User talk:Vanished user 7b1215e7ef746ac20682e3dbe03f5b84/Archive Mar-JAN 2015

VisualEditor newsletter on 16 October 2013
VisualEditor is still being updated every Thursday. As usual, what is now running on the English Wikipedia had a test run at Mediawiki during the previous week. If you haven't done so already, you can turn on VisualEditor by going to your preferences and choosing the item, " ".

The reference dialog for all Wikipedias, especially the way it handles citation templates, is being redesigned. Please offer suggestions and opinions at mw:VisualEditor/Design/Reference Dialog. (Use your Wikipedia username/password to login there.) You can also drag and drop references (select the reference, then hover over the selected item until your cursor turns into the drag-and-drop tool). This also works for some templates, images, and other page elements (but not yet for text or floated items). References are now editable when they appear inside a media item's caption (bug 50459).

There were a number of miscellaneous fixes made: Firstly, there was a bug that meant that it was impossible to move the cursor using the keyboard away from a selected node (like a reference or template) once it had been selected (bug 54443). Several improvements have been made to scrollable windows, panels, and menus when they don't fit on the screen or when the selected item moves off-screen. Editing in the "slug" at the start of a page no longer shows up a chess pawn character ("♙") in some circumstances (bug 54791). Another bug meant that links with a final punctuation character in them broke extending them in some circumstances (bug 54332). The "page settings" dialog once again allows you to remove categories (bug 54727). There have been some problems with deployment scripts, including one that resulted in VisualEditor being broken for an hour or two at all Wikipedias (bug 54935). Finally, snowmen characters ("☃") no longer appear near newly added references, templates and other nodes (bug 54712).

Looking ahead: Development work right now is on rich copy-and-paste abilities, quicker addition of citation templates in references, setting media items' options (such as being able to put images on the left), switching into wikitext mode, and simplifying the toolbar. A significant amount of work is being done on other languages during this month. If you speak a language other than English, you can help with translating the documentation.

For other questions or suggestions, or if you encounter problems, please let everyone know by posting problem reports at VisualEditor/Feedback and other ideas at Wikipedia talk:VisualEditor. Thank you! Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:48, 16 October 2013 (UTC)

The Signpost: 16 October 2013

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 * EdwardsBot (talk) 01:06, 19 October 2013 (UTC)

File permission problem with File:Beckley Feed.jpg
Thanks for uploading File:Beckley Feed.jpg. I noticed that while you provided a valid copyright licensing tag, there is no proof that the creator of the file has agreed to release it under the given license.

If you are the copyright holder for this media entirely yourself but have previously published it elsewhere (especially online), please either
 * make a note permitting reuse under the CC-BY-SA or another acceptable free license (see this list) at the site of the original publication; or
 * Send an email from an address associated with the original publication to permissions-en@wikimedia.org, stating your ownership of the material and your intention to publish it under a free license. You can find a sample permission letter here. If you take this step, add OTRS pending to the file description page to prevent premature deletion.

If you did not create it entirely yourself, please ask the person who created the file to take one of the two steps listed above, or if the owner of the file has already given their permission to you via email, please forward that email to permissions-en@wikimedia.org.

If you believe the media meets the criteria at Non-free content, use a tag such as non-free fair use or one of the other tags listed at File copyright tags, and add a rationale justifying the file's use on the article or articles where it is included. See File copyright tags for the full list of copyright tags that you can use.

If you have uploaded other files, consider checking that you have provided evidence that their copyright owners have agreed to license their works under the tags you supplied, too. You can find a list of files you have created in [ your upload log]. Files lacking evidence of permission may be deleted one week after they have been tagged, as described on criteria for speedy deletion. You may wish to read the Wikipedia's image use policy. If you have any questions please ask them at the Media copyright questions page. Thank you. Stefan2 (talk) 17:33, 21 October 2013 (UTC)
 * No problem- I have text of the email and I will send that to permissions-en@wikimedia.orgCoal town guy (talk) 18:00, 21 October 2013 (UTC)
 * I have added the tag to the file page AFTER sending Wikipedia folks the mail contaiing permission to use this fileCoal town guy (talk) 18:09, 21 October 2013 (UTC)

Fractional currency FLC
Hi Coal town guy- A Fractional Currency list is currently under review at FLC. If you are interested in reviewing/commenting your input would be appreciated. Thanks-Godot13 (talk) 17:04, 24 October 2013 (UTC)

The Signpost: 23 October 2013

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NO, its George Mason
There appears some confusion about the citations for Mason county's namesake. Virgil A. Lewis' works are the source for Mason county's namesake. Lewis' History of West Virginia in Two Parts, p. 616 1887, is the source for most if not all cites for George Mason as Mason county's namesake. Lewis' subsequent publication History and Government of West Virginia, p.266 1896, supersedes his previous work with S. T. Mason as Mason county's namesake and was cited in numerous publications.

Here is my summary of the namesake situation: Most historical accounts up to about 1920 indicate Mason County was named for Stevens Thomson Mason. Simple political logic would reinforce that notion, since the Va. Gen. Assy. elected Sen. Stevens Thomson Mason’s successor (12-7-1803) in the same legislative session about three weeks before passing legislation creating Mason County (1-2-1804) and the Va. Gen. Assy. had named Mason County, Kentucky (Va.) for Geo. Mason in 1788. Geo. Mason died in 1792.

The namesake confusion seems to begin about 1896 when Virgil A. Lewis’ school textbook, History and Government of West Virginia, was published; stating Mason County was named for Stevens Thomson Mason. This work contradicted his 1889 History of West Virginia in Two Parts, where Lewis wrote Mason County was named for George Mason. Other history texts after 1896 used Lewis’ wording from either his 1889 book or his 1896 book. Virgil A. Lewis was a Mason County resident and West Virginia’s first Historian/Archivist from 1905 to 1912. In 1906, former member of the U. S. House of Representative from Mercer County WV, David E. Johnston, published A History of The Middle New River Settlements and Contiguous Territory where Mason County’s namesake is listed as Stevens Thomson Mason in Appendix B.

The Mason County namesake controversy surfaces later in the West Virginia Legislative Hand Book and Manual and Official Register (Blue Book). The Blue Book description for Mason County, 1916-1920, said Mason County was named for Stevens Thomson Mason, using Virgil Lewis’ 1896 wording. In the 1921 Blue Book, the Mason County description was shortened, omitting the county namesake reference. This description continued until 1927, when the Mason County description was expanded to include Lewis’ 1889 wording stating George Mason was the county namesake. This change could be related to Clifford Myers being WV Historian (he was from Mason County) or the Mason County Clerk (John Aten) submitting new county information, based on Lewis’ 1889 book, to the WV Senate Clerk for inclusion in the 1927 Blue Book.

Clifford Myers, a Mason County resident, was West Virginia’s Historian/Archivist from 1919 to 1935. Two years after Clifford Myers became WV Historian the description in the West Virginia Legislative Hand Book and Manual and Official Register (Blue Book) for Mason County was reduced to two short sentences and listed no namesake for the county. In the 1927 when a new description for Mason County appeared in the WV Blue Book, George Mason was cited as the county’s namesake. The 1927 description continues to present.

A very noticeable clue to Virgil Lewis being the source of most of the namesake information is the consistent misspelling of Stevens Thomson Mason’s middle name as “Thompson”. (see excerpts of below) Why did Virgil Lewis change the namesake of Mason County from G. Mason (1887/1889) to Stevens Thomson Mason (1896)? Could it be that Lewis, as an educator and Superintendent of WV Schools, found definitive evidence of Mason County’s namesake and included it in his 1896 textbook for WV Schools? --Kbgh66 (talk) 03:09, 31 October 2013 (UTC)
 * No, you cited the works incorrectly, I have posted on your talk page and have a discussion on the county talk page...It is George Mason....Please note that the later Lewis work had the help of Jim Comstock. Also note that the WV Culture and History site, which is used in the Mason County article, has the precise use of George Mason as the namesake. Jim Comstock was wrong....Lewis published in 1889Coal town guy (talk) 03:21, 31 October 2013 (UTC)

The Signpost: 30 October 2013

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Fractional currency set FPC
The images from the FLC Fractional currency have been nominated as a Featured Picture Set on English Wikipedia. As you were involved in reviewing the FLC, you may or may not wish to comment or review the FPC. Thank you.-Godot13 (talk) 06:31, 3 November 2013 (UTC)

The Signpost: 06 November 2013

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The Center Line: Fall 2013

 * —EdwardsBot (talk) 03:13, 15 November 2013 (UTC)

The Signpost: 13 November 2013

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VisualEditor newsletter for November 2013
Since the last newsletter, the VisualEditor team has worked on some feature changes, major infrastructure improvements to make the system more stable, dependable and extensible, some minor toolbar improvements, and fixing bugs.

A new form parsing library for language characters in Parsoid caused the corruption of pages containing diacritics for about an hour two weeks ago. Relatively few pages at the English Wikipedia were affected, but this created immediate problems at some other Wikipedias, sometimes affecting several dozen pages. The development teams for Parsoid and VisualEditor apologize for the serious disruption and thank the people who reported this emergency at VisualEditor/Feedback and on the public IRC channel, #mediawiki-visualeditor.

There have been dozens of changes since the last newsletter. Here are some of the highlights:


 * Accidental deletion of infoboxes and other items: You now need to press the Delete or Backspace key twice to delete a template, reference or image. The first time, the item becomes selected, and the second time, it is removed.  The need to press the delete key twice should make it more obvious what you are doing and help avoid accidental removals of infoboxes and similar (bug 55336).
 * Switch from VisualEditor to the wikitext editor: A new feature lets you make a direct, one-way editing interface change, which will preserve your changes without needing to save the page and re-open it in the wikitext editor (bug 50687). It is available in a new menu in the action buttons by the Cancel button (where the "Page Settings" button used to be). Note that this new feature is not currently working in Firefox.
 * Categories and Languages are also now directly available in that menu. The category suggestions drop-down was appearing in the wrong place rather than below its input box, which is now fixed. An incompatibility between VisualEditor and the deployed Parsoid service that prevented editing categories and language links was fixed.
 * File:, Help: and Category: namespaces: VisualEditor was enabled for these namespaces the on all wikis (bug 55968), the Portal: and Viquiprojecte: namespaces on the Catalan Wikipedia (bug 56000), and the Portal: and Book: namespaces on the English Wikipedia (bug 56001).
 * Media item resizing: We improved how files are viewed in a few ways. First, inline media items can now be resized in the same way that has been possible with block ones (like thumbnails) before. When resizing a media item, you can see a live preview of how it will look as you drag it (bug 54298). While you are dragging an image to resize it, we now show a label with the current dimensions (bug 54297). Once you have resized it, we fetch a new, higher resolution image for the media item if necessary (bug 55697). Manual setting of media item sizes in their dialog is nearly complete and should be available next week. If you hold down the shift key whilst resizing an image, it will now snap to a 10 pixel grid instead of the normal free-hand sizing. The media item resize label now is centered while resizing regardless of which tool you use to resize it.
 * Undo and redo: A number of improvements were made to the transactions system which make undoing and redoing more reliable during real-time collaboration (bug 53224).
 * Save dialogue: The save page was re-written to use the same code as all other dialogs (bug 48566), and in the process fixed a number of issues. The save dialog is re-accessible if it loses focus (bug 50722), or if you review a null edit (bug 53313); its checkboxes for minor edit, watch the page, and flagged revisions options now layout much more cleanly (bug 52175), and the tab order of the buttons is now closer to what users will expect (bug 51918). There was a bug in the save dialog that caused it to crash if there was an error in loading the page from Parsoid, which is now fixed.
 * Links to other articles or pages sometimes sent people to invalid pages. VisualEditor now keeps track of the context in which you loaded the page, which lets us fix up links in document to point to the correct place regardless of what entry point you launched the editor from—so the content of pages loaded through   and   both now have text links that work if triggered (bug 48915).
 * Toolbar links: A bug that caused the toolbar's menus to get shorter or even blank when scrolled down the page in Firefox is now fixed (bug 55343).
 * Numbered external links: VisualEditor now supports Parsoid's changed representation of numbered external links (bug 53505).
 * Removed empty templates: We also fixed an issue that meant that completely empty templates became impossible to interact with inside VisualEditor, as they didn't show up (bug 55810).
 * Mathematics formulae: If you would like to try the experimental LaTeX mathematics tool in VisualEditor, you will need to opt-in to Beta Features. This is currently available on Meta-wiki, Wikimedia Commons, and Mediawiki.org. It will be available on all other Wikimedia sites on 21 November.
 * Browser testing support: If you are interested in technical details, the browser tests were expanded to cover some basic cursor operations, which uncovered an issue in our testing framework that doesn't work with cursoring in Firefox; the Chrome tests continue to fail due to a bug with the welcome message for that part of the testing framework.
 * Load time: VisualEditor now uses content language when fetching TemplateData information, so reducing bandwidth use, and users on multi-language or multi-script wikis now get TemplateData hinting for templates as they would expect (bug 50888).
 * Reuse of VisualEditor: Work on spinning out the user experience (UX) framework from VisualEditor into oojs-ui, which lets other teams at Wikimedia (like Flow) and gadget authors re-use VisualEditor UX components, is now complete and is being moved to a shared code repository.
 * Support for private wikis: If you maintain a private wiki at home or at work, VisualEditor now supports editing of private wikis, by forwarding the Cookie: HTTP header to Parsoid ( set to true) (bug 44483).  (Most private wikis will also need to install Parsoid and node.js, as VisualEditor requires them.)

