User talk:Thehelpfulone/Archive/October 2008

Thank you
for the barnstar - appreciate it!! :D And you're most welcome - it was a pleasure working with you. ;) Ncmvocalist (talk) 17:17, 2 October 2008 (UTC)

Harry Potter themes
If the section of themes about HP is going to be expanded, I suggest to add links to Politics of Harry Potter and especially Religious debates over the Harry Potter series, which is FA. Lots of stuff can be "borrowed" from those topics. Love is also a recurring theme, but I noticed it is already explained. Congrats for your work, and greetings! -- LøЯd  ۞pεth  00:55, 4 October 2008 (UTC)


 * I'm sorry, but I'm too busy these days to offer any help on articles. Good luck with it, though! Scartol  •  Tok  20:45, 11 October 2008 (UTC)

Barnstar

 * Hey. I hope you're not pissed off at me.  Serendi pod ous  12:40, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

Chilean presidential election, 2005–2006
Your bot has just "corrected" the Spanish word oficial to the English word official. Please be more careful in the futute. Thanks. ☆ CieloEstrellado 05:25, 12 October 2008 (UTC)

State Route 74 (New York–Vermont)
Hi, over at this page you recently delinked a redlink Tawahus, New York. Actually that page is in the final stages of a featured article drive and the editors there had placed the redlink on purpose as a reminder to start an underlying article for it. Durova Charge! 22:14, 12 October 2008 (UTC)

Thanks
Thank you so much for helping to protect my user page from vandals while I was away; that Top Gun stuff was really getting annoying. I see from your contributions that fighting vandalism is a regular thing for you, so please consider this Barnstar a small token of appreciation from me for your efforts on my behalf, and for all your vandalism fighting. Vandal fighters don't get recognized nearly often enough, in my humble opinion. Nutiketaiel (talk) 12:39, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

Re Harry Potter copyedit
Thanks for your request. I'm pretty full at the moment, and will be for some time, but if you aren't in any hurry and want to give me a nudge in a few month's time, I may be able to help out then. Sorry I can't be more specific :( You could always try some of editors on this list too. All the best, EyeSerene talk 14:46, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

Edits
Pardon my frankness, but who are you to tell me that I was adding inappropriate links and intentionally adding false information to certain articles? I made revisions to the pages for WVNZ, WTOX, and WREJ because I work there and wanted to update those stations' official websites and ownership status. Everything I changed was correct. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 141.152.48.21 (talk) 20:40, 21 October 2008 (UTC)

Upcoming World Development contest
Penubag has been hard at work developing awards for this project. He has completed a very professional looking medal, and is almost done with a trophy that is truly awesome - both of these awards are visually stunning.

I and a few others have been working steadily on the country outlines that will be the focus of the contest - an outline for every country of the world! They're shaping up nicely. So far, 28 of them have been moved to article space - these aren't complete, but they are complete enough to be made available for readers to benefit from them. The rest of the set still includes temporary data that was generated by template (because it matched most but not all of the countries), and before those lists can be moved to article space, all the temporary data needs to be checked for accuracy, and if incorrect it needs to be replaced with correct information.

The effort on the lists has been on 3 fronts:
 * 1) Working on the lists in article space to complete them so they will be good examples for editors working on the rest of the set (during the contest).
 * 2) Adding or correcting other data (fixing redlinks, filling in blanks, etc.).  The main type of work participants in the contest will be doing.  The reason we're doing this is to get a feel for it, to develop the fastest methods for each type of task, etc.
 * 3) Improving the overall design and implenting changes on all 247 pages, whether in article space or not.

There has been some opposition to us running the contest based on edit counts or iterations. The concern is that we should reward quality work and not quantity, for fear of crappy edits done quickly without thought just to earn an award. I pointed out that the collection of pages are drafts in the Wikipedia namespace (therefore posing no danger to article space) and that most of the work needs to be done with power tools like AWB and Linky (which are specifically designed for repetitive volumnous work), but the reply was that we shouldn't set the precedent of rewarding barnstars for numerically-based tasks, and implied the threat of continuously MfD'ing the contest if we attempted to do so (like they did with the Awards Center - I was very surprised and disappointed that participants didn't step up to defend it). So we need to be careful in determining what exactly the awards will represent, and how they will be awarded.

Since rewarding iterations (passes with AWB on all of the pages in the set) are out, we really don't need the globe-in-stand (award we were working on) anymore. Two awards should suffice.

Once we get started with the contest, I'd like to kick the whole thing off with a round of medals for those dedicated few who have worked hard on the project so far.

What do you think of all of this?

Your comments and suggestions are most welcome.

The Transhumanist 00:52, 23 October 2008 (UTC)

videopaltform - Need Your Help
Attention,

I was recently placed on the subject to speedy deletion list. I was under the impression that if an article was written by a 3rd party and was referenced then it could be placed on the page. Also, if it was written in a non-biased point of view and was more informitive then it could be placed. We had at least three articles written about us from reliable sources in the media, like MNSun, Columbus Daily, and Leesburg Today.

