using v1.0 and just bumped to the experimental v1.3 and the loose char issue cleared up.
 * Cheers, Jack Merridew 07:21, 1 February 2010 (UTC)


 * Ha! 1.0 was not my code. That was Cite for Wiki; my Cite4Wiki began at 1.1, based on the former's 1.0, which I believe was first-and-last published in September 2009.— SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ʕ(Õلō)ˀ  Contribs. 19:46, 1 February 2010 (UTC)


 * I used the for wiki a few years ago; the version User:Jehochman had linked off his user page (which went broken for some reason; a FF update, I think). I currently have v1.0 of 4 as well as v1.3 of 4. The first version, I installed a few months ago, off Mozilla.org, and the second, yesterday. I'll be uninstalling the old one soon enough. You said somewhere that v1.4 is nearly ready and I'll be sure and grab that. Cheers, Jack Merridew 20:38, 1 February 2010 (UTC)

ISO date format
Aren't the dates in cites supposed to be numeric, such as 01-02-2010 for today? Cheers, Jack Merridew 07:21, 1 February 2010 (UTC)


 * Dates in citations are definitely not supposed to be ISO format any longer, per deprecation at WP:MOSNUM several months ago, and slow deprecation in the templates themselves. The date format should match the rest of the article. There are still zillions of citations that need cleaning up, but this add-on won't make more broken ones. :-)


 * That's good to know; I've not been following such discussions. Cheers, Jack Merridew 20:38, 1 February 2010 (UTC)

Code formatting options
I like the vertical formatting, but start lines with the vertical rule, a space, then the arg. Cheers, Jack Merridew 07:21, 1 February 2010 (UTC)


 * The " |foo=" vs. "| foo=" issue is one of personal preference. I've gone with the most readable option, to me, and both seem to be common, as is "|foo=", " |foo =", "|foo =", "| foo =", " | foo =", and so on. The parser doesn't care.  Without creating a really complicated prefs panel, I can't account for all of these tastes (it actually gets worse - some people want horizontal layout, but also want very particular spacing before "|" or after it or both or neither and before "=" or after it or both or neither, sometimes with matching options for each of the two characters and sometimes not, and so on and so on).  I think it would be far more valuable to spend at least my developer time on more customized site filters that fill in correct source-specific values, but if someone wants to develop such a XUL preference window for the add-on, then please join the project. — SMcCandlish   Talk⇒ ʕ(Õلō)ˀ  Contribs. 19:46, 1 February 2010 (UTC)


 * Such a prefs panel would be messy work and we really don't want too many personal prefs pumped into the database. I also use spaces on either side of the '=' and will sometimes line the '=' up into columns for better readability. These are all habits that originating in coding real code. Here's an example of how I prefer cites to be formatted (scroll down a bit; there are a bunch). Cheers, Jack Merridew 20:38, 1 February 2010 (UTC)


 * Yeah, I know some people prefer that, but I don't (too much useless whitespace that doesn't really help readability enough to make it worth it) and I'm not willing to change the tool to use someone else's preferences, all other things being equal. If MOS ever comes up with code style guidelines, I'll have to tool do what those say. I have no objections to a prefs panel for this stuff, but won't build it myself, at least not any time soon. "Real code": Depends on the code. I absolutely positively hate it when people space [X]HTML code like this, but I also hate it when they don't do that with PHP and JS. Different standards (written and otherwise) apply to different languages, and differ depending upon your coding community and background too (there's even more than one school of thought on how to format C code, with some prefering variation from the K&R style).  I.e., it's a can of worms I don't really want to open. :-) — SMcCandlish   Talk⇒ ʕ(Õلō)ˀ  Contribs. 21:56, 1 February 2010 (UTC)

Reflinks tool conflict?
I like the vertical formatting, but start lines with the vertical rule, a space, then the arg. Also, Reflinks forces the 'Cite' template to lower case 'c' so the tools edit-war (as do many tool). Cheers, Jack Merridew 07:21, 1 February 2010 (UTC)


 * That tool seems to act on bare URLs pasted in as "references" and converts them to actual citations as best it can. The output of Cite4Wiki won't be what the tool acts on, so there doesn't seem to be a conflict. — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ʕ(Õلō)ˀ  Contribs. 19:54, 1 February 2010 (UTC)