Looking ahead: If you have questions or suggestions for future improvements, or if you encounter problems, please let everyone know by posting a note at VisualEditor/Feedback. Thank you! Whatamidoing (WMF) 22:13, 20 November 2013 (UTC)
 * VisualEditor will be released to some of the smaller Wikipedias on 02 December 2013. If you are active at one or more smaller Wikipedias where VisualEditor is not yet generally available, please see the list at VisualEditor/Rollouts.
 * Public office hours on IRC to discuss VisualEditor with Product Manager James Forrester will be held on Monday, 2 December, at 1900 UTC and on Tuesday, 3 December, at 0100 UTC. Bring your questions.  Logs will be posted on Meta after each office hour completes.
 * In terms of feature improvements, one of the major infrastructure projects affects how inserting characters works, both using your computer's built-in Unicode input systems and through a planned character inserter tool for VisualEditor. The forthcoming rich copying and pasting feature was extended and greater testing is currently being done.  Work continues to support the improved reference dialog to quickly add citations based on local templates.

The Signpost: 20 November 2013

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The Signpost: 18 December 2013

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VisualEditor newsletter • 19 December 2013
Since the last newsletter, the VisualEditor team has worked on some toolbar improvements, fixing bugs, and improving support for Indic languages as well as other languages with complex characters. The current focus is on improving the reference dialog and expanding the new character inserter tool.

There have been dozens of changes since the last newsletter. Here are some of the highlights:

Looking ahead: The transclusion dialog will see further changes in the coming weeks, with a simple mode for single templates and an advanced mode for more complex transclusions. The new character formatting menu on the toolbar will get an arrow to show that it is a drop-down menu. The reference dialog will be improved, and the Reference item will become a button in the main toolbar, rather than an item in the Insert menu.
 * Rich copying and pasting is now available. If you copy text from another website, then character formatting and some other HTML attributes are preserved.  This means, for example, that if you copy a pre-formatted suggested citation from a source like this, then VisualEditor will preserve the formatting of the title in the citation.  Keep in mind that copying the formatting may include formatting that you don't want (like section headings).  If you want to paste plain, unformatted text onto a page, then use Control or Command  (Mac).
 * Auto-numbered external links like can now be edited just like any other link.  However, they cannot be created in VisualEditor easily.
 * Several changes to the toolbar and dialogs have been made, and more are on the way. The toolbar has been simplified with a new drop-down text styles menu and an "insert" menu. Your feedback on the toolbar is wanted here.  The transclusion/template dialog has been simplified.  If you have enabled mathematical formula editing, then the menu item is now called the formula editor instead of LaTeX.
 * There is a new character inserter, which you can find in the new "insert" menu, with a capital Omega ("Ω"). It's a very basic set of characters.  Your feedback on the character inserter is wanted here.
 * Saving the page should seem faster by several seconds now.
 * It is now possible to access VisualEditor by manually editing the URL, even if you are not logged in or have not opted in to VisualEditor normally.  To do so, append  to the end of the page name.  For example, change   to   to open a random page in VisualEditor.  This is intended to support bug testing across multiple browsers, without requiring editors to login repeatedly.

If you have questions or suggestions for future improvements, or if you encounter problems, please let everyone know by posting a note at VisualEditor/Feedback. Thank you! Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:42, 19 December 2013 (UTC)

Possibly unfree File:Beckley Feed.jpg
A file that you uploaded or altered, File:Beckley Feed.jpg, has been listed at Possibly unfree files because its copyright status is unclear or disputed. If the file's copyright status cannot be verified, it may be deleted. You may find more information on the file description page. You are welcome to add comments to its entry at if you object to the listing for any reason. Thank you. Stefan2 (talk) 22:18, 27 December 2013 (UTC)

The Signpost: 25 December 2013

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The Signpost: 01 January 2014

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Kentucky counties
Thanks, I'm just getting started. Now that I know how to search the Google free books (old books in the public domain) database it's gotten much easier. In case you did not know you can search here and every page of the book is viewable free. - Gilliam (talk) 15:57, 9 January 2014 (UTC)
 * There is also a great online KY History resource linked at the List of Counties in Kentucky Page here, and KY Place Names is an oldy but a goody as wellCoal town guy (talk) 16:01, 9 January 2014 (UTC)
 * Gilliam, WOW, what a resource! I had no idea, with your clue it didn’t take long to figure it out. Is this a commonly known Google trick, and if not, should it be spread around? Thank you, Sammy D III (talk) 18:44, 17 January 2014 (UTC)

The Signpost: 08 January 2014

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Valley, West Virginia
Hey Coal town guy! I was working on an article at User:Caponer/Valley, West Virginia and I was wondering if you knew of any other online sources for West Virginia post offices. Valley's post office was in operation between 1928 and 1937. Any guidance you could provide would be of the greatest help! I'm going to begin authoring articles for all the populated places/post offices in Hampshire and Mineral to bring them up to snuff! Here's hoping your New Year is off to a good start! -- Caponer (talk) 00:45, 13 January 2014 (UTC)

The West Virginia Barnstar
Hey Coal town guy! I wanted to let you know that I added your incredible award to the list at Awards by WikiProject. You did such a phenomenal job conceiving of and creating this award that I wanted to ensure it was included with the barnstars for the other U.S. states. -- Caponer (talk) 06:11, 16 January 2014 (UTC)

The Center Line: Winter 2013

 * —MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 01:15, 17 January 2014 (UTC)

VisualEditor newsletter for Janaury 2014
Since the last newsletter, the VisualEditor team has worked mostly minor features and fixing bugs. A few significant bugs include working around a bug in CSSJanus that was wrongly flipping images used in some templates in right-to-left (RTL) environments (bug 50910) a major bug that meant inserting any template or other transclusion failed (bug 59002), a major but quickly resolved problem due to an unannounced change in MediaWiki core, which caused VisualEditor to crash on trying to save (bug 59867). This last bugs did not appear on any Wikipedia. Additionally, significant work has been done in the background to make VisualEditor work as an independent editing system.

As of today, VisualEditor is now available as an opt-out feature to all users at 149 active Wikipedias.


 * The character inserter tool in the "Insert" menu has a very basic set of characters. The character inserter is especially important for languages that use Latin and Cyrillic alphabets with unusual characters or frequent diacritics. Your feedback on the character inserter is requested. In addition to feedback from any interested editor, the developers would particularly like to hear from anyone who speaks any of the 50+ languages listed under Phase 5 at mw:VisualEditor/Rollouts, including Breton, Mongolian, Icelandic, Welsh, Afrikaans, Macedonian, and Azerbaijani.
 * meta:Office hours on IRC have been heavily attended recently. The next one will be held this coming Wednesday, 22 January at 23:00 UTC.
 * You can now edit some of the page settings in the "options" dialog –    and   as selection (forced on, forced off, or default setting; bugs 56866 and 56867) and   as a checkbox (bug 57166).
 * The automated browser tests were adjusted to speed them up and bind more correctly to list items in lists, and updated to a newer version of their ruby dependencies. You can monitor the automated browser tests' results (triggered every twelve hours) live on the server.
 * VisualEditor/User guide was updated recently to show some new and upcoming features.

Looking ahead: The character formatting menu on the toolbar will get a drop-down indicator next Thursday. The reference and media items will be the first two listed in the Insert menu. The help menu will get a page listing the keyboard shortcuts. Looking further out, image handling will be improved, including support for alignment (left, right, and center) and better control over image size (including default and upright sizes). The developers are also working on support for editing redirects and image galleries.

Subscriptions to this newsletter are managed at VisualEditor/Newsletter. Please add or remove your name to change your subscription settings. If you have questions or suggestions for future improvements, or if you encounter problems, please let everyone know by posting a note at VisualEditor/Feedback. Thank you! Whatamidoing (WMF) 20:07, 17 January 2014 (UTC)

The Signpost: 15 January 2014

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The Signpost: 29 January 2014

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Nomination of Blue Bucket Cow Camp, Oregon for deletion
A discussion is taking place as to whether the article Blue Bucket Cow Camp, Oregon is suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia according to Wikipedia's policies and guidelines or whether it should be deleted.

The article will be discussed at Articles for deletion/Blue Bucket Cow Camp, Oregon until a consensus is reached, and anyone is welcome to contribute to the discussion. The nomination will explain the policies and guidelines which are of concern. The discussion focuses on high-quality evidence and our policies and guidelines.

Users may edit the article during the discussion, including to improve the article to address concerns raised in the discussion. However, do not remove the article-for-deletion notice from the top of the article. Valfontis (talk) 21:41, 7 February 2014 (UTC)

Ghost towns
Hey there. You probably know more about ghost towns than anyone. I'm finding that many places listed as "ghost towns" in the southern U.S. don't really meet the strict definition. There needs to be a name for places that are post-boomtowns, but still have people living there (eg. "Chester, Mississippi"). I'm as guilty as anyone, having added "ghost town" to places where absolutely nothing is left behind (eg. "Peyton, Mississippi"). Just wondering what your view is on the use of "ghost town". Cheers. Magnolia677 (talk) 15:36, 12 February 2014 (UTC)
 * Its tough honestly and a dam good question. My understanding, has been, so far, that if a place is sparsely inhabited and has virtually no industry or jobs, its a ghost town. HOWEVER, as you very rightly point out, there are places that are literally nothing more than a few foundation stones with NO inhabitants excluding possibly the infrequent meth freak or hermit. I had asked about this before and I agree, there should be a different category for such places. HMMMMM, perhaps a new category should be in order. As of now though, I believe you are correct to place these locations in the category of ghost town. My old home is a ghost town, sadly the meth freaks are not infrequentCoal town guy (talk) 15:42, 12 February 2014 (UTC)

Interesting you mention the drug problems. You and I have both edited "Oceana, West Virginia". Very sad. Regarding the ghost towns, I'll keep adding them to the ghost town category. I've recently added a bunch of long-lost river towns to "Category:Mississippi populated places on the Mississippi River". Another user, "Chillin662", has been doing great work creating articles for many forgotten hamlets in Mississippi. Cheers! Magnolia677 (talk) 15:06, 13 February 2014 (UTC)

WV barnstar
Thanks for devising the West Virginia barnstar, which I just awarded to Caponer after doing GA reviews for a couple of his Hampshire County articles, and following Wikilinks to a number of others. Nice to have a state-specific recognition like that. Ammodramus (talk) 02:06, 13 February 2014 (UTC)
 * I merely provided the specs, Kelvinsong did the great art work. I thought WV should have a barnstar and thought the great seal of WV should be on it with our Motto. Coal town guy (talk) 14:19, 13 February 2014 (UTC)
 * Thanks sm!!!—Love, Kelvinsong talk 22:50, 13 February 2014 (UTC)

The Signpost: 12 February 2014
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File:Pocahontas Coalfield Centennial Celebration medal.jpg listed for deletion
A file that you uploaded or altered, File:Pocahontas Coalfield Centennial Celebration medal.jpg, has been listed at Files for deletion. Please see the to see why it has been listed (you may have to search for the title of the image to find its entry). Feel free to add your opinion on the matter below the nomination. Thank you. — howcheng  {chat} 02:19, 15 February 2014 (UTC)
 * Please see my note at Files for deletion/2014 February 14 regarding the medallion's possible PD status, and some work you could do to help the situation. Nyttend (talk) 06:03, 20 February 2014 (UTC)
 * I am very appreciative, I have provided data on the medal at the deletion discussion pageCoal town guy (talk) 13:48, 20 February 2014 (UTC)

Disambiguation link notification for February 15
Hi. Thank you for your recent edits. Wikipedia appreciates your help. We noticed though that when you edited Pocahontas Coalfield, you added links pointing to the disambiguation pages Freeman, West Virginia and Upland, West Virginia (check to confirm | fix with Dab solver). Such links are almost always unintended, since a disambiguation page is merely a list of "Did you mean..." article titles. Read the FAQ* Join us at the DPL WikiProject.