I have read posts about companies way more promotional that what was posted.

Your advice as too the next steps will be a helpful tool as to move forward. I have since deleted our page and will wait for your advice.

Thank you,

David —Preceding unsigned comment added by Videoplatform (talk • contribs) 15:23, 23 October 2008 (UTC)

Country outlines AWB task: Fill in each country's economic rank (see below)
I really appreciate your offer to help. There's just no way I could do this project all by myself - it would take me years! It amazes me how helpful and cooperative Wikipedians are - that's one reason I love volunteering here. Thank you.

OK, let's get started...

For the AWB tasks on these pages, be sure to turn off all automatic fixes (wikification, etc.) There's some non-wikified stuff in these that we need to keep for now.

This task requires a bit of look-up and typing, but AWB is useful here as an auto-page-loader...

For the pages listed at User:The Transhumanist/Country list, please do the following:

To do this task, keep a window open with the following article in it: List of countries by GDP (nominal).

In another window, run AWB on the following list of pages: User:The Transhumanist/Country list

For each page, look up the country's economic rank in the 3rd column (CIA) at List of countries by GDP (nominal), and fill in the following entry on each page with it (which is located in the "Economy of" section of each page):


 * Economic rank:

For example, this entry for Algeria looks like this:


 * Economic rank: 50th (fiftieth)

All the rest need to be completed in the same way.

A trick you can use in AWB to let you spot and jump to the right location quickly on each page is search/replace "* Economic rank:" with "* Economic rank: ." (see the added period?) Before you save, type over the period with the rank data.

This should help speed things up. If you know any better methods, please let me know, as I'm always looking for the fastest ways to do things on Wikipedia.

Good luck, have fun, and if you have any further questions, please let me know.

By the way, I really love your name.

And remember, be sure to turn off all automatic fixes (wikification, etc.).

The Transhumanist 19:21, 23 October 2008 (UTC)

P.P.S.: The above task might be even faster using Linky (a Firefox add-on) instead. If you have Firefox and Linky, and want to try them out on this, let me know, and I'll be happy to explain how.

P.S.: When you are done with this assignment, there is a super easy follow-up task that I'll need you to do (a simple search/replace operation).

you've got a reply
on my talk page. The Transhumanist 20:13, 23 October 2008 (UTC)

Linky list
I've made a linky list for you at User:Thehelpfulone/Country list.

Highlight a piece of it at a time (no more than 99 links), by holding down the left mouse button and dragging your mouse down the page. Then right-click to get the drop down menu. Linky will be on there (assuming you have it installed).

click on Linky, and "Open selected links in tabs".

When you are down with a tab, press Ctrl-W, and it will instantly be deleted, and the next tab will be displayed on your screen.

I created the linky list by copying the contents of User:The Transhumanist/Country list into Word, and then using search/replace. WikEd works better, but I don't have access to it on this machine (no Firefox). :(

The Transhumanist 21:29, 23 October 2008 (UTC)

IRC, quick! I've got 30 seconds left!
I saw your "aaaaargh" just before my account time ran out. :) The Transhumanist  18:01, 24 October 2008 (UTC)

Follow-up task
This is an easy search/replace with AWB.

On all of the pages listed at User:The Transhumanist/Country list...

Replace:

with:

Have fun.

The Transhumanist 18:01, 24 October 2008 (UTC)


 * Nicely done. The Transhumanist  22:46, 24 October 2008 (UTC)

Next task!
I've refreshed User:Thehelpfulone/Country list with a new list to support your next task.

It's not a URL list because the "External links" section isn't the same number on each of the pages.

Anyhow, each link is to the correct section, though it won't open an edit window - you'll have to do that manually in each tab.

OK, so here's the task:

Most of the external link sections are empty, and need some links.

For each outline, copy the external links from the corresponding country article and paste them in after  (starting on the next line).

This will give us a base to start with which we can improve upon later.

Beware of subheadings in those sections. External links subheadings aren't supposed to show up in an article's TOC, and the heading codes need to be changed from this:

To this:

Which looks like this:


 * Example heading

(The same thing applies to see also sections).

Good luck, and as always...

Have fun!

The Transhumanist 22:46, 24 October 2008 (UTC)

P.S.: most if not all of the the country outlines that are in article space already have this external links task done. You can look those over as examples. The Transhumanist 22:46, 24 October 2008 (UTC)

Sorry, I wasn't very clear...
With respect to External links sections, if you come across any that are done incorrectly (with subheadings), please fix them. So if such a section is in error, correct at its original location first and then copy/paste it to the corresponding outline. That way, it's correct in both places. ;) The Transhumanist  00:09, 26 October 2008 (UTC)

Missing links

 * Macedonia - ✅ - it had links but the section was formatted poorly and started with a bunch of white space. It's fixed now, and copied.
 * Micronesia - ✅ the article on the region doesn't have any external links, but the article on the country does! The formatting has been fixed, and the links copied to the outline.