 * Reflinks will apply common fixes and tweak all the other citation templates on a page to use the lower case 'c' so your upper case 'C' will end up coerced to lowercase if someone hits the page with Dispenser's tool. For what it's worth, I was using 'C' and stopped bothering once I noticed this. Cheers, Jack Merridew 20:38, 1 February 2010 (UTC)


 * Hmph. I've asked Dispenser to have it stop doing that. If he won't, I'm not going to care. ;-) — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ʕ(Õلō)ˀ  Contribs. 21:50, 1 February 2010 (UTC)


 * re all; this is a useful tool and I thank you for putting it out there. More here should be using such tools. The standards for referencing are going to go up over time and the unsourced BLPs are just the beginning. Cheers, Jack Merridew (who's a sockpuppet who goes by 'David' in real-life) 20:38, 1 February 2010 (UTC)

Hijacking of Cite4Wiki code
I'm a little shocked to see that you have basically hijacked the addon's code and the "cite4wiki" name I gave it. I did not so much as receive a single email at my attached email address about this. I do not use this account often, but I would have reacted to any email. I'm curious as you how you justify this sort of unethical behaviour and considering what my next step will be. Unit 5 15:56, 2 February 2010 (UTC)


 * I tried contacting you weeks ago, here, in e-mail at the e-mail address publicized in the source code for Cite for Wiki 1.0, and via addons.mozilla.org's forms for contacting the add-on author. I guess the one possible way of contacting you that I could have tried but didn't was WP's "e-mail this user" form, but by that point I'd given up or not thought to try that avenue.


 * The code has been GNU Lesser Public Licensed since Jehochman & Manuar's original version (aside from Mozilla Public Licensed code snippets in there, but there's very little license difference), which means anyone can do anything with it within the terms of the open licensing, including derivative versions as long as they perpetuate the same licensing terms (kind of like Wikipedia itself). I kept a similar name ("Cite4Wiki"; yours was "Cite for Wiki", though the shorter string appeared in a few places in the code) out of respect and a desire to credit you, basically.  If you'd prefer it were renamed, that's fine.  This has nothing to do with taking anything from you or shutting you out, but improving the tool. You were not reachable, so I moved on with it.  Sorry if this is somehow offensive to you.  You were a "wikimissing person", the code had not been updated in any public way since September 2009, and it was spitting out incorrect Wikicode that people were actually using. No offense intended, but I don't think I've done anything wrong here much less "unethical" which is a very strong accusation, although I can understand your initial reaction. I'm not sure what to do to make you happier. My earlier messages to you, via three different means, were attempts to get in contact so that our efforts could be combined, and my goal the entire time has been to find you and work with you on this. Heretofore, however, I haven't even been able to add you to my version of the code's addons.mozilla.org project because the only addresses you've publicized that I can find do not correspond to whatever address you exist as on that site as a developer I can add.  I've been stuck for weeks trying to get through to you (and, yeah, at this point, I wish I'd thought to use the one option I didn't try). — SMcCandlish   Talk⇒ ʕ(Õلō)ˀ  Contribs. 16:53, 2 February 2010 (UTC)


 * I monitor the emails you claim to have written to, and no, you did not send any email to me over this issue. In high-handed fashion, you decided you wanted to change the addon, and to hell with me, basically.
 * To claim I was "not reachable" is a self-serving lie. I repeat, you DID NOT send messages to those email addresses. Nor did you contact Ratel.
 * I am extremely busy at the moment, so I cannot pursue this malfeasance further. At the same time, I want what's best for the project. If you can indeed improve the addon, more power to you. All I ask is A) acknowledgement for involvement and B) that the output remains a one line wrapped citation (the original reason I got involved bec I cannot stand the multi-line citation format, or if you want carriage returns, give a preferences option to allow either. This section is replicated at Wikipedia Talk:Cite4Wiki and I prefer the conversation proceeds there, if at all. Unit 5 01:22, 4 February 2010 (UTC)
 * I'll take this all in order:


 * Well, if you're just going to call me a liar, maybe there's no point trying to continue to communicate. I sent you messages via all of the available means that I thought of (the one that I didn't was your "E-mail this user" link here at WP, because odds were that it would go to the e-mail address I'd already tried, as detailed below). My message to w**.ma*****n@gmail.com, the address you published in relationship to the tool itself, was sent Jan. 18, "Subject: Cite for Wiki is using the wrong parameter!", ; I still have it in my Gmail. The message I left on your talk page here is still there. The post I left at your tool's page at addons.moz is still there  has been overwritten by a later note I left there, apparently (I just looked). 02:19, 4 February 2010 (UTC) . So, what's the "lie" again? Unless I'm now evilly forging Gmails, I obviously did contact you.