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Pocahontas Coalfield
Definitely an improvement, but considering it includes my ancestral home of Cucumber, I think it ought to be an FA some day.  Acroterion   (talk)   02:59, 18 February 2014 (UTC)

VisualEditor Newsletter—February 2014
Since the last newsletter, the VisualEditor team has worked on some small changes to the user interface, such as moving the reference item to the top of the Insert menu, as well as some minor features and fixing bugs, especially for rich copying and pasting of references.

The biggest change was the addition of more features to the image dialog, including the ability to set alignment (left, right, center), framing options (thumbnail, frame, frameless, and none), adding alt text, and defining the size manually. There is still some work to be done here, including a quick way to set the default size.


 * The main priority is redesigning the reference dialog, with the goal of providing autofill features for ISBNs and URLs and streamlining the process. Current concept drawings are available at VisualEditor/Design/Reference Dialog. Please share your ideas about making referencing quick and easy with the designers.
 * A few bugs in the existing reference dialog were fixed. The toolbar was simplified to remove galleries and lists from the reference dialog.  When you re-use references, it now correctly displays the references again, rather than just the number and name.  If you paste content into a dialog that can't fit there (e.g.   in references), it now strips out the inappropriate HTML.
 * You can now edit image galleries inside VisualEditor. At this time, the gallery tool is a very limited option that gives you access to the wikitext.  It will see significant improvements at a later date.
 * The character inserter tool in the "Insert" menu is being redesigned. Your feedback on the special character inserter is still wanted, especially if you depend on Wikipedia's character inserters for your normal editing rather than using the ones built into your computer.
 * You can now see a help page about keyboard shortcuts in the page menu (three bars next to the Cancel button).
 * If you edit categories, your changes will now display correctly after saving the page.
 * Saving the page should be faster now.
 * Any community can ask to test a new tool to edit TemplateData by leaving a note at.

Looking ahead: The link tool will tell you when you're linking to a disambiguation or redirect page. The warning about wikitext will hide itself after you remove the wikitext markup in that paragraph. Support for creating and editing redirects is in the pipeline. Looking further out, image handling will be improved, including default and upright sizes. The developers are also working on support for viewing and editing hidden HTML comments, some behavioral magic words like DISPLAYTITLE, and in-line language setting.

If you have questions or suggestions for future improvements, or if you encounter problems, please let everyone know by posting a note at VisualEditor/Feedback. Thank you! Whatamidoing (WMF) 04:20, 20 February 2014 (UTC)

Thanks
Hi Coal town guy- Thanks for your support on the FLC. I have also nominated the image set at FPC. Gold certificates next...--Godot13 (talk) 21:50, 20 February 2014 (UTC)
 * No worries, I am very anxious to see the Gold Cert effort. I got one in change (Gold Cert small), 20 dollar gold cert where it states redeemable in Gold Coin, I was STOKED. The same week, I got a 5 dollar silver...it was quite the find for me.Let me know when you have time, I FINALLY managed to get pics of a scrip machine, and thus now I decent pics of the device that makes coal scrip..Coal town guy (talk) 21:54, 20 February 2014 (UTC)
 * Wow! I've heard of people getting silver certificates as change here and there, but I've never heard about a gold certificate as change. I should do some shopping in your neck of the woods ;-) -Godot13 (talk) 22:35, 20 February 2014 (UTC)
 * I could have had some OLD large size Gold Certs at a bar for a tip when I bounced, BUT I gave them back to the patron......HOWEVER, I did win a CC silver dollar in a poker game.....YES, I kept the CC dollarCoal town guy (talk) 01:58, 21 February 2014 (UTC)

The Signpost: 19 February 2014
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The Signpost: 26 February 2014
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Mistake?
Was this an accident? -- Neil N  <sup style="color:blue;">talk to me  14:41, 28 February 2014 (UTC)
 * YES, My apologies, please, I am sorry, had a PC glitchCoal town guy (talk) 14:50, 28 February 2014 (UTC)

(test) The Signpost: 05 March 2014
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Map request
Your request at WP:WikiProject U.S. Roads/Maps task force/Requests has been rejected because the article is not within the scope of WP:USRD. I suggest that you look at WP:Graphics Lab/Map workshop instead for assistance. (P.S. you may want to look into archiving your talk page here because of its length.)  Imzadi 1979  →   16:20, 11 March 2014 (UTC)

Care to be an ambassador?
Hi, CTG! I was looking around today and I found an editor that is working tirelessly on an article on a ghost town in Minnesota (Elcor, Minnesota). He writes quite well, but I left him a kind note today on WP:OR. Two things: Do you know of any barnstar for work on ghost towns? and secondly, could you maybe drop in and take a look and see what you think of his article? It seemed really good to me. You work much more on settlements than I. It seems to be at least a "C" and possibly higher. Let me know what you think, ok?

BTW, I changed my username. This is. John from Idegon (talk) 19:16, 11 March 2014 (UTC)
 * I am delighted to assist. That article has alot of work, it takes amazing dedication to produce that. I have replied on your talk page in detailCoal town guy (talk) 20:44, 11 March 2014 (UTC)

Thanks!
Hey, Coal town guy! I appreciate the feedback on the Elcor, Minnesota Wiki page. Anything you can do to help clean it up from a Wiki perspective using bots or otherwise to bring it up to Wiki standards, please feel free. With regard to the encyclopedic content, I don't know that there's much more to add. I have not edited the page since last November, and only recently decided to describe how the land changed hands after demolition of the Corsica mine stack, describing a series of steel company mergers until present day. A friend of mine from the Iron Range Historical Society (I also started this page) brought my attention to the original page, which was apparently started by a fan of Sam LoPresti. It was a stub article and not even accurate at that. I took the liberty of expanding and correcting it. I am somewhat of an expert (or at least hobbyist) on east Mesabi Range ghost towns, but have some personal experience with this one. And in response to an earlier message from John from Idegon will be removing some of the personally cited material. Regrettably, my occupation does not allow me to write Wiki pages for every Iron Range ghost town.DrGregMN (talk) 01:32, 12 March 2014 (UTC)

The Signpost: 12 March 2014
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File:State Line KY postmark.jpg listed for deletion
A file that you uploaded or altered, File:State Line KY postmark.jpg, has been listed at Files for deletion. Please see the to see why it has been listed (you may have to search for the title of the image to find its entry). Feel free to add your opinion on the matter below the nomination. Thank you. Sfan00 IMG (talk) 10:03, 17 March 2014 (UTC)

Barrett Ridge, Mississippi
Hey there. Can I get your opinion on what to do with Barrett Ridge, Mississippi?

Not on GNIS. Not on ACME topographic maps. Probably located along Highway 683 here 34.42447°N, -88.70234°W.

This article says that Highway 683 is also Barrett Ridge Road.

This article mentions St. Thomas Church, which can be seen along Highway 683 on a topographic map.

These articles also mention the community:, ,.

Aside from cleaning up the text in the article, should it get an infobox? Should rough geo-coordinates be added, based on discussion in the articles? Should it be added to the Lee County template? Or is it not really a "place", and shouldn't even have an article? Thanks! Magnolia677 (talk) 04:37, 19 March 2014 (UTC)

VisualEditor newsletter—March 2014
Since the last newsletter, the VisualEditor team has mostly worked on changes to the template and image dialogs.

The biggest change in the last few weeks was the redesign of the template dialog. The template dialog now opens in a simplified mode that lists parameters and their descriptions. (The complex multi-item transclusion mode can be reached by clicking on "Show options" from inside the simplified template dialog.) Template parameters now have a bigger, auto-sizing input box for easier editing. With today's update, searching for template parameters will become case-insensitive, and required template parameters will display an asterisk (*) next to their edit boxes. In addition to making it quicker and easier to see everything when you edit typical templates, this work was necessary to prepare for the forthcoming simplified citation dialog. The main priority in the coming weeks is building this new citation dialog, with the ultimate goal of providing autofill features for ISBNs, URLs, DOIs and other quick-fills. This will add a new button on the toolbar, with the citation templates available picked by each wiki's community. Concept drawings can be seen at VisualEditor/Design/Reference Dialog. Please share your ideas about making referencing quick and easy with the designers.


 * The link tool now tells you when you're linking to a disambiguation or redirect page. Pages that exist, but are not indexed by the search engine, are treated like non-existent pages.
 * Wikitext warnings will now hide when you remove wikitext from the paragraph you are editing.
 * The character inserter tool in the "Insert" menu has been slightly redesigned, to introduce larger buttons. Your suggestions for more significant changes to the special character inserter are still wanted.
 * The page options menu (three bars, next to the Cancel button) has expanded. You can create and edit redirect pages, set page options like ,   and   , and more.  New keyboard shortcuts are listed there, and include undoing the last action, clearing formatting, and showing the shortcut help window.  If you switch from VisualEditor to wikitext editing, your edit will now be tagged.
 * It is easier to edit images. There are more options and they are explained better.  If you add new images to pages, they will also be default size.  You can now set image sizes to the default, if another size was previously specified. Full support for upright sizing systems, which more readily adapt image sizes to the reader's screen size, is planned.
 * VisualEditor adds fake blank lines so you can put your cursor there. These "slugs" are now smaller than normal blank lines, and are animated to be different from actual blank lines.
 * You can use the Ctrl or Command shortcuts to open the save window, and you can preview your edit summary when checking your changes in the save window.
 * After community requests, VisualEditor has been deployed to the Interlingual Occidental Wikipedia, the Portuguese Wikibooks, and the French Wikiversity.
 * Any community can ask for custom icons for their language in the character formatting menu (bold, italic, etc.) by making a request on Bugzilla or by contacting Product Manager James Forrester.

The developers apologize for a regression bug with the deployment on 6 March 2014, which caused the incorrect removal of  size definitions on a handful of pages on the English Wikipedia, among others. The root cause was fixed, and the broken pages were fixed soon after.

Looking ahead:  Several template dialogs will become more compact. Looking further out, the developers are also working on support for viewing and editing hidden HTML comments. You will be able to see the Table of Contents change live as you edit the page, rather than it being hidden. In-line language setting may be offered to a few Wikipedias soon.