For Nicaragua and Uruguay, we need to build an external links list for each of those. When done, we can copy it to the end of those articles too.

You pick one, I'll take the other. (Then it's off to Google to find the best links. Articles on various aspects of the country (culture of, geography of, polictics of, etc.) might already have some links, so those are worth checking out also.  A couple of links on each major subtopic should do nicely.

Have fun. ;)

The Transhumanist 20:49, 26 October 2008 (UTC)


 * Uh, you didn't pick one! Eenie meenie miney moe - OK, I'll take Uruguay.  You get Nicaragua.  :)  The Transhumanist  22:18, 26 October 2008 (UTC)


 * Ooh, I found this template, which utilizes the codes at ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 to refer to a webpage for a particular country on the CIA World Factbook site for creating external links on country pages, like this:




 * The Transhumanist 22:36, 26 October 2008 (UTC)

You've still got Nicaragua
I only added a couple links. :) The Transhumanist  22:28, 27 October 2008 (UTC)

Another easy search/replace
Here's another AWB search/replace task for you:

On all the pages listed at User:The Transhumanist/Country list, please replace:

With:

And as always...

Have fun!

The Transhumanist 23:23, 26 October 2008 (UTC)

Hey!
When is the one and only helpful one going for RfA? Its about time my friend! I have been waiting for such a long time. What areas are you lacking? What is taking you so long? Dont you want to become one anymore? You do know there were only 7 admins promoted last month, the lowest for such a long time. If thats not a sign, i dont know what it. Thanks  Monster Under Your Bed  (talk) 08:30, 27 October 2008 (UTC)


 * Thanks for your response. I personally think you would make a great admin and your username shows that your here to help instead of some people thinking admins are harsh bad people or what have you, it would be nice to change that opinion. As for me, you know how real life is, i recently took a months break and will take another short break soon and then i will archive my page. Its not that large really, i mean if you want large take a look at this person's talk page (357,575 bytes)!!! And he has no intention of archiving until he gets 10,000 sections. Well, there you go...  Monster Under Your Bed  (talk) 09:40, 28 October 2008 (UTC)

Oops - follow-up task
We're not supposed to have cross-namespace links. My fault.

Please change:

To:

That's the relevant place where the template is displayed.

Sorry about the mix-up.

The Transhumanist 23:04, 27 October 2008 (UTC)

Another fun one
In one window, have this open: List of national capitals

For each of the pages listed at User:The Transhumanist/Country list, replace the pipe in


 * Capital of x: Capital of x

with the capital name. Note that this link appears twice in every outline!!! (Both need to be fixed).

For example:

should become:

We're doing it this way so that "Capital of x" remains the main link, cuz as a redirect, it will always lead to the correct page.

The Transhumanist 23:13, 27 October 2008 (UTC)

P.S.: In answer to your latest question... since you will be typing in the name of the country's capital on each page, Linky is better suited for this task. The Transhumanist 22:00, 28 October 2008 (UTC)

P.P.S.: I've updated User:Thehelpfulone/Country list for this task. Have fun. The Transhumanist 23:52, 28 October 2008 (UTC)

new comment
I've had a few messages relating to Cesc Fabregas - it's all news to me - i haven't altered anything on the page. You've got the wrong man! I agree, Cesc couldn't be classed as 'key' as he was only a bit part player.

Cheers

Sol —Preceding unsigned comment added by 90.194.135.188 (talk) 13:29, 28 October 2008 (UTC)

Find/replaces
Good point!

I'm sure there will be more.

We can let these accumulate for awhile, and then you can hit them all at once. I've created User:Thehelpfulone/Find-replace requests as a place to store them up.

By the way, do you know how to use regex? There will be some multi-line search strings and multi-line replace strings in upcoming tasks.

A new line is specified with "\n".

For more information, see WP:REGEX and AutoWikiBrowser/Regular expression.

The Transhumanist 21:32, 28 October 2008 (UTC)

Sorry
I am sorry, but I do not generally do copyedits (I just don't have time for it - this is listed at the top of my talk page). The last section at WP:PRV lists people willing to do copyedits, so I would ask there. Ruhrfisch &gt;&lt;&gt; &deg; &deg; 02:02, 29 October 2008 (UTC)


 * I also must apologize for having no time to help out at the moment. Good luck with it, tho! Scartol  •  Tok  01:20, 30 October 2008 (UTC)

Another country outline moved to article space!
Topic outline of Zimbabwe is now in article space. It still needs images and some bluelinking, and is undoubtedly missing some relevant links.

Please take a look at it. You will no doubt spot things you can easily fix that I overlooked.

The Transhumanist 19:50, 31 October 2008 (UTC)