 * I cannot find any information about Ratel; the only information present was mention of the string "Ratel" in the source code. I have no idea what e-mail address, human name, or Wikipedia ID that might correspond to. I would like to know, so I can credit this person properly.


 * More constructively:


 * A) You're ack'ed all over the place: in the source code, in the "About" and "Options" text, and on the WP:Cite4Wiki page, and in the release notes on the page at addons.moz, and so on. I'm at a loss for anywhere else you could be credited, other than in an annoying pop-up alertbox or something. Heh.


 * B) The version you released used multi-line citations: screenshot. Regardless, the version I've worked up since then will do either one you want (rather, there'll be a version to do either; I haven't worked out the preferences panel code yet to have one add-on offer both options). So, you should be happy either way.


 * The fact that you're obviously really busy is why I proceeded in taking this tool further without you. I did try to contact you. I'm sorry that I didn't do it in the one way out of every way available that would actually work. Water under the bridge now. And you did release this code "to the wild" in August (not September; I was thinking you'd been more active than you have been); that's almost 6 months, which is half way to forever in Internet Time. This wasn't some non-GLPL's commercial software I ripped off for my own gain. It was GLPL'd (and partially MPL'd) free software in turn based on someone else's GLPL/MPL'd work (and some of that is based even on older work, at Mozilla's own developer site and a site in the Netherlands), released to the world in source form as a tool anyone could use and modify, for free, and I did so, for no reason other than to improve it and make other editors' citation needs a little easier to fulfill. I'm going to take your "more power to you" at face value. The two conditions you've listed will certainly be satisfied.


 * PS: I sent you an e-mail directly, the other day, to your "E-mail this user" address from here; haven't seen a reply yet. I'll repeat the gist: If you give me the e-mail address you registered with at addons.moz, I can add you to the project there. We could surely combine them into one code base now that we're in touch, if our dispute is resolvable.


 * PPS: I will not respond at the other talk page, since your calling me a liar to my face in public constitutes a direct personal attack. I'd be justified in even deleting it here, as a matter of policy, but I'd rather just respond to it (here, since it's about your issues with me, not with the tool and its functionality) and hopefully move past our misunderstanding. — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(Õلō)ˀ Contribs. 02:05, 4 February 2010 (UTC)


 * Proof of contact, Jan. 18, 2010. I'm sorry that you were too busy to notice, your filters caught my message and disposed of it, or you don't use that address any more despite publishing it with the source code, but none of those possibilities are my responsibility. — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(Õلō)ˀ Contribs. 16:21, 4 February 2010 (UTC)


 * The only email I received from you went as follows: "Your add-on is not only doing something wrong it's leading to god knows how many Wikipedia editors messing up live articles by creating incorrect citations in them that other editors like me will end up having to fix. The problem is that your tool is putting the domain name of the website in the |publisher= parameter, but this is NOT what that field is for. The field you want is |work= (i.e. the publication). The |publisher= parameter is for the REAL-WORLD PUBLISHING ENTITY, such as a publication company or, in the case of self-publishing, the site owner (i.e. what is likely to turn up in whois). Please fix this ASAP. This error is really glaring. Conceptually, it is exactly the same thing as mistaking the record label (publisher) for the name of the album (work) on which the song (title) appears."


 * Only a complete ass would think that constitutes an effort to collaborate or a request to work on the code. Unit 5 08:49, 5 February 2010 (UTC)


 * You didn't respond to that e-mail (it was a bug report, not a collaboration request; one of the latter is here), since as you said, you were busy. I fixed the reported problem, since as I said it seemed you were too busy to respond and do anything about it. This was after I'd already reported this problem via addons.mozilla.org (as I also already mentioned). Again, I'm sorry that you did not receive other attempts to contact you. And again, ensuring that you read your own messages on WP, addons.mozilla.org and other sites you supposedly participate in isn't my responsibility. As already noted before, you've expressed above two conditions that will satisfy you; I've already agreed to them. And to repeat one more thing, I don't need anyone's permission to fork and independently develop code released under GLPL and MPL (the entire point of those and other free content licenses is that no one needs any such permission!). That's an awful lot of repetition and nothing new. You do not appear to be satisfiable that the work is good, that our personal dispute is resolvable and that collaboration would be good, so I'm going to stop trying. I now consider this matter closed. You already are and will continue to be credited in every way practical (and Ratel will be credited in more detail if you or Ratel make that possible), and the variant of the add-on code I next release will include a horizontal layout option. — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(Õلō)ˀ Contribs. 15:42, 5 February 2010 (UTC)