If you have questions or suggestions for future improvements, or if you encounter problems, please let everyone know by posting a note at VisualEditor/Feedback or by joining the office hours on 19 April 2014 at 2000 UTC. Thank you! MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 22:44, 20 March 2014 (UTC)

Western Kentucky help
Do you have printed local histories for any of the Western Coal Fields counties? Early this month, I took a Green River ferry in Butler County (SE corner of the region), and I'd like to write an article about it, but I can't get enough sources. It's been around for a long time; it's documented in 1916, by which time it had its current name of "Reeds Ferry". If you could help find documentation on this ferry, I'd really appreciate it. Nyttend (talk) 23:14, 21 March 2014 (UTC)
 * I do not own printed coalfield material from Western KY coalfield counties, BUT I know some folks who might, give me a day or 2...There was at one time a series of e books for the older lit, let me take look...Coal town guy (talk) 01:51, 22 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Thanks! Either actual print or digital versions of print would work; I was meaning "can you identify books in which it's covered".  There's no Butler County entry in Filby's Bibliography of American County Histories, so anything you can dig up via your acquaintances will be most welcome.  Nyttend (talk) 04:59, 22 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Found a few decent started sources...:Book, Kentucky Encyclopedia by John Kleber, parts of green river data is on Google Books


 * Listing of coal towns in Butler County, I do not know their proximity to Green River...here


 * The Green River Pioneers by James Ramage


 * Butler County Historical and Genealogical Society, 1987 by Lois Russ


 * Journal of the Senate of the Commonwealth of Kentucky 1889


 * Butler County Roger G. Givens, Nancy Richey 2012 pages 7 -9 have some great data, those pages can be read on Google books as well.Coal town guy (talk) 19:15, 22 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Really appreciate the help, especially the Arcadia Publishing book. Besides their content on this ferry, I'm particularly interested by Givens/Richey because they spell it "Read's" instead of "Reeds", as I'd not thought to check under that spelling.  Nyttend (talk) 01:22, 23 March 2014 (UTC)
 * I have actualy helped some folks at Arcadia, I like them, they actually like to get into the history, elbow deep, its rather impressive honestly. A few of them used to come to the field and it was honestly impressive to see them there, there is a series they did on Southern WV and they were really thereCoal town guy (talk) 02:02, 23 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Yeah, I've been a big fan to use the vernacular :-) of Arcadia since buying their Beaver Falls: Gem of Beaver County about the city in which I wish I lived, and I've since been given as Christmas presents a couple of their books on historic bridges. I've seen numerous books on cities and counties, and all seem to be comparable quality.  At first, I hesitate to use these books, since they're by local authors instead of by significant historians, but the same is true of the typical county history that we routinely use without question.  Nyttend (talk) 02:13, 23 March 2014 (UTC)

The Signpost: 19 March 2014
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Woodyard, West Virginia
Hi-I came across Woodyard, West Virginia in Roane County-GNIS-1741042-ghost town. Thanks-RFD (talk) 22:00, 24 March 2014 (UTC)
 * GROOVY, many thanks, its documented now.Coal town guy (talk) 01:13, 25 March 2014 (UTC)

The Signpost: 26 March 2014
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Peelers, Mississippi
Hey there. I want to create an article about Peelers, Mississippi (GNIS), and what I'd like to figure out is, was it ever a port on the Mississippi River, or did it come about after Eagle Lake was cut off from the river. I have a pretty good map from 1862, and it's not on it. Eagle Lake was created in 1866 (see page 151). It had a post office from 1892 to 1922 (see ). I'd like to add a few more to places to this category. Just wondering if you might have an old map that shows Peelers on the old river. Thanks! Magnolia677 (talk) 00:03, 4 April 2014 (UTC)

The Signpost: 02 April 2014
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You have been nominated for a gift from the Wikimedia Foundation!
You have been selected to receive a merchandise giveaway. Please send us a message if you would like to claim your shirt. Thank you again for all you do! --JMatthews (WMF) (talk) 06:58, 9 April 2014 (UTC)

Ogden, West Virginia
Hi-I had to make a minor change in one of the articles Ogden, West Virginia you started; a space was needed. I had to move the article to make the change. It should not be any problem. How are you doing?-RFD (talk) 11:09, 10 April 2014 (UTC)
 * I ewill be going home for a weekend and will of course be updating some pics in the National Register Page......MUCh appreciate the helpCoal town guy (talk) 15:50, 10 April 2014 (UTC)

The Signpost: 09 April 2014
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The Signpost: 23 April 2014
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VisualEditor newsletter—April 2014
Since the last newsletter, the VisualEditor team has mostly worked on performance improvements, image settings, and preparation for a simplified citation template tool in its own menu.


 * In an oft-requested improvement, VisualEditor now displays red links (links to non-existent pages) in the proper color. Links to sister projects and external URLs are still the same blue as local links.
 * You can now open templates by double-clicking them or by selecting them and pressing  Return.  This also works for references, images, galleries, mathematical equations, and other "nodes".
 * VisualEditor has been disabled for pages that were created as translations of other pages using the Translate extension (common at Meta and MediaWiki.org). If a page has been marked for translation, you will see a warning if you try to edit it using VisualEditor.
 * When you try to edit protected pages with VisualEditor, the full protection notice and most recent log entry are displayed. Blocked users see the standard message for blocked users.
 * The developers fixed a bug that caused links on sub-pages to point to the wrong location.
 * The size-changing controls in the advanced settings section of the media or image dialog were simplified further. VisualEditor's media dialog supports more image display styles, like borderless images.
 * If there is not enough space on your screen to display all of the tabs (for instance, if your browser window is too narrow), the second edit tab will now fold into the drop-down menu (where the "" item is currently housed). On the English Wikipedia, this moves the "Edit beta" tab into the menu; on most projects, it moves the "" tab. This is only enabled in the default Vector skin, not for Monobook users. See this image for an example showing the "" and "" tabs after they moved into the drop-down menu.
 * After community requests, VisualEditor has been deployed as an opt-in feature at Meta and on the French Wikinews.

Looking ahead:  A new, locally controlled menu of citation templates will put citations immediately in front of users. You will soon be able to see the Table of Contents while editing. Support for upright image sizes (preferred for accessibility) is being developed. In-line language setting will be offered as a Beta Feature soon. Looking further out, the developers are also working on support for viewing and editing hidden HTML comments. It will be possible to upload images to Commons from inside VisualEditor.

If you have questions or suggestions for future improvements, or if you encounter problems, please let everyone know by posting a note at VisualEditor/Feedback or by joining the office hours on Monday, 19 May 2014 at 18:00 UTC. If you'd like to get this on your own page, subscribe at VisualEditor for English Wikipedia only or at meta:VisualEditor/Newsletter for any project. Thank you! Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:23, 23 April 2014 (UTC)

The Signpost: 30 April 2014
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Photo advice
In your opinion, what's the best kind of building to photograph when visiting a former coal town? I'm talking about an infobox image: what kind of setting is best for the infobox? For example, when visiting Harlan County KY recently, I got a residential neighborhood in Lynch, and I got a downtown scene in Cumberland. Nyttend (talk) 02:12, 5 May 2014 (UTC)
 * IMO, ANYTHING showing an original structure that was integral to the town is the best, IMO. A post office, a school, a church or yes, a downtown shot that would be as close to the original as possible. I will have EXTENSIVE updates soon as I just got back from McDowell County in WV and a few other places. Coal town guy (talk) 15:32, 5 May 2014 (UTC)

Possibly unfree File:UBB Memorial.jpg
A file that you uploaded or altered, File:UBB Memorial.jpg, has been listed at Possibly unfree files because its copyright status is unclear or disputed. If the file's copyright status cannot be verified, it may be deleted. You may find more information on the file description page. You are welcome to add comments to its entry at if you object to the listing for any reason. Thank you.  Ron h jones  (Talk) 22:59, 6 May 2014 (UTC)

Possibly unfree File:Bartley WV Miners Memorial.jpg
A file that you uploaded or altered, File:Bartley WV Miners Memorial.jpg, has been listed at Possibly unfree files because its copyright status is unclear or disputed. If the file's copyright status cannot be verified, it may be deleted. You may find more information on the file description page. You are welcome to add comments to its entry at if you object to the listing for any reason. Thank you.  Ron h jones  (Talk) 23:02, 6 May 2014 (UTC)
 * Re your comments at the PUF, this is exactly why I virtually never upload images of this sort: I often find them, and I'd love to upload more, but it's basically too much of a mess in most cases. The exceptions are things that are themselves dated without copyright notice (e.g. this historical marker, dated 1956), or things without notice for which I've got external documentation (e.g. this sign; it's in a National Register district, and the nomination mentions when it was placed), or things that are too old, such as the numerous Confederate monuments in western Kentucky.  Nyttend (talk) 03:40, 8 May 2014 (UTC)
 * You may release all rights if you want, or you may do nothing additional — the image as it stands right now has no copyright issues whatsoever. Remember that you retain copyright when releasing something under GFDL/CC; the licenses impose certain requirements on reusers (for example, attribution and copyleft), and these requirements would be worthless if the licenses involved a public domain release.  As long as you retain copyright, the PD-US-no notice template should be linked (as it is now), not transcluded: either way, humans can figure out that the object in the picture is in the public domain, but transcluding the template causes the image to end up in a category for images that themselves are in the public domain, and bots (and inattentive humans) might misunderstand and think that the whole image is in the public domain.  The only reason we need to mention PD-US-no notice is to prevent copyright-based deletion here on Wikipedia; it's really not relevant for any other reason, and transcluding it would make the image appear to have two different copyright statuses.  If you feel like releasing the image into the public domain, you can do that (remove the GFDL/CC template and add PD-self), and in that case you could transclude the no-notice template — both say that the image is in the public domain, and that's the most important thing, since we basically need to have all templates stating the same copyright status, and the reason for PD status isn't as important.  See the permission templates I've used at File:Pivot Point historical marker.jpg, for example.  I hope this isn't too confusing!  At the end, please remember that you have to be able to demonstrate PD status (if challenged) for anything you're photographing — with most things, including buildings and landscapes, of course they're not copyrightable, but if you have something copyrightable, you need to be able to demonstrate that it's too old or that it failed to comply with registration requirements.  Pretty much any image of a pre-1978 work will be fine if you state that it was published without notice; don't lie, of course, but pretty much anything in good faith will be accepted.  Nyttend (talk) 17:25, 8 May 2014 (UTC)

Great user page!
You have a really nice user page. I love the design and the photo (which I assume you took). Came here from the Organized Labor Wikiproject. Keep up the good work researching those unions and documenting West Virginia's history. Mvblair (talk) 18:19, 9 May 2014 (UTC)

The Signpost: 07 May 2014
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Mississippi River towns
Hi there. Our paths haven't crossed in a while. I wanted to share this link with you. There are still a few more old river towns in Bolivar County, but that's about it. I only added the plantations on the river where it was evident that a populated place was also established. I also added a few ghost towns along the Tombigbee, but there are a ton left to do. Lots of fun! Cheers. Magnolia677 (talk) 19:43, 10 May 2014 (UTC)

Copyright frustrations
I appreciate your frustrations but please don't shoot the messengers, they're only trying to ensure Wikipedia stays within the law. Sadly US copyright law is convoluted and trying to list all the possibilities is probably endless. Two good and well explained places to start are c:Commons:Hirtle chart for the generalities around dates and c:Commons:Freedom of panorama about photgraphing statues and buildings. But to answer one of your questions, if you photograph a memorial it is your responsibility as the uploader to establish that the subject of the photo is a public domain item. Nthep (talk) 09:05, 16 May 2014 (UTC)
 * Please do not post on this page. I have bad genetics I am a meat pop tart, I will in a free society post my contention with any rule that is applied with virtually NO explanation. Last I recalled, in a volunteer environment, where we all work together, it would be logical and cogent to COOPERATE. I am very appreciative of the other admins who actually shook things up and INFORMED me about the reasoning of said deletion. Thats rather cool. In other words, if you actually let people know why something happens, odds are, JUST A HUNCH, everything would go rather smooth.....HOWEVER, to the absurdist extreme, to tell me, my consternation is "shooting the messenger" I cant help you there. GOOD FAITH ASSUMPTIONS ASIDE HA HA HA I mean why help people LEARN HOW TO CONTRIBUTE MORE when it is far far easier to essentially provide a kiss off message and certainly encourage future contributions..I assure you I am aching to post another memorial pic..honest....... Coal town guy (talk) 14:01, 16 May 2014 (UTC)

The Signpost: 14 May 2014
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Elcor, Minnesota
Hi, CTG! I want to thank you for the Wiki Ghost Towns Barnstar and nomination for Editor of the Week. I appreciate all your comments and support of this article. At this point, I don't think there's much more I can do with it. I've referenced all the RS that I can, have added photos, proper licensure, added content for clarification and cleaned up the article to try to bring it up to Wiki standards. I don't know who rates these things, but would you take another look at it? I welcome any further suggestions!DrGregMN (talk) 19:49, 18 May 2014 (UTC)

VisualEditor newsletter—May 2014


Did you know? The cite menu offers quick access to up to five citation templates. If your wiki has enabled the "" menu, press "" and select the appropriate template from the menu.

