User talk:West.andrew.g/Archive 10

STiki use
Hey West.andrew.g, I just downloaded STiki today and I don't know how to activate it. Can you give me a crash course of it on my user page? Thanks. JustAGuyOnWikipedia (talk) 00:23, 3 December 2016 (UTC)


 * See STiki. Judging by your account, you likely don't have permission yet to use it. I see that you've also tried for rollback, it's really recommended that you rack up edits fighting vandalism first; it's important to distinguish between WP:VANDALISM and WP:NOTVAND, warn offending editors and report them. Ugog Nizdast (talk) 07:02, 3 December 2016 (UTC)

STiki Issues
I logged into it this morning, started working. All the buttons worked, it worked fine, but when I went to check my contributions to see if any other users got to the reverts before me (on a high-importance article), I saw that none of my last 30 minutes of patrolling was there. I also went to the pages themselves, and nothing happened. Any way to fix this? (please ping me when you reply) Adotchar | reply here  10:48, 16 December 2016 (UTC)
 * I restarted STiki and it worked again. It's still an issue, just it stopped when I restarted it. Adotchar | reply here  11:00, 16 December 2016 (UTC)
 * In the archives at WT:STiki this comes up several times. It is one of our most persistent and nasty bugs. We believe it is related to session dropping on the WMF side. We've struggled to write code to correct -- or at minimum, detect -- when a user is in this state . I believe some more debugging code will be pushed to users in our next release. Thanks, West.andrew.g (talk) 20:59, 16 December 2016 (UTC)
 * Thanks! Adotchar | reply here  03:00, 17 December 2016 (UTC)

Pls move your popular pages reports over to Wikipedia: space etc.
Hi there - first of all thank you for your great pageview-reports! Apparently nobody else is doing that and they look great.

And since nobody else is doing it and as these pages are of internal and external interest please move them over to Wikipedia:-space.

It would probably best to name them in the style of the prior Most read articles in 2008-pages ("Most read articles in 2013" etc). You can check the pages in Category:Wikipedia pageviews for other reports of that kind. Btw I just created that category and would also like to ask you to add that category to all pageview-reports that you produce (if you let a bot create/update such reports pls modify its code).

Furthermore I'd also like to ask you to create pages (they don't have to be in Wikipedia:-space) for all the reports that you only put up on http://pastebin.com/u/westand so far. Even if you don't see any value or potential interest in them and think that they aren't formatted/.. well enough. I do think they're of value and that interest might develop at a later point. Of course if you create some really strange report that nobody (e.g. for testing purposes) or just a single person (who might have requested it) might be interested in you don't need to set a page on here for it - however I can't see any of such in the ones you put on pastebin. Putting them up on Wikipedia has many advantages: first of they get made editable so people (and yourself at a later point) could (at least in theory) improve upon the work of yours, also their findability can be improved (mainly via categories), they can be discussed on their associated talk pages, properly linked to with internal links, etc. etc.

--Fixuture (talk) 19:50, 16 January 2017 (UTC)


 * Briefly, the decision to edit in user-space comes from the fact that these reports, and some related work, are of a mechanized nature. It is permitted for one to make mechanized edits to one's own user-space. To edit in other spaces, I'd have to receive bot approval for every report I wished to produce and maintain a separate account. This is not convenient for me, and we do have redirects in from Wikipedia space.
 * I can add categorizations to the weekly report data. I assume this can't be done via transclusion of the header on the weekly reports?
 * If one wants to take the one-off stuff I've put on PasteBin and copy-paste it here on wiki, I'm fine with that. However, the beauty PasteBin is that I can dump raw SQL output there in seconds. Dealing with Wikpedia's table formatting and other beautification is an order of magnitude more work. Given my limited cycles here these days, I'd prefer to focus on the more technical statistical/coding work. West.andrew.g (talk) 07:51, 17 January 2017 (UTC)