I'm not going to discuss this in two different places. You insist on the more public forum, you got it. I'd like you to notice that even the original author, Jehochman, is telling you in that forum that the software was free, open source for anyone to redevelop as they see fit. You've been credited and thus the license conditions are satisfied. Good bye. — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ʕ(Õلō)ˀ  Contribs. 23:58, 5 February 2010 (UTC)

Cite4Wiki 1.4a author error
I've installed v1.4a and there are a few nits. I'm getting things like this: I'll try it more tomorrow and offer better feedback then.
 *  |last= 

Cheers, Jack Merridew 03:27, 4 February 2010 (UTC)


 * That's intentional. It won't let you accidentally put in a citation without any author. You'll at least need to remove the error and replace it with &lt--none specified--&gt; or something if there's no author listed. This will discourage half-citations from being posted to real articles, and the red error will encourage other editors to fix the problem immediately if the posting editor doesn't notice or care.  The release version will use an actual template that explains this. :-) — SMcCandlish   Talk⇒ ʕ(Õلō)ˀ  Contribs. 15:35, 4 February 2010 (UTC)


 * I think I get it. I'll try it for awhile and see how it goes. A lot of websites don't give any author. A good argument to make would be that a link with no named author may not be particularly reliable; exceptions, of course. Cheers, Jack Merridew 17:03, 4 February 2010 (UTC)
 * I strongly agree. Basically, this template's going to force the user to either find out who the author is, or specifically declare that they can't. >;-) — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ʕ(Õلō)ˀ  Contribs. 17:43, 4 February 2010 (UTC)

DEFAULTSORT vs. listas
Hi!

Your recent edit to Talk:Edgar Valdez Villarreal replaced the listas in WPBiography with a DEFAULTSORT outside the shell. DEFAULTSORT is not to be used on a talk page and early last year a lot of discussion and work went into the project banners so that listas in WPBiography would cause the talk page to be sorted properly in the categories that are populated by all the project banners.

If you have edited other talk pages in the same manner I ask that you go back and correct them. Category:Biography articles without listas parameter is too large now and inexperienced editors are adding to it faster that I can make corrections.

Thank you, JimCubb (talk) 05:48, 3 February 2010 (UTC)


 * Discussion where? The code in listas calls DEFAULTSORT to begin with, unless something changed when I wasn't looking. — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ʕ(Õلō)ˀ  Contribs. 06:50, 3 February 2010 (UTC)


 * Template:WPBiography is the documentation. The discussion was on the template's talk page as I recall and was during December 2008 and January 2009 and is in the archives.  JimCubb (talk) 22:25, 3 February 2010 (UTC)


 * Okay. I do, however, know that less than a week ago I ran into someone reporting problems with this method. It seems completely boneheaded to me to to use a template parameter to do this instead of using , and using a bot to categorize based on that.  Categorizing based on the presence of the template parameter is a more brittle method that, for examples, fails to account for the fact that many, many bio talk pages have long used DEFAULTSORT, since before listas even existed, and the more important fact that users will keep adding DEFAULTSORT to talk pages, because the feature exists and it works, and not everyone even knows the template parameter exists. I'm not going to allow myself to really care either way. If you and other WP Biography folks want it done in listas, then so be it. You'd do well to update all of the relevant documentation (including both your links above) to make more sense of this, however.  For one thing, it's entirely unclear by anything but doing tests on pages in real categories that putting a listas on  will also sort to the same sort key for other projects' categories and even categories added manually, like Category:Place of birth missing or whatever. Not knowing that alone is enough to inspire some editors to add a DEFAULTSORT just to be sure. — SMcCandlish   Talk⇒ ʕ(Õلō)ˀ  Contribs. 01:22, 4 February 2010 (UTC)

Most of the biography articles need to have a sort value that is not the page name. (Bands comprise the largest exception to this.) I have been told that there is no way to categorize pages that lack a sort value that is not the page name. The presence or absence of DEFAULTSORT cannot be categorized. The presence or absence of listas can be categorized.