Existing citations that use these templates can be edited either using the "" tool or by selecting the reference and choosing the "" item in the "" menu.

Read the user guide for more information.

Since the last newsletter, the VisualEditor team has mostly worked on the new citation tool, improving performance, reducing technical debt, and other infrastructure needs.

The biggest change in the last few weeks is the new citation template menu, labeled "". The new citation menu offers a locally configurable list of citation templates on the main toolbar. It adds or opens references using the simplified template dialog that was deployed last month. This tool is in addition to the "" item in the "" menu, and it is not displayed unless it has been configured for that wiki. To enable this tool on your wiki, see the instructions at VisualEditor/Citation tool.

Eventually, the VisualEditor team plans to add autofill features for these citations. When this long-awaited feature is created, you could add an ISBN, URL, DOI or other identifier to the citation tool, and VisualEditor would automatically fill in as much information for that source as possible. The concept drawings can be seen at mw:VisualEditor/Design/Reference Dialog, and your ideas about making referencing quick and easy are still wanted.


 * There is a new Beta Feature for setting content language and direction.  This allows editors who have opted in to use the "" tool in the "" menu to add HTML span tags that label text with the language and as being left-to-right (LTR) or right-to-left (RTL), like this:   . This tool is most useful for pages whose text combines multiple languages with different directions, common on Right-to-Left wikis.
 * The tool for editing mathematics formulae in VisualEditor has been slightly updated and is now available to all users, as the "" item in the "" menu. It uses LaTeX like in the wikitext editor.
 * The layout of template dialogs has been changed, putting the label above the field.  Parameters are now called "fields", to avoid a technical term that many editors are unfamiliar with.
 * TemplateData has been expanded:  You can now add "suggested" parameters in TemplateData, and VisualEditor will display them in the template dialogs like required ones.  "Suggested" is recommended for parameters that are commonly used, but not actually required to make the template work.  There is also a new type for TemplateData parameters: wiki-file-name, for file names.  The template tool can now tell you if a parameter is marked as being obsolete.
 * Some templates that previously displayed strangely due to absolute CSS positioning hacks should now display correctly.
 * Several messages have changed: The notices shown when you save a page have been merged into those used in the wikitext editor, for consistency.  The message shown when you "" out of an edit is clearer.  The beta dialog notice, which is shown the first time you open VisualEditor, will be hidden for logged-in users via a user preference rather than a cookie.  As a result of this change, the beta notice will show up one last time for all logged-in users on their next VisualEditor use after Thursday's upgrade.
 * Adding a category that is a redirect to another category prompts you to add the target category instead of the redirect.
 * In the "" dialog, it is no longer possible to set a redundant border for thumbnail and framed images.
 * There is a new Template Documentation Editor for TemplateData.  You can test it by editing a documentation subpage (not a template page) at Mediawiki.org: edit mw:Template:Sandbox/doc, and then click "Manage template documentation" above the wikitext edit box.  If your community would like to use this TemplateData editor at your project, please contact product manager James Forrester or file an enhancement request in Bugzilla.
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 * The developers merged in many minor fixes and improvements to MediaWiki interface integration (e.g., edit notices), and made VisualEditor handle Education Program pages better.
 * At the request of the community, VisualEditor has been deployed to Commons as an opt-in. It is currently available by default for 161 Wikipedia language editions and by opt-in through Beta Features at all others, as well as on several non-Wikipedia sites.

Looking ahead:  The toolbar from the PageTriage extension will no longer be visible inside VisualEditor. More buttons and icons will be accessible from the keyboard. The "" link will be moved out of the "" menu, into the "" menu. Support for upright image sizes (preferred for accessibility) and inline images is being developed. You will be able to see the Table of Contents while editing. Looking further out, the developers are also working on support for viewing and editing hidden HTML comments. VisualEditor will be available to all users on mobile devices and tablet computers. It will be possible to upload images to Commons from inside VisualEditor.

If you have questions or suggestions for future improvements, or if you encounter problems, please let everyone know by posting a note at mw:VisualEditor/Feedback or by joining the office hours on Thursday, 19 June 2014 at 10:00 UTC. If you'd like to get this newsletter on your own page (about once a month), please subscribe at w:en:Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Newsletter for English Wikipedia only or at meta:VisualEditor/Newsletter for any project. Thank you! Whatamidoing (WMF) 22:16, 21 May 2014 (UTC)

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The Center Line: Spring 2014

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New photos
Just wanted to let you know that I visited the Eastern Kentucky coal country yesterday; photos will be forthcoming for localities such as Wheelwright and Burton. Wheelwright seemed the epitome of a coal town: at the end of a dead-end road, along a stream, lots of what were clearly company-built houses, and a falling-apart downtown. Several of the pivotal buildings mentioned in the National Register nomination are gone, although I got photos for some of the ones that remain. For a little while in the recent past, they had jobs, although unusual ones: the Otter Creek Correctional Center operated there from 1981 until closing in 2012. I'm definitely left wondering what the locals do for a living, aside from the school, post office, and gas station employees; I saw no sign of any current mining operations, and there's no way you can farm the surrounding countryside. Maybe they all drive to Prestonsburg for work? Nyttend (talk) 19:52, 15 June 2014 (UTC)
 * All you need to do is look at the population figures for the last 40 years and you will know what will happen...McDowell County, West Virginia is doing it now. Most folks stay in service industries until their parents die, then they move out. I am green with envy that you went. I used my google fu to its maximum and found a neat way to drie my photography...I look up demolition contracts and offers for the areas I take pics of. So far, it has worked. I will back and active soon, taking care of a few presdervation things Coal town guy (talk) 14:42, 17 June 2014 (UTC)
 * I agree with you that it's not particularly neutral, between two massive sections on court rulings and environmental record, and the trespassing section needs to go per WP:NOTNEWS unless there's a longer-term relevance. We definitely need to mention them, but right now almost all the article is dedicated to saying how horrible the company is ("is" and not "was", since much hasn't been updated since they got bought up), way past what would be neutral.  You mention community service: this definitely needs to be redone, but it isn't something we'd trash.  Go back to Wheelwright for a minute: if we were writing a comprehensive article about the owner, Elk Horn Coal, we'd want to mention Wheelwright because it was (in a way) a model town, and we'd definitely need to mention how they built a swimming pool, above-average-quality housing (after the first few years), and a golf course that was free for all workers.  In the same way, we should mention what Massey has done for its workers and their communities.  Finally on those photos, I'm still getting them organised; it might be several days before they're uploaded.  I had hoped to get a lot of Lexington photos on my way back, but the roads between Salyersville and Wheelwright were so slow (I got stuck behind a funeral procession south of Salyersville and behind bicyclists climbing the ridge just west of Wheelwright) that I lost a lot of time, so I'm making it my goal to get back to Lexington on Saturday and dodge the isolated thunderstorms.  Nyttend backup (talk) 17:36, 18 June 2014 (UTC)
 * Sounds good. A few of my "usual haunts" are going the way of the dozer very soon. I do also relate to photo delays......Coal town guy (talk) 00:47, 19 June 2014 (UTC)
 * Floyd County photos uploaded; some are at Wayland, Burton, and Bosco, but several more are on Commons. I've just created Commons:Category:Wheelwright, Kentucky (although in all fairness, 14 of the 18 images are from the 1940s), and five other images are in the parent Floyd County category, including one of the post office at the redlinked Lackey.  I have work to do on images from Breathitt, Clark, Estill, Fayette, Henry, Knott, Lee, Madison, Magoffin, Perry, Powell, Scott, and Wolfe counties, although of course some of them aren't Eastern Coal Fields (e.g. Henry County map), but you'd do well to look at the Commons categories for each county if you're curious what I got.  If you don't feel like looking, I'll be happy to look for something specific if you'd like.  Nyttend (talk) 00:32, 21 June 2014 (UTC)
 * Thanks for letting me know. A mini-stub, with just text, tends to make me think of an auto-generated entry from a database such as GNIS.  That's part of the reason I try to get these small-town pictures; when we don't have text from any other source, a photo really helps to demonstrate that we've done some work, that it's definitely still there and not simply a group of building foundations or a GNIS error.  Nyttend (talk) 20:04, 22 June 2014 (UTC)
 * ANY Time. I do have a few hundred coal town pics on hand to help flesh out some of these places...I have at times not posted them, BUT I must agree with what you are sayingCoal town guy (talk) 21:11, 22 June 2014 (UTC)

The Signpost: 18 June 2014
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VisualEditor global newsletter—June 2014
Did you know? The character formatting menu, or "" menu lets you set bold, italic, and other text styles. "Clear formatting" removes all text styles and removes links to other pages.

Do you think that clear formatting should remove links? Are there changes you would like to see for this menu? Share your opinion at MediaWiki.org.

The user guide has information about how to use VisualEditor. The VisualEditor team is mostly working to fix bugs, improve performance, reduce technical debt, and other infrastructure needs. You can find on Mediawiki.org weekly updates detailing recent work.


 * They have moved the "" link out of the "" menu, into the "" menu. Within dialog boxes, buttons are now more accessible (via the Tab key) from the keyboard.
 * You can now see the target of the link when you click on it, without having to open the inspector.
 * The team also expanded TemplateData: You can now add a parameter type  "  for dates and times in the ISO 8601 format, and  "  for values which are true or false. Also, templates that redirect to other templates (like   →  ) now get the TemplateData of their target (bug 50964).  You can test TemplateData by editing mw:Template:Sandbox/doc.
 * Category: and File: pages now display their contents correctly after saving an edit (bug 65349, bug 64239)
 * They have also improved reference editing: You should no longer be able to add empty citations with VisualEditor (bug 64715), as with references.  When you edit a reference, you can now empty it and click the "use an existing reference" button to replace it with another reference instead.
 * It is now possible to edit inline images with VisualEditor. Remember that inline images cannot display captions, so existing captions get removed.  Many other bugs related to images were also fixed.
 * You can now add and edit   and   in the "" menu, rounding out the full set of page options currently planned.
 * The tool to insert special characters is now wider and simpler.

Looking ahead
The VisualEditor team has posted a draft of their goals for the next fiscal year. You can read them and suggest changes on MediaWiki.org.

The team posts details about planned work on VisualEditor's roadmap. You will soon be able to drag-and-drop text as well as images. If you drag an image to a new place, it won't let you place it in the middle of a paragraph. All dialog boxes and windows will be simplified based on user testing and feedback. The VisualEditor team plans to add autofill features for citations. Your ideas about making referencing quick and easy are still wanted. Support for upright image sizes is being developed. The designers are also working on support for viewing and editing hidden HTML comments and adding rows and columns to tables.

Supporting your wiki
Please read VisualEditor/Citation tool for information on configuring the new citation template menu, labeled "". This menu will not appear unless it has been configured on your wiki.

If you speak a language other than English, we need your help with translating the user guide. The guide is out of date or incomplete for many languages, and what's on your wiki may not be the most recent translation. Please contact me if you need help getting started with translation work on MediaWiki.org.

VisualEditor can be made available to most non-Wikipedia projects. If your community would like to test VisualEditor, please contact product manager James Forrester or file an enhancement request in Bugzilla.