 * No, I don't think that this would be needed - instead simply ask for approval of the bot for reports once. That really should be enough. Also it doesn't apply to the pages I linked because you only used a bot to create the data - they aren't regularly updated by a bot or so. The same it's allowed to create an article about data that was generated by a computer program.
 * Please note that when things are inconvenient − and here it looks like it's fairly reasonable to say so (even though I don't see such a large issue with creating a separate account) − it usually means that Wikipedia needs to be improved. Hence you should probably create a post about it so that a change can be effected that not only helps you but also others for which it's likely to be inconvenient as well. If, for instance, that would mean that bots get distinguished by two types − one of which being few-edits-making report-generators that are allowed to be operated under ones main account and post to Wikipedia-space directly − then that's good. That actually might help drive up the amount (at least the publications) of such reports, which in turn is useful for editors as well as for researchers of all kind, present or future (e.g. Wikipedia pageview data is of interest to various fields of study − from sociology to economics).
 * That would be nice. Well, the category just has to be somewhere on the page - if it's on the header that's included in the report that should work as well. Could you please also add Category:Wikipedia contribution leaderboards to STiki/leaderboard?
 * Alright, because if you don't want to do it I'll do. I just thought maybe you'd like to do that plus I also don't have that much time either.
 * Alright, that's great too. It's just that statistics and code is rather useless if it's not used/seen by people. Allowing people who are interested in the data (knowingly or unknowingly beforehand) is just as important as creating the data in the first place. I try to do my part with the latter here but the more people that create such reports (or scripts) make them more openly findable themselves the better.
 * --Fixuture (talk) 18:59, 17 January 2017 (UTC)
 * That would be nice. Well, the category just has to be somewhere on the page - if it's on the header that's included in the report that should work as well. Could you please also add Category:Wikipedia contribution leaderboards to STiki/leaderboard?
 * Alright, because if you don't want to do it I'll do. I just thought maybe you'd like to do that plus I also don't have that much time either.
 * Alright, that's great too. It's just that statistics and code is rather useless if it's not used/seen by people. Allowing people who are interested in the data (knowingly or unknowingly beforehand) is just as important as creating the data in the first place. I try to do my part with the latter here but the more people that create such reports (or scripts) make them more openly findable themselves the better.
 * --Fixuture (talk) 18:59, 17 January 2017 (UTC)
 * Alright, that's great too. It's just that statistics and code is rather useless if it's not used/seen by people. Allowing people who are interested in the data (knowingly or unknowingly beforehand) is just as important as creating the data in the first place. I try to do my part with the latter here but the more people that create such reports (or scripts) make them more openly findable themselves the better.
 * --Fixuture (talk) 18:59, 17 January 2017 (UTC)

2016’s most-read Ukrainian Wikipedia articles
Hi, Andrew!

Can you help to create a 2016’s most-read Ukrainian Wikipedia articles?

I get this information on a monthly basis via https://tools.wmflabs.org/topviews/?project=uk.wikipedia.org&platform=all-access&date=last-month&excludes= but was unable to find a list for all the year. For 2015 there was http://tools.wmflabs.org/wikitrends/2015.html#ukrainian

Thank you! --Perohanych (talk) 09:26, 10 January 2017 (UTC)


 * Unfortunately I cannot, as I store only English pageview data for Wikipedia. All languages/projects data are released in raw (hourly + daily aggregate) form; but you are looking at a non-trivial technical project to get from these daily files to a yearly aggregate. I use nightly downloads and a pretty size-able database to get the task done, though I don't know the scale comparison between "en" and "uk". Best of luck. West.andrew.g (talk) 17:58, 10 January 2017 (UTC)
 * Can you file a similar Phabricator request to via the process described here? Thanks! Ed Erhart (WMF) (talk) 23:52, 18 January 2017 (UTC)
 * ✅ at https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T155736 is it correct? --Perohanych (talk) 14:51, 19 January 2017 (UTC)
 * Looks good to me! Ed Erhart (WMF) (talk) 19:13, 23 January 2017 (UTC)