The listas in WPBiography only affects other project banners. It does not affect category tags. The decision to put Category:Place of birth missing on the talk page instead of treating "missing" as a valid but unacceptable value for "Place of birth" was made in April, 2007, by fewer than 10 editors and the majority of them were not part of the Biography project at the time. I don't consider the decisions to move such categories to the talk pages the best examples of mucking things up for the wrong reasons because there have been better examples in the last six months but for their time they were really dumb. The category tags on the talk pages require pipes to be sorted properly.

While I have seen talk pages where DEFAULTSORT has been added for no apparent reason, yours is the only addition I have seen that occurred during the last six months and the only one that also deleted the listas. Most editors seem to have no idea of what a sort value is or why it is necessary.

Thank you for your understanding and cooperation.

JimCubb (talk) 06:51, 4 February 2010 (UTC)


 * I'd rather have all the cleanup categories be on the article page myself, but the precedent is long since ingrained (I've seen it cited many times at CfD, and new cleanup categories are routinely now put on the talk page.)


 * Given that we're stuck with them,  is clearly a better option in the long run. It can be categorized by, via a pretty simple bot.  Another option would be to modify the  template (not magicword) to do the categorization, and use that. Again, I'll be happy  not overwhelmingly unhappy to let WP Bio do it your way, with listas, but I still think it's not the best way to do it, since it still requires use of   anyway when cleanup categories are present. A solution that isn't really a solution is, well, not a solution. — SMcCandlish   Talk⇒ ʕ(Õلō)ˀ  Contribs. 15:29, 4 February 2010 (UTC)
 * Update: It turns out this isn't true. If listas is used in WP Biography tag, it will cause manually-added categories to sort that way as well. Just tested this at Talk:Yank Adams by adding listas, removing defaultsort and adding a bogus category, then purging the page. He sorted under "A" for Adams in the bogus category. — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ʕ(Õلō)ˀ  Contribs. 01:20, 5 February 2010 (UTC)
 * The Bio template invokes DEFAULTSORT. This is one of several cases where a template does it, they all create problems, but in this case the problems seem minimal. The benefit is that it is possible to have a category of bio-talk pages which do not have a value set - Category:Biography articles without listas parameter, which would otherwise require frequent bot intervention.  The dis-benefit was collision with other banners (now I think resolved) and explicit DEFAULTSORTS, which seems rare. Rich Farmbrough, 21:04, 25 April 2010 (UTC).

Kind of a process question
This is a new one:


 * Articles for deletion/Rebecca Chambers (Character)

No one's nominated Rebecca Chambers (Character) for deletion, so this must be some sort of preemptive !vote. I'm thinking there must be some CSD that would cover this; right? An MfD would be silly ;)


 * You'll have to dig if you're interested; it went via WP:CSD. Cheers, Jack Merridew 06:11, 4 February 2010 (UTC)


 * I'm seeing a redlink up there. Anyway, my guess would be that someone put it up at AfD, and forgot to tag the article with an AfD tag, and then someone else did a on the half-baked AfD page, and away it went. — SMcCandlish   Talk⇒ ʕ(Õلō)ˀ  Contribs. 15:35, 4 February 2010 (UTC)


 * I assumed you could read the deleted page ;) It was a preemptive 'keep' by the author of the page. No one nominated it for deletion. I'm expecting him to be blocked today for other issues. Cheers, Jack Merridew 16:59, 4 February 2010 (UTC)
 * Ah, okay. — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ʕ(Õلō)ˀ  Contribs. 15:27, 5 February 2010 (UTC)

Talkback (Febuary 2009)
Armbrust Talk  Contribs  18:34, 5 February 2010 (UTC)

Templates Reference necessary & Citation needed
Hi Stanton. You know, given your edit summary with this edit, that “This template should fail gracefully,” I am beginning to suspect that you hived off the CSS debate from the merger debate because you knew that the WT:MOS crowd would hate the way the wrapper creates its subtle underlining, concerned mainly with esthetics as they are. Why not try the same CSS proposal at WT:V since both templates relate to verifiability, the core principle at Wikipedia? They are not style templates, they are verifiablity and citation templates. —  Spike Toronto  08:13, 7 February 2010 (UTC)

P.S. I am, of course, assuming good faith, notwithstanding appearances to the contrary. —  Spike Toronto  08:13, 7 February 2010 (UTC)