Please share your questions, suggestions, or problems by posting a note at mw:VisualEditor/Feedback or by joining the office hours on Saturday, 19 July 2014 at 21:00 UTC (daytime for the Americas and Pacific Islands) or on Thursday, 14 August 2014 at 9:00 UTC (daytime for Europe, Middle East, Asia).

To change your subscription to this newsletter, please see the subscription pages on Meta or the English Wikipedia. Thank you! Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 04:59, 25 June 2014 (UTC)

West Virginee
How you doing? I wrote you a couple of times but didn't hear back. I'm slowly adding pics from Virginia, West Virginia and Kentucky. Lovely part of the county. Magnolia677 (talk) 14:12, 26 June 2014 (UTC)
 * Life gets in the way of editing. I'm soon to be in the same boat.  I have a few more Appalachian photos to upload, then just monitor my watchlist.  I finally finished this project.  Remarkably, there are still a few more ghost towns on the Mississippi that were once populated places and have a GNIS number.  Your trip sounds wonderful.  Nice to get caught up with you!  Magnolia677 (talk) 17:23, 26 June 2014 (UTC)

The Signpost: 25 June 2014
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Killarney, West Virginia
Hey there. Can you have a look at Killarney, West Virginia? It's listed as a ghost town, but Pocahontas has a fairly modern coal processing plant off Highway 33 there. I just added a picture of it to the Killarney article. Then again, there's not much else there, so it probably is a ghost town. Thanks! Magnolia677 (talk) 13:10, 1 July 2014 (UTC)

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Kentucky help
Thanks for the offer! But what do you mean? Are you perhaps referring to this edit? If you feel like writing "good stubs" or better, I can help you find NR nominations if you're not already familiar with the NPS website. Nyttend (talk) 23:57, 7 August 2014 (UTC)
 * Okay, a few basic points; I'm probably telling you some things you already know, but I just want to make sure. (1) Please please please don't create NRIS-only stubs!  You probably already know this, but these stubs really aren't informative encyclopedia articles, and we're better with a redlink than an NRIS-only stub.  Plus, NRIS occasionally contains statements that (once you check the documentation) are egregious errors; see "Perfect example of NRIS errors" at WT:NRHP.  (2) You can access NRIS via User:Elkman's website.  If you want to find information for a specific site, get its refnum from the county list (it's the eight-digit number immediately below the date when the site was listed), and put the refnum in the lower blank.  You can also type the name into the upper blank, but sometimes there are typos or turned-around names (e.g. most personal names are listed as "Lastname, Firstname, House"), so it's normally easier to use the refnum.  (3) The best common source for NR site articles is the nomination form.  Once you get the infobox for a site, Elkman's page will give you the URL for a site (look below the information on the left side of the page), as well as the URL for the associated group of photos.  NPS has digitised most nominations, with the major exceptions being restricted-address locations and locations listed since about 2008.  KHC has nominations online for sites listed since about 2010 (just put the name into Google), so the only ones that aren't online at all are sites listed from around 2008 until 2010.  (4) If you want to produce a "good stub", like several users often do, this should be enough.  If you want to produce fewer but fuller articles, like I generally do, don't forget your county histories!  You mention Perry County; for one of these "good stubs", see its only listing, the Presbyterian church in Buckhorn.  Nyttend (talk) 02:54, 8 August 2014 (UTC)

VisualEditor newsletter—July and August 2014
''The VisualEditor team is currently working mostly to fix bugs, improve performance, reduce technical debt, and other infrastructure needs. You can find on Mediawiki.org weekly updates detailing recent work.'' VisualEditor - Link editing inline box.png.

The user guide is also being updated.
 * alt=Screenshot of VisualEditor's link tool|240px]]

The biggest visible change since the last newsletter was to the dialog boxes. The design for each dialog box and window was simplified. The most commonly needed buttons are now at the top. Based on user feedback, the buttons are now labeled with simple words (like "Cancel" or "Done") instead of potentially confusing icons (like "<" or "X"). Many of the buttons to edit links, images, and other items now also show the linked page, image name, or other useful information when you click on them.
 * Hidden HTML comments (notes visible to editors, but not to readers) can now be read, edited, inserted, and removed. A small icon (a white exclamation mark on a dot) marks the location of each comments.  You can click on the icon to see the comment.
 * You can now drag and drop text and templates as well as images. A new placement line makes it much easier to see where you are dropping the item.  Images can no longer be dropped into the middle of paragraphs.
 * All references and footnotes (  tags) are now made through the "" menu, including the "" (manual formatting) footnotes and the ability to re-use an existing citation, both of which were previously accessible only through the "" menu. The "" is still added via the "" menu.
 * When you add an image or other media file, you are now prompted to add an image caption immediately. You can also replace an image whilst keeping the original caption and other settings.
 * All tablet users visiting the mobile web version of Wikipedias will be able to opt-in to a version of VisualEditor from 14 August. You can test the new tool by choosing the beta version of the mobile view in the Settings menu.
 * The link tool has a new "Open" button that will open a linked page in another tab so you can make sure a link is the right one.
 * The "Cancel" button in the toolbar has been removed based on user testing. To cancel any edit, you can leave the page by clicking the Read tab, the back button in your browser, or closing the browser window without saving your changes.

Looking ahead
The team posts details about planned work on the VisualEditor roadmap. The VisualEditor team plans to add auto-fill features for citations soon. Your ideas about making referencing quick and easy are still wanted. Support for upright image sizes is being developed. The designers are also working on support for adding rows and columns to tables. Work to support Internet Explorer is ongoing.

Feedback opportunities
The Editing team will be making two presentations this weekend at Wikimania in London. The first is with product manager James Forrester and developer Trevor Parscal on Saturday at 16:30. The second is with developers Roan Kattouw and Trevor Parscal on Sunday at 12:30.

Please share your questions, suggestions, or problems by posting a note at the VisualEditor feedback page or by joining the office hours discussion on Thursday, 14 August 2014 at 09:00 UTC (daytime for Europe, Middle East and Asia) or on Thursday, 18 September 2014 at 16:00 UTC (daytime for the Americas; evening for Europe).

If you'd like to get this newsletter on your own page (about once a month), please subscribe at w:en:Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Newsletter for English Wikipedia only or at Meta for any project. Thank you! Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:14, 8 August 2014 (UTC)

The Signpost: 06 August 2014
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McDowell County localities
We generally use a simple issue to decide whether a location belongs on the county template: if it's not itself a municipality, is it in an incorporated area, or is it unincorporated? For county template purposes, a neighborhood is any portion of a municipality; to take some examples (sorry that it's so far away, but I can't think of something near you), Acton, Indiana, surrounded by farm fields, is considered an Indianapolis neighborhood because it's within the city limits, while North Corbin, Kentucky isn't considered part of Corbin because it's outside the city limits. These places don't belong on the county template, unless of course we've made a mistake and they're really not in the city limits of Gary. Nyttend (talk) 22:44, 11 August 2014 (UTC)
 * I have to differ with all three of them. Begin by going to Google Maps and puting in Gary, and it will give the city limits.  If you put in Wilcoe, you'll see a spot that's definitely in the limits.  The same is true of Elbert, with Gary's city limits extending southward past Elbert all the way to Filbert, and for Thorpe, as the city limits go east a little bit past the spot where Leslie Creek flows into the Tug Fork.  I'm not clear why you say that Thorpe is 9.1 miles away; Google says that it's 2.6, and Elbert 2.3.  Are there perhaps two-or-more places of each name in the area?  Nyttend (talk) 22:59, 11 August 2014 (UTC)

Gary, WV "neighborhoods"
I saw your note on Nyttend's talk page. Those descriptions are actually my fault (though I wrote them about five years ago). Gary and its constituent communities were sort of an odd situation when I was writing articles on every place with a post office in WV. At the time, I wasn't quite sure how to handle distinct communities that were legally incorporated as part of another distinct community, and "neighborhood" seemed like the closest description. In hindsight, I think you're right that it's not a very good description, and it's probably just better to call it a community and explain its legal situation in more detail. I'll leave that to you, since you know way more about the area than I do. By the way, you might want to take a look at Warriormine, West Virginia; I think it's a similar situation to Gary where a separate community became legally part of another one, so that probably isn't a neighborhood either. TheCatalyst31 Reaction•Creation 22:48, 11 August 2014 (UTC)
 * I just replied to Nyttends page, its a custom that started in the last few years in McDowell, Coalwood claimed War was a neighborhood, the then Mayor, stated how unusual that was as War is a City......Its not at all anybodys fault per se, it is however some misinformation that not many care enough to correct.......Coal town guy (talk) 22:54, 11 August 2014 (UTC)
 * I will however in the spirit of cooperation follow ANY consensusCoal town guy (talk) 22:55, 11 August 2014 (UTC)
 * If you have any sources that talk about the situation with Gary, they'd be useful; the Gary article used to explain that Elbert, Filbert, Thorpe, and Wilcoe were once separate communities before Gary was incorporated, but that got removed because it was unreferenced. The Filbert article claims that it's still partly unincorporated, so if you have anything on that it'd be great too. I think Nyttend's right that the consensus is that places shouldn't be in the navbox if they're part of an incorporated city, but it's not enforced too strictly; Warriormine's been in the McDowell County navbox for years, and former settlements within incorporated cities are usually allowed, so it's a bit murky. This might be worth making an exception, though it'd take some discussion first. TheCatalyst31 Reaction•Creation 23:02, 11 August 2014 (UTC)
 * MOST EXCELLENT (rubbing hands together)...a few years ago, I had the pleasure of meeting with the VP of the NSCA, (National Scrip Collectors Association), the idea of these places being seperate was paramount for 2 reasons, 1)Greed and 2)generating higher revenue and creating greater profit.Each of these places had its own mine and yes, its own company store and yes, its own coal company scrip. You of course HAD to spend the company scrip in that specific company town. It meant that you could NOT come from another town and use another towns scrip, UNLESS you wanted to take a HUGE hit on the value of your credits. Bottom line, it was historically known that these were their own little places. WHEN the coal mined out, When the individual companies in each of these places faded out, people would say, oh yes, they are a neighborhood, BUT in reality, in civil matters or an actual map, no. I have to date never ever seen a map, from the state or any county that explicitly stated, oh they are part of Gary etc etc. Coal town guy (talk) 23:38, 11 August 2014 (UTC)
 * I understand what you mean, but at the present time all of them are within Gary's city limits; they can definitely have separate identities in historical contexts and in the mind of the man-on-the-street, but as we're going by legal status, we have to depend on Google's boundaries unless we have reason to believe that they've made a mistake somewhere. However, it's not just a Google thing: Elbert, Filbert, and Thorpe are depicted in the city limits by USGS topographical maps.  If you go to Gary on mapper.acme.com and set it on topo mode, you'll see the city limits (dashed lines, e.g. the ones at N 37.34839 W 81.54336) extending down to Filbert and east of Thorpe.  My Census Bureau map of Gary (final page of this document) depicts city limits functionally identical to the ones shown by Google, so I don't think we can say that Google's in error here.  Nyttend (talk) 00:25, 12 August 2014 (UTC)
 * AGREED...Found an excellent ref, and want to ask, what do we do??...Here s why, According to the book,U.S. Steel and Gary, West Virginia: Corporate Paternalism in Appalachia, they were formerly independant, BUT part of the condition for Gary to incorporate was to make them part and parcel of Gary. Which they did in 1971. Since they were at one time independant and a few have current post offices, how do we handle that?? In my opinion it would be a misnomer to say they are a neighborhood especially since they were independant, is it possible to make them historical places or in some way designate they were actual places before Gary was incorporated??? Coal town guy (talk) 00:29, 12 August 2014 (UTC)
 * "Historical places" — I'm really only familiar with two usages of this phrase (both of which would be wrong): either what the GNIS means by, i.e. a ghost town, or a community that's really historic, and I doubt that's what you mean.  Could you give an example of what you're thinking of adding to the article?  Not trying to say "don't be bold", as I won't complain if you start editing these articles; it's just that I can't answer you properly because I'm not clear what you're suggesting.  PS, I'm left wondering whether the following text might be kind-of what you're thinking as an intro.  Wilcoe is a mining community within the city limits of Gary, WV, US.  Does this work?  Nyttend (talk) 00:47, 12 August 2014 (UTC)
 * Correct, it can not be a "historical" place under GNIS, I know one still has an active post office, HOWEVER, a former coal town within the limits of Gary is probably the most accurate descriptor.The rub as it were would be how to categorize it. Would it be in the county template as an unincorporated community as I cant say, its a ghost town??........I will edit the locations with that intro for sure. The neighborhood thing is not accurate as a descriptorCoal town guy (talk) 01:16, 12 August 2014 (UTC)
 * No, it still wouldn't go on the county template: the whole point of those is to show current municipalities and current locations outside municipal limits. In states with townships, we don't list former townships, and when municipality A annexes municipality B, we don't include B — for example, that's why Hamilton County, Ohio doesn't include Mill Creek Township, Hamilton County, Ohio or Spring Grove Village, Cincinnati.  In the same way, when an unincorporated area gets annexed, we don't include it, because it's already on there via the municipal article.  They all should go into Category:Neighborhoods in West Virginia, since it's meant for everything that's part of a municipality, whether historically-freestanding towns or Wheeling's East End.  Nyttend (talk) 01:24, 12 August 2014 (UTC)
 * AHA, I got it! I can edit the City of Gary article, remove the individual places from the template, I like the above because its a rather good example of how to approach itCoal town guy (talk) 01:41, 12 August 2014 (UTC)
 * Should have all of the edits complete by tomorrow, I did however get them off of the county template. I wanted to say thanks to you for helping out here. I want to be able to address these places properly.Coal town guy (talk) 01:45, 12 August 2014 (UTC)

