User talk:Thehelpfulone/Archive/May 2012

The Signpost: 30 April 2012

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 * EdwardsBot (talk) 05:36, 1 May 2012 (UTC)

RevDelete request
Hey, if it's possible, can you RevDelete this, this, and that edits. Those edits go against WP:BLP. Much appreciated. --   Luke      (Talk)   21:52, 1 May 2012 (UTC)
 * No problem, I'll be sure to e-mail you next time. They mutilated that article. Thanks. --   Luke      (Talk)   22:08, 1 May 2012 (UTC)

Lucas Cruikshank
Was there a problem with my revision? 117Avenue (talk) 22:18, 1 May 2012 (UTC)
 * Ah, my apologies - I was mass rev deleting and thought that your revision would contain some of the stuff that was rev deleted - nope, there was nothing wrong with it, I've restored the edit. Thanks for letting me know! The  Helpful  One  22:20, 1 May 2012 (UTC)

Your free 1-year HighBeam Research account is ready
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New Pages update
Hey :). A quick update on how things are going with the New Page Triage/New Pages Feed project. As the enwiki page notes, the project is divided into two chunks: the "list view" (essentially an updated version of Special:NewPages) and the "article view", a view you'll be presented with when you open up individual articles that contains a toolbar with lots of options to interact with the page - patrolling it, adding maintenance tags, nominating it for deletion, so on.

On the list view front, we're pretty much done! We tried deploying it to enwiki, in line with our Engagement Strategy on Wednesday, but ran into bugs and had to reschedule - the same happened on Thursday :(. We've queued a new deployment for Monday PST, and hopefully that one will go better. If it does, the software will be ready to play around with and test by the following week! :).

On the article view front, the developers are doing some fantastic work designing the toolbar, which we're calling the "curation bar"; you can see a mockup here. A stripped-down version of this should be ready to deploy fairly soon after the list view is; I'm afraid I don't have precise dates yet. When I have more info, or can unleash everyone to test the list view, I'll let you know :). As always, any questions to the talkpage for the project or mine. Thanks! Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 23:32, 5 May 2012 (UTC)

The Signpost: 07 May 2012

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 * EdwardsBot (talk) 01:48, 8 May 2012 (UTC)

Bugzilla 36662 follow-up
Hi, re : no, I didn't get the orange banner "You have new messages (last change)." I have carried out some further tests: I suspect that it's something to do with user settings or rights, but I don't see anything in "My preferences" that might control the banner. I was wondering about CSS classes: the full HTML for the banner received by Redrose64a is: I've added some line breaks after certain spaces, so that it doesn't flow off the right margin. -- Red rose64 (talk) 19:46, 9 May 2012 (UTC)
 * To eliminate a recent upgrade to Firefox 12 as a possibility, I started up other browsers (IE 7 and Safari 5.1), and then logged in on those with the same result: no "You have new messages" banner.
 * To see if it's something to do with my PC in general, or with my IP address, I created account (per WP:SOCK) and then used each account to send a message to the other. Redrose64a immediately got the "You have new messages" banner; Redrose64 did not.
 * Testing 1,2,3. The  Helpful  Bot  19:52, 9 May 2012 (UTC)
 * I've got a new theory. Although I am still not getting the banner in question, I've noticed several people posting the same message to my talk page multiple times (examples: ; ; ). Some of them have cleaned up after themselves, or after others. These multiple posts suggest to me that they've had an error like this:

Wikimedia Foundation Error

Our servers are currently experiencing a technical problem. This is probably temporary and should be fixed soon. Please try again in a few minutes.

You may be able to get further information in the #wikipedia channel on the Freenode IRC network.

The Wikimedia Foundation is a non-profit organisation which hosts some of the most popular sites on the Internet, including Wikipedia. It has a constant need to purchase new hardware. If you would like to help, please donate. If you report this error to the Wikimedia System Administrators, please include the details below. Request: POST http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Redrose64&action=submit, from 91.198.174.44 via sq60.wikimedia.org (squid/2.7.STABLE9) to 10.2.1.1 (10.2.1.1) Error: ERR_ZERO_SIZE_OBJECT, errno [No Error] at Wed, 09 May 2012 19:27:28 GMT
 * and have then gone for the "try again" link, without first checking to see if the edit really went through or not. As you may notice, the above coincides with, which actually went through first time, I did not need to hit "try again".
 * I believe that the "you have new messages" banner is displayed if the user account has a certain flag set. I suspect that amending a user's talk page therefore requires two SQL updates: one to amend the page text, and the second to update the flag. My new theory is this: the second of these SQL updates is failing, hence the error is thrown even though the first succeeded. -- Red rose64 (talk) 19:39, 10 May 2012 (UTC)
 * Just removed one of the duplicate messages, and replied to the one above it: I got the error message, which finished:

Request: POST http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Redrose64&action=submit, from 91.198.174.44 via sq60.wikimedia.org (squid/2.7.STABLE9) to 10.2.1.1 (10.2.1.1) Error: ERR_ZERO_SIZE_OBJECT, errno [No Error] at Thu, 10 May 2012 19:55:38 GMT
 * -- Red rose64 (talk) 20:11, 10 May 2012 (UTC)

OK, it just worked. triggered the banner. One factor could be the size of my talk page: yesterday I deleted 19 threads, and that was the first message to me since. I must delete some more... -- Red rose64 (talk) 21:19, 12 May 2012 (UTC)

New Page Triage prototype released
Hey Thehelpfulone! We've finally finished the NPT prototype and deployed it on enwiki. We'll be holding an office hours session on the 16th at 21:00 in #wikimedia-office to show it off, get feedback and plot future developments - hope to see you there! Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 03:41, 13 May 2012 (UTC)

The Signpost: 14 May 2012

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 * EdwardsBot (talk) 23:57, 14 May 2012 (UTC)

The Signpost: 21 May 2012

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 * EdwardsBot (talk) 04:05, 22 May 2012 (UTC)

New Page Triage/New Pages Feed
Hey all :). A notification that the prototype for the New Pages Feed is now live on enwiki! We had to briefly take it down after an unfortunate bug started showing up, but it's now live and we will continue developing it on-site.

The page can be found at Special:NewPagesFeed. Please, please, please test it and tell us what you think! Note that as a prototype it will inevitably have bugs - if you find one not already mentioned at the talkpage, bring it up and I'm happy to carry it through to the devs. The same is true of any additions you can think of to the software, or any questions you might have - let me know and I'll respond.

Thanks! Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 13:25, 22 May 2012 (UTC)

Template:episode list
Hi,

Why did you make this change while there was ongoing discussion? Chris Cunningham (user:thumperward) (talk) 16:58, 22 May 2012 (UTC)
 * Replied at Template_talk:Episode_list. The  Helpful  One  17:13, 22 May 2012 (UTC)

Astral Projection (band)
Thanks for restoring this article to mainspace. It was my first attempt as a new admin at helping someone by userfying a prodded article after they demonstrated the existence of sources showing notability, and I botched it up a bit. The original article was at Astral Projection (group), I got it wrong when creating the version in userspace and writing the edit summary there, and I should probably have used undelete rather than cut and paste, which would have avoided that problem. Could you please merge in the history from that original location? I am not sure which disambiguator is standard for popular music ensembles. My apologies; I was trying to do a good deed but I didn't do it very well :-( Yngvadottir (talk) 18:26, 22 May 2012 (UTC)

Navbox
Hi, I was wondering about the Navbox if I could have one on ones user page and talk page? The alternate one looked good. Thanks Chip123456 (talk) 16:50, 21 May 2012 (UTC)


 * Hi, how would I get contributions on the Navbox?--Chip123456 (talk) 18:15, 23 May 2012 (UTC)

Wise to have bot so easy to shut off?
Hi,

I don't want to get too BEANSy here, but is it wise to have your bot so easy for any tom dick or harry to disable? I assume you ain't awake 24/7 to restart it  Egg   Centri  c  20:52, 22 May 2012 (UTC)

Deletion request
Please delete the redirect page Why do we have outlines in addition to...? to make way for a page move.

Thank you. The Transhumanist 22:26, 22 May 2012 (UTC)

Channel name
Hi. I haven't been on IRC in a while. Is this change kosher? Several coups have been attempted in the past is the reason why I'm asking. Killiondude (talk) 22:17, 21 May 2012 (UTC)
 * Hey! Sorry for the delayed response, I've been slightly busy and just catching up with talk page messages. So yes, this change is okay as that's the channel that helpers (not helpees) go to for live updates of the category, and it doesn't have traffic from people needing help in #wikipedia-en-help, so it's probably a better idea to change it to that channel (which is also under the #wikipedia-en-help Contacts' control). The  Helpful  One  00:19, 26 May 2012 (UTC)

Thank you
Thanks for the assist on the page move.

In answer to your question, yes, I am going as strong as ever on outlines, and so is the outline department. At the beginning of the year, there were about 540 outlines. Today there are 599. I'm learning Perl, and will be able to write bots soon. I'm currently writing scripts to process outlines offline.

I created a notice section a few months ago on The Community Bulletin Board about outlines. All new outlines and whatever outlines are currently being worked on are posted on there.

In answer to your offer, yes, there are many tasks that need bot assistance. I just did about 1000 edits on outlines with AWB a couple days ago. A bot sure would have been nice. There are at least 10,000 or so routine edits left to clean up the country outlines.

Some of them are tricky, so I need to pick and choose the tasks carefully. I'll send you some bot task requests soon.

Nice to see you again. I'm glad you are still with Wikipedia!

Sincerely, The Transhumanist 13:04, 26 May 2012 (UTC)

The Signpost: 28 May 2012

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 * EdwardsBot (talk) 09:28, 30 May 2012 (UTC)

You've got mail
Pine✉ 08:20, 31 May 2012 (UTC)