 * If you want to raise the discussion there, too, be my guest. I brought it up at MOS because the appearance of things is very much a style issue. This doesn't actually have a thing to do with verifiability - the tag flagging the material in any way as unverified is the verifiability concern. What it looks like when it does so is 100% a style matter. You've clearly misunderstood my edit summary. To "fail gracefully" in coding terms mean that when an error condition occurs ("failure"), the code in question does something user-friendly ("graceful") rather than dying messily.  The code change I implemented with that edit ensured that this happened. If it is used without surrounding any content, it is applied exactly like cn, a graceful result, instead of spitting out " " error gibberish, a messy result. The edit also erased any further distinction, really, between the two templates, since the one now subsumes the behavior of the other. Also, it's completely hypocritical to come to my talk page and accuse me of something and then hide behind WP:AGF by attempting to pretend you aren't really accusing me of something. Own your own words and take responsibility for them, or the safest thing to do is to remain silent. More substantively, MOS is not at all mostly concerned with aesthetics (which is actually rarely an issue there because it's subjective, and when it does come up, it's most often an issue raised by anti-MOS editors, e.g. opponents of logical quotation), but rather usability in a broad sense. Use of visual cues to explicitly draw reader attention to a meta-issue is firmly within that purview. MOS doesn't have anything to do with "style templates" (I can't find any such category on the system). In closing, I'm not hiding anything. I've made it very clear that I think a) the underlining is a bad idea; b) the wrapper function of the template is fantastic; c) it's boneheaded not to merge the two templates in question; d) style issues should not hold up the merger and can be settled elsewhere another time. If you find some kind of fault with that, I'm not sure what to tell you other than that WP is a big place and I'm sure you can find some way to avoid me if my presence is a big irritation to you. — SMcCandlish   Talk⇒ ʕ(Õلō)ˀ  Contribs. 20:15, 7 February 2010 (UTC)

Sorry it has taken me over a month to respond. Thank you for clarifying the “fail gracefully” edit summary confusion. The lesson to be taken from that is that not everyone is as techinically proficient at coding as you are and perhaps less argot should be used in such edit summaries. But for that edit summary, I might not have interpreted the hiving off of the underlining debate to MOS as I did. I still think that since this template is one that relates to the verifiablity of statements in articles, Talk:Verifiability is where that aspect of the debate should be taking place. Further, I think that this highlights a problem that I used to observe at work where the programmers often failed to understand how end-users use the systems that the former code, hence the use of systems analysts and development staff to interface between the programmers (i.e., coders) and us end users. In this particular case, a wrapper that wraps invisibly, that does not reveal what is wrapped until one presses the edit button, is next to worthless. I think we should not have our approach to editing driven by the technical side, but rather it should be driven by (1) the need of wikieditors to know at a glance what statements are deficient as to verifiability, and (2) the need of wikireaders to know at a glance when they are reading questionable statements in wikiarticles. Finally, the fact that this template is used fairly often speaks to its value as a visible wrapper. As for my comment re: AGF, I was not trying to distance myself from anything that I had said. I was essentially saying, “If I have misunderstood your actions …” And that, as you have made me very well aware, is what I ought to have said. I try to be clear, say what I mean, and mean what I say, but I do not always succeed, as this instance proves. As for your presence being a “big irritation”, that is not the case. I think that someone as proficient at coding and repairing templates as are you is an invaluable asset to Wikipedia. You saw how my one coding attempt, with this very template, failed … and failed miserably. And, I only did that — attempting to get the template to add articles in which it is used to the relevant categories — because I had promised to try and fix it in the TfD debate. Obviously, I bit off more than I could chew! But, you came along and rescued it. So, how could I find someone who cleaned up my mess an irritant?! Thanks! —  Spike Toronto  18:21, 19 March 2010 (UTC)


 * Here's my $.02. I personally believe that [Reference necessary] and [Citation needed] should be merged, and the unique functionality of the former be incorporated into the latter. The underlining is not that big of a deal, in my opinion.  A similar template is used on fr.wiki and it.wiki; the Italian template may be a little unsightly, but the French version uses solid underlining and even takes the whole idea a step further. .  I guess it just takes a little getting used to. I'm [dʒæˑkɫɜmbɚ]  and I approve this message. 00:44, 9 February 2010 (UTC)
 * This Wikipedia doesn't care, really, what other Wikipedias are doing. They all have their own e-cultures. The French WP is quite happy to browbeat readers, and the English one is not. — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ʕ(Õلō)ˀ  Contribs. 01:08, 9 February 2010 (UTC)