Mooreville, Mississippi
I hope you're having a great summer! I was asked to have a look at these four census-designated places and created articles where I could. I started with Mooresville, Mississippi and I'm already stumped. Mooreville, Mississippi (no "S") is an unincorporated community in Lee County (GNIS), and Mooresville, Mississippi (GNIS) is a CDP in Lee County at the same geo-coordinates (the "S" somehow got added to new article, but it's just a variant of "Mooreville"). Complicating this is that the Mooreville (CDP) listing on GNIS also lists another place called "Evergreen", though Evergreen has no GNIS listing in Lee County and is not on ACME topo.

Would you suggest the following:
 * redirected Mooresville, Mississippi to Mooreville, Mississippi.
 * acknowledge the variant spellings.
 * change the text and infobox of Mooreville, Mississippi to be a census-designated place?

Or, should the text on the Wiki article state that it is both an unincorporated community and a CDP? Thanks! Magnolia677 (talk) 20:25, 17 August 2014 (UTC)
 * It looks like the Census Bureau either misspelled the name or is using an alternate spelling, but it's pretty clear that Mooreville and "Mooresville" are the same place. I'd suggest you do what you suggested above, though it might be worth mentioning that Mooreville is both a CDP and an unincorporated community (since while all CDPs are unincorporated, some aren't communities in the traditional sense). As for "Evergreen", that looks like it's just the name of another topographic map, which is in turn named after a nearby place in Itawamba County. TheCatalyst31 Reaction•Creation 20:50, 17 August 2014 (UTC)
 * Thanks! Magnolia677 (talk) 21:43, 17 August 2014 (UTC)
 * I could be very wrong but I thought evergreen was a very old district name. But yup, s or no s it's the same place. Is there any reference stating which is correct? I can't look at this time but gnis May have a form at the details listing of the accepted entry. I start PT tomorrow. So I should be back to snuff soon. Coal town guy (talk) 01:06, 18 August 2014 (UTC)
 * AHA, Mooresville is an accepted name variant, [LOOKY LOOKY]....Hope this is not old hat for some of you, I will of course taker a look at the Factfinder to see if its still a CDP or notCoal town guy (talk) 15:31, 19 August 2014 (UTC)
 * Mooreville, is a CDP. [here], at least as far as 2013 data, did you want to edit this for the article??Coal town guy (talk) 15:37, 19 August 2014 (UTC)
 * Hey there. Would you have a moment to make the edit?  If not I can do it on the weekend. Thanks!  Magnolia677 (talk) 22:11, 19 August 2014 (UTC)
 * More here and here. I can add this in a few days if you're busy.  Magnolia677 (talk) 22:21, 19 August 2014 (UTC)

The Signpost: 13 August 2014
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You're welcome
We definitely need a button for thanking someone for thanking them for the edit... not sure where that would end, though. Well just two things, thanks for all your work -- I see you got an Editor of the Week, very nice -- but also, I wonder why it is named Peanut. Herostratus (talk) 20:40, 19 August 2014 (UTC)

The Signpost: 20 August 2014
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Clarksville, Mississippi
Have a peek at Clarksville, Mississippi. Long forgotten, like so many coal towns, if not for Wikipedia. Magnolia677 (talk) 01:39, 27 August 2014 (UTC)
 * Do you know of any online source of a map showing the community in relation to others? If so, I could send an entry nom to GNISCoal town guy (talk) 19:57, 27 August 2014 (UTC)

Yes:,, ,. Thanks! Magnolia677 (talk) 21:36, 27 August 2014 (UTC)
 * Got it, I can contact GNIS as it was is close vicinity to Pinckneyville. It will be anywhere from 5 to 10 days for them to note it. 173.73.32.152 (talk) 03:24, 28 August 2014 (UTC)

Coal town guy (talk) 03:26, 28 August 2014 (UTC)

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Adamsville, West Virginia
Hi-I came across Adamsville, West Virginia in Harrison County-GNIS-1534808-thanks-RFD (talk) 18:14, 31 August 2014 (UTC)
 * YAAAY, got it, Many thanks!Coal town guy (talk) 00:53, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

GNIS-new additions-access
Hi-How do I access GNIS to check for any new additions about places, communities, ghost towns, etc., involving Wisconsin (or elsewhere)? I had to use the Wisconsin Hometown Locator to go through each county, etc., and takes a long time to go through the hometown locator. Many thanks-RFD (talk) 13:01, 1 September 2014 (UTC)
 * The best way is to search all populated places or locals for a county and sort by entry date. I understand for Wisconsin thats a deal, BUT if you do the same search for ALL popultaed places or locals without specifying a county, the return will be large and take quite a bit of time to sort. I checked WV the other night, all of the new entries were ones that I submitted ;-)Coal town guy (talk) 22:42, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

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Ona, West Virginia
Hey there. A while back I added this link to the Ona article. The Kennedy brothers spent some time in West Virginia, and there are some fascinating pictures. Most seem to be copyrighted, but I've been trying to hunt down others that are public domain. Most presidential shots are formal and staged, but the West Virginia shots all show them just hanging out at some coffee shop, or standing outside a mine. Also, way back I added something to the Cleveland, Mississippi article, about when Robert compared the poverty in WV to that in Mississippi. He in fact was referring to McDowell County, but I can't seem to track down my source. On a personal note, having been to both Cleveland and Welch in the past year, two more beautiful cities you could not find. Anyway, I'm on the hunt for some public domain Kennedy photos. I think they'd add a lot to some WV articles. Cheers. Magnolia677 (talk) 09:03, 18 September 2014 (UTC)
 * Food for thought, Kennedy also visited Bramwell, West Virginia and Slab Fork, West Virginia. The tree he stood at in Bramwell still stands, its down from the post officeCoal town guy (talk) 14:15, 18 September 2014 (UTC)

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The Center Line: Summer 2014

 * —MediaWiki message delivery (talk) on behalf of Imzadi1979, 21:50, 30 September 2014 (UTC)

The Signpost: 01 October 2014
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VisualEditor newsletter—September and October 2014
Did you know? TemplateData is a separate program that organizes information about the parameters that can be used in a template. VisualEditor reads that data, and uses it to populate its simplified template dialogs.

With the new TemplateData editor, it is easier to add information about parameters, because the ones you need to use are pre-loaded.

See the help page for TemplateData for more information about adding TemplateData. The user guide has information about how to use VisualEditor. Since the last newsletter, the Editing team has reduced technical debt, simplified some workflows for template and citation editing, made major progress on Internet Explorer support, and fixed over 125 bugs and requests. Several performance improvements were made, especially to the system around re-using references and reference lists. Weekly updates are posted on Mediawiki.org.

There were three issues that required urgent fixes: a deployment error that meant that many buttons didn't work correctly (bugs 69856 and 69864), a problem with edit conflicts that left the editor with nowhere to go (bug 69150), and a problem in Internet Explorer 11 that caused replaced some categories with a link to the system message, MediaWiki:Badtitletext (bug 70894) when you saved. The developers apologize for the disruption, and thank the people who reported these problems quickly.

Increased support for devices and browsers
Internet Explorer 10 and 11 users now have access to VisualEditor. This means that about 5% of Wikimedia's users will now get an "Edit" tab alongside the existing "Edit source" tab. Support for Internet Explorer 9 is planned for the future.

Tablet users browsing the site's mobile mode now have the option of using a mobile-specific form of VisualEditor. More editing tools, and availability of VisualEditor on smartphones, is planned for the future. The mobile version of VisualEditor was tweaked to show the context menu for citations instead of basic references (bug 68897). A bug that broke the editor in iOS was corrected and released early (bug 68949). For mobile tablet users, three bugs related to scrolling were fixed (bug 66697, bug 68828, bug 69630). You can use VisualEditor on the mobile version of Wikipedia from your tablet by clicking on the cog in the top-right when editing a page and choosing which editor to use.

TemplateData editor
A tool for editing TemplateData will be deployed to more Wikipedias soon.  Other Wikipedias and some other projects may receive access next month. This tool makes it easier to add TemplateData to the template's documentation. When the tool is enabled, it will add a button above every editing window for a template (including documentation subpages). To use it, edit the template or a subpage, and then click the "" button at the top. Read the help page for TemplateData. You can test the TemplateData editor in a sandbox at Mediawiki.org. Remember that TemplateData should be placed either on a documentation subpage or on the template page itself. Only one block of TemplateData will be used per template.

Other changes
Several interface messages and labels were changed to be simpler, clearer, or shorter, based on feedback from translators and editors. The formatting of dialogs was changed, and more changes to the appearance will be coming soon, when VisualEditor implements the new MediaWiki theme from Design. (A preview of the theme is available on Labs for developers.) The team also made some improvements for users of the Monobook skin that improved the size of text in toolbars and fixed selections that overlapped menus.

VisualEditor-MediaWiki now supplies the  or   class on links to redirects and disambiguation pages, so that user gadgets that colour in these in types of links can be created.

Templates' fields can be marked as ' required ' in TemplateData. If a parameter is marked as required, then you cannot delete that field when you add a new template or edit an existing one (bug 60358).

Language support improved by making annotations use bi-directional isolation (so they display correctly with cursoring behaviour as expected) and by fixing a bug that crashed VisualEditor when trying to edit a page with a  attribute but no   set (bug 69955).

Looking ahead
The team posts details about planned work on the VisualEditor roadmap. The VisualEditor team plans to add auto-fill features for citations soon, perhaps in late October.

The team is also working on support for adding rows and columns to tables, and early work for this may appear within the month. Please comment on the design at Mediawiki.org.

In the future, real-time collaborative editing may be possible in VisualEditor. Some early preparatory work for this was recently done.

Supporting your wiki
At Wikimania, several developers gave presentations about VisualEditor. A translation sprint focused on improving access to VisualEditor was supported by many people. Deryck Chan was the top translator. Special honors also go to संजीव कुमार (Sanjeev Kumar), Robby, Takot, Bachounda, Bjankuloski06 and Ата. A summary of the work achieved by the translation community has been posted here. Thank you all for your work.

VisualEditor can be made available to most non-Wikipedia projects. If your community would like to test VisualEditor, please contact product manager James Forrester or file an enhancement request in Bugzilla.

Please join the office hours on Saturday, 18 October 2014 at 18:00 UTC (daytime for the Americas; evening for Africa and Europe) and on Wednesday, 19 November at 16:00 UTC on IRC.

''Give feedback on VisualEditor at mw:VisualEditor/Feedback. Subscribe or unsubscribe at Meta. To help with translations, please subscribe to the Translators mailing list or contact Elitre at Meta. Thank you!''

— Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 00:10, 8 October 2014 (UTC)

The Signpost: 08 October 2014
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Talkback from Eman235
Eman 235 / talk 05:25, 14 October 2014 (UTC)

KY counties
Don't worry; it's not what you think. See the "Badges" section of d:Wikidata:Development plan; this kind of thing is now being handled by Wikidata. Apparently the FA/FL stars will be managed by someone (or a bot) over at that site, although of course here we're going to retain control over what content is featured; we'll simply pass it along to Wikidata for processing. I'm guessing that this is intended to merge FA/GA stars at top right and in the interwiki links on the bottom left; with a single button click at Wikidata, a new FA will get its star, and all other Wikipedia articles about the subject will immediately have the English article marked as an FA. Nyttend (talk) 14:24, 15 October 2014 (UTC)

The Signpost: 15 October 2014
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The Signpost: 22 October 2014
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The Signpost: 29 October 2014
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Nada, Ky.
Hello, Coal town guy. A while back, I wrote an article about the Nada Tunnel, in Powell County, Kentucky. Ever since then, I can't seem to find any solid references for the red link Nada, Kentucky (a few pages link to it). I've been through Nada so I know that a small town is there but it doesn't appear on the GNIS website, even though the community is apparently mentioned in the NRHP. Do you have access to a source stating that Nada is in fact an unincorporated place so that we can start the Nada article? Either way, thanks for looking into it.- Gilliam (talk) 10:22, 1 November 2014 (UTC)
 * Okay, I created it. Thanks for the Lombard tip. I added what I could and will try to improve.- Gilliam (talk) 22:42, 1 November 2014 (UTC)

VisualEditor newsletter—November 2014
Did you know? VisualEditor is also available on the mobile version of Wikipedia. Login and click the pencil icon to open the page you want to edit. Click on the gear-shaped settings in the upper-right corner, to pick which editor to use. Choose "Edit" to use VisualEditor, or "Edit source" to use the wikitext editor.

It will remember whether you used wikitext or VisualEditor, and use the same editor the next time you edit an article.

The user guide has information about how to use VisualEditor. Not all features are available in Mobile Web. Since the last newsletter, the Editing Team has fixed many bugs and requests, and worked on support for editing tables and for using non-Latin languages. Their weekly updates are posted on Mediawiki.org. Informal notes from the recent quarterly review were posted on Meta.

Recent improvements
The French Wikipedia should see better search results for links, templates, and media because the new search engine was turned on for everyone there. This change is expected at the Chinese and German Wikipedias next week, and eventually at the English Wikipedia.

The "pawn" system has been mostly replaced. Bugs in this system sometimes added a chess pawn character to wikitext. The replacement provides better support for non-Latin languages, with full support hopefully coming soon.

VisualEditor is now provided to editors who use Internet Explorer 10 or 11 on desktop and mobile devices. Internet Explorer 9 is not supported yet.

The keyboard shortcuts for items in the toolbar's menus are now shown in the menus. VisualEditor will replace the existing design with a new theme from the User Experience / Design group. The appearance of dialogs has already changed in one Mobile version. The appearance on desktops will change soon. (You can see a developer preview of the old "Apex" design and the new "MediaWiki" theme which will replace it.)

Several bugs were fixed for internal and external links. Improvements to MediaWiki's search solved an annoying problem: If you searched for the full name of the page or file that you wanted to link, sometimes the search program could not find the page. A link inside a template, to a local page that does not exist, will now show red, exactly as it does when reading the page. Due to a error, for about two weeks this also affected all external links inside templates. Opening an auto-numbered link node like with the keyboard used to open the wrong link tool. These problems have all been fixed.

TemplateData
''' The tool for quickly editing TemplateData will be deployed to all Wikimedia Foundation wikis on Thursday, 6 November. '''   This tool is already available on the biggest 40 Wikipedias, and now all wikis will have access to it. This tool makes it easier to add TemplateData to the template's documentation. When the tool is enabled, it will add a button above every editing window for a template (including documentation subpages). To use it, edit the template or a subpage, and then click the "" button at the top. Read the help page for TemplateData. You can test the TemplateData editor in a sandbox at Mediawiki.org. Remember that TemplateData should be placed either on a documentation subpage or on the template page itself. Only one block of TemplateData will be used per template.

You can use the new autovalue setting to pre-load a value into a template. This can be used to substitute dates, as in this example, or to add the most common response for that parameter. The autovalue can be easily overridden by the editor, by typing something else in the field.

In TemplateData, you may define a parameter as "required". The template dialog in VisualEditor will warn editors if they leave a "required" parameter empty, and they will not be able to delete that parameter. If the template can function without this parameter, then please mark it as "suggested" or "optional" in TemplateData instead.

Looking ahead
Basic support for inserting tables and changing the number of rows and columns in tables will appear next Wednesday. Advanced features, like dragging columns to different places, will be possible later. The VisualEditor team plans to add auto-fill features for citations soon. To help editors find the most important items more quickly, some items in the toolbar menus will be hidden behind a "More" item, such as "underlining" in the styling menu. The appearance of the media search dialog will improve, to make picking between possible images easier and more visual. The team posts details about planned work on the VisualEditor roadmap.

The user guide will be updated soon to add information about editing tables. The translations for most languages except Spanish, French, and Dutch are significantly out of date. Please help complete the current translations for users who speak your language. Talk to us if you need help exporting the translated guide to your wiki.  You can influence VisualEditor's design . Tell the VisualEditor team what you want changed during the office hours via IRC. The next sessions are on Wednesday, 19 November at 16:00 UTC and on Wednesday 7 January 2015 at 22:00 UTC. You can also share your ideas at mw:VisualEditor/Feedback. Also, user experience researcher Abbey Ripstra is looking for editors to show her how they edit Wikipedia. Please sign up for the research program if you would like to hear about opportunities.

If you would like to help with translations of this newsletter, please subscribe to the Translators mailing list or contact us directly, so that we can notify you when the next issue is ready. Subscribe or unsubscribe at VisualEditor/Newsletter. Thank you!

— Whatamidoing (WMF) 20:41, 6 November 2014 (UTC)

The Signpost: 05 November 2014
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The Signpost: 12 November 2014
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The Signpost: 26 November 2014
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George Crumb
The rules are pretty unambiguous: we reject claims of fair use for images of living people, unless the image itself is significant. For example, we permit one of Bibi Aisha because she's only famous for being in a specific nonfree picture; we show the picture because it's really the most important part of her biography, and nobody except family and acquaintances would have heard of her if not for the picture. Just an average picture being used for ID is essentially never permitted; the only exceptions that I can remember are one of J.D. Salinger, used in his article before his death (he was such a recluse that it was deemed irreplaceable; this 1950 photo was apparently his last public appearance, even though he lived until 2010), and some guy (don't remember who) that had been sentenced to lots of life sentences in a high-security prison, and we concluded that nobody except for the prison photographer was going to be able to get a photo.

My best suggestion is that you find a decent photo and contact the photographer to request a copyright release. The easiest way to do this is often through Flickr, especially since changing the license there just requires the click of a button. Perhaps you could contact grupocatorceb and request a change of license on this picture? You could say something like "I'm trying to improve his Wikipedia article, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Crumb, but I couldn't find any copyright-acceptable pictures of him. Would you be willing to help us by changing the license on your picture to CC-by or CC-by-sa?" Nyttend (talk) 05:15, 6 December 2014 (UTC)

The Signpost: 03 December 2014
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Your two cents
You may be interested in this discussion. Magnolia677 (talk) 00:54, 10 December 2014 (UTC)

The Signpost: 10 December 2014
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The Signpost: 17 December 2014
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VisualEditor newsletter—December 2014


Did you know?

Basic table editing is now available in VisualEditor. You can add and remove rows and columns from existing tables at the click of a button.

The user guide has more information about how to use VisualEditor. Since the last newsletter, the Editing Team has fixed many bugs and worked on table editing and performance. Their weekly status reports are posted on Mediawiki.org. Upcoming plans are posted at the VisualEditor roadmap.

VisualEditor was deployed to several hundred remaining wikis as an opt-in beta feature at the end of November, except for most Wiktionaries (which depend heavily upon templates) and all Wikisources (which await integration with ProofreadPage).

Recent improvements
Basic support for editing tables is available. You can insert new tables, add and remove rows and columns, set or remove a caption for a table, and merge cells together. To change the contents of a cell, double-click inside it. More features will be added in the coming months. In addition, VisualEditor now ignores broken, invalid  and   elements, instead of trying to repair them.

You can now use find and replace in VisualEditor, reachable through the tool menu or by pressing  ⌃ Ctrl + F  or  ⌘ Cmd + F.

You can now create and edit simple  paragraphs for quoting and indenting content. This changes a "" into a "".

Some new keyboard sequences can be used to format content. At the start of the line, typing " *  " will make the line a bullet list; " 1.  " or " # " will make it a numbered list; " == " will make it a section heading; " : " will make it a blockquote. If you didn't mean to use these tools, you can press undo to undo the formatting change. There are also two other keyboard sequences: " [[ " for opening the link tool, and " {{ " for opening the template tool, to help experienced editors. The existing standard keyboard shortcuts, like ⌃ Ctrl + K to open the link editor, still work.

If you add a category that has been redirected, then VisualEditor now adds its target. Categories without description pages show up as red.

You can again create and edit galleries as wikitext code.

Looking ahead
VisualEditor will replace the existing design with a new theme designed by the User Experience group. The new theme will be visible for desktop systems at MediaWiki.org in late December and at other sites early January. (You can see a developer preview of the old "Apex" theme and the new "MediaWiki" one which will replace it.)

The Editing team plans to add auto-fill features for citations in January. Planned changes to the media search dialog will make choosing between possible images easier.

Help
If you would like to help with translations of this newsletter, please subscribe to the Translators mailing list or contact us directly, so that we can notify you when the next issue is ready. Subscribe or unsubscribe at Meta.
 * Share your ideas and ask questions at mw:VisualEditor/Feedback.
 * Translations of the user guide for most languages are oudated. Ukrainian, Portuguese, Spanish, French, and Dutch translators are nearly current. Please help complete the current translations for users who speak your language.
 * Talk to the Editing team during the office hours via IRC. The next session is on Wednesday, 7 January 2015 at 22:00 UTC.
 * File requests for language-appropriate "" and "" icons for the character formatting menu in Phabricator.
 * The design research team wants to see how real editors work. Please sign up for their research program.

Thank you! WhatamIdoing (WMF) (talk) 23:37, 20 December 2014 (UTC)

The Center Line: Fourth Quarter 2014

 * —MediaWiki message delivery (talk) on behalf of 10:38, 24 December 2014 (UTC)

The Signpost: 24 December 2014
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The Signpost: 31 December 2014
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Possibly unfree File:Coal scrip from Killarney West Virginia.jpg
A file that you uploaded or altered, File:Coal scrip from Killarney West Virginia.jpg, has been listed at Possibly unfree files because its copyright status is unclear or disputed. If the file's copyright status cannot be verified, it may be deleted. You may find more information on the file description page. You are welcome to add comments to its entry at if you object to the listing for any reason. Thank you. Stefan2 (talk) 19:47, 8 January 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost: 07 January 2015
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The Signpost: 14 January 2015
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 * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 19:27, 16 January 2015 (UTC)

Sunshine
P.S. -- Do you think this page needs archiving? Eman 235 / talk 16:03, 17 January 2015 (UTC)

The Signpost: 21 January 2015
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 * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 10:13, 22 January 2015 (UTC)