This shouldn't be discussed any further here, but at the merge discussion at Template talk:Citation needed; this page is for issues/collaboration with me as an editor, not for template merge discussions. — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ʕ(Õلō)ˀ  Contribs. 01:08, 9 February 2010 (UTC)

Whisperback
Armbrust Talk  Contribs  23:39, 11 February 2010 (UTC)

Masako Katsura: I finally...
...started writing on a subject that there was lots of sources to draw from—oh, no multiple books with all the details that I just need to summarize; no previous precis of the person's life in other encyclopedia; no magazines giving me the a to z dope, like so many subjects that make it to a successful FA nomination have—but nevertheless, hundreds of newspaper articles to cull and hunt through searching for tidbits. Billiard subjects are so fucking tough to write about. I think this one will make it. I'm going to go the whole process route though; GAC → PR → FA.--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 09:18, 14 February 2010 (UTC)
 * Good deal! I remember her from Shamos I think, not entirely certain. I seem to recall that she was a massé whiz. — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ʕ(Õلō)ˀ  Contribs. 00:51, 18 February 2010 (UTC)

North Yorkshire
==Final discussion for Requests for comment/Biographies of living people ==

Hello, I note that you have commented on the first phase of Requests for comment/Biographies of living people

As this RFC closes, there are two proposals being considered:
 * 1) Proposal to Close This RfC
 * 2) Alternate proposal to close this RFC: we don't need a whole new layer of bureaucracy

Your opinion on this is welcome. Okip  02:03, 24 February 2010 (UTC)

Add-ons for Firefox move
I noticed you moved the article for Mozilla Add-ons to Add-ons for Firefox. The website's name was never changed; the latter is a description, not its name. The site employs user agent sniffing to redirect users to section for the corresponding application. I assume you made the move after visiting the page in Firefox. If you visit the page in SeaMonkey, you'll note it redirects you to the SeaMonkey add-ons section. -- C. A. Russell ( talk ) 03:59, 25 February 2010 (UTC)
 * My bad! — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ʕ(Õلō)ˀ  Contribs. 10:14, 25 February 2010 (UTC)

Citing your words
SMcCandlish -- As you know, I paid close attention to your critical comments at User talk:Tenmei#Decline. I favorably mirrored your point of view at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Clarification/Tang Dynasty#Response to Risker:
 * Reinventing the wheel . As FloNight explained in June 2009, "... if mentors see a new problem they can make it clear to him that they will tell us so that we can promptly handle it. This approach usually works best." As succinctly expressed by SMcCandlish here, " ...this is encyclopedia-bulding project, not an experiment in virtual governance ...."

Thank you for the time and thought you invested in drafting these helpful phrases. It would have taken many more words for me to try to say the same thing; and I doubt that the result would have been as effective. --Tenmei (talk) 22:28, 27 February 2010 (UTC)
 * Glad it worked out. — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ʕ(Õلō)ˀ  Contribs. 22:13, 17 March 2010 (UTC)

Just thought I'd let you know that I've replied to your comment on the Yorkshire Dialect talk page. I would welcome more details about North Yorkshire speech, but I don't know enough about it. So far, all there is the /u:/ noise in down, about, south, etc. What other features did you notice? Epa101 (talk) 13:23, 15 February 2010 (UTC)
 * I'm no expert. I figure Sean Bean for Yorkshire, but which Riding I'm not sure.  He sounds more English to me than the North Yorkshireman I know, who I first thought was Scottish.  I'm sure some linguist somewhere's mapped all this stuff out. — SMcCandlish   Talk⇒ ʕ(Õلō)ˀ  Contribs. 00:53, 18 February 2010 (UTC)
 * I've found a book on the topic here. This will be useful for improving the article.  You're right that people in the southern half of Yorkshire don't sound Scottish at all.  There are some pronunciations in North Yorkshire that are more Scots, especially in MOUTH words, but I don't think many Scots would see North Yorkshire speech as akin to theirs.  In addition to the two things I mentioned on the talk page, the vowel in "strut" becomes different from the one in "foot" in Scotland whereas the two words rhyme in the northern half of England.  Epa101 (talk) 16:43, 18 February 2010 (UTC)
 * Right. Reminds me of the handling of "u" sounds before sibilants in Northern Ireland, e.g. "use" having two different pronunciations in the sentence "She'll use it for its use". — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ʕ(Õلō)ˀ  Contribs. 06:22, 24 February 2010 (UTC)