 * Just noticed this thread. The first few most popular articles are core articles like Ukraine and Lesya Ukrainka.  The first pop culture entry is DZIDZIO which appears to be some crazy Ukrainian band.--Milowent • hasspoken  14:01, 24 February 2017 (UTC)

Medical participation statistics
I noticed you did for last year (wikiproject Medicine/editors 2015) do you know if 2016 will be available this year as well?, thank you for your time--Ozzie10aaaa (talk) 16:51, 14 February 2017 (UTC)
 * Unfortunately I do not have the bandwidth to take on another iteration of those statistics at this time. I've talked to Doc James and offered to share my source code if he can identify another contributor who might be able to help out -- unfortunately, the way I encoded it, much of this stuff requires database setup and is far from a push-to-play model. West.andrew.g (talk) 16:54, 14 February 2017 (UTC)
 * Hi. IANAD, but I was wondering if your source code could be published somewhere public, so that anyone can see & improve/utilize it? (Perhaps on Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Medicine/Stats or similar, for discoverability). However, possibly there's an obvious privacy reason, or similar, that I'm overlooking!
 * I probably can't help with it myself, because I've only dipped my toes into using Quarry a few times, usually just copy & subtly adapting an existing query; but my thought is that there's a greater likelihood of some enthusiastic dev picking up this request, on the spur of the moment (and ditto in years to come), if the source is directly available for them to look at, without any delays in communicating a request for it.
 * Just a thought. :-) Quiddity (talk) 02:19, 19 February 2017 (UTC)
 * Source would be appreciated if at all possible -- Samtar talk &middot; contribs 14:28, 23 February 2017 (UTC)

The two editors above seem interested per offered to share my source code if he can identify another contributor who might be able to help out... --Ozzie10aaaa (talk) 09:31, 24 February 2017 (UTC)
 * I am engaged in email conversation with User:DocJames and another contributor who is going to help produce medical statistics. I anticipate this user will provide both (1) the statistics you are interested in and (2) open-source the code. I am going to provide whatever support I can in that effort. As a result, I will not be releasing my code, as it was truly an unmitigated dumpster fire, and would take additional time to clean and document. I was basically crawling the whole of medical Wikipedia metadata via the API, transforming that locally to Java objects, serializing those objects as binary for database storage, and occasionally making calls to other databases (e.g., STiki's) for support. This is very far from the best practice. However this is implemented in the future is sure to be more extensible and portable. West.andrew.g (talk) 04:56, 25 February 2017 (UTC)
 * thank you for your help(and kind explanation) it means a lot to several of our members who are interested, its been a pleasure conversing with you, thank you again--Ozzie10aaaa (talk) 10:23, 25 February 2017 (UTC)
 * Ah, that makes sense! Much thanks for the explanation. I'm glad you've (all) found someone interested and capable to help. :) Quiddity (talk) 02:27, 27 February 2017 (UTC)

Userbox code
Dear Andrew, I was trying to use the code in free text from the userboxes fetching records from leaderboard (beginning with #invoke:STikiLeaderboard...) but this didnt really work, just got the XXX, any idea what I may have done wrong? Dan Koehl (talk) 02:31, 5 March 2017 (UTC)
 * Is this in reference to the STiki userbox that displays leaderboard permission? It's not working for you? Do you find that is working on other userpages where it is installed? I didn't write the Lua (?) code behind that userbox, so we'd need to consult someone in that space if things are broken. Thanks, West.andrew.g (talk) 05:13, 5 March 2017 (UTC)
 * Got it. To copy the code from the userbox for your personal use, it still needs to be in a transcluded from somewhere. Like I just did it at my sandbox here and put it wherever I wanted by adding --for example. Ugog Nizdast (talk) 07:19, 5 March 2017 (UTC)
 * , This is of course a very OT question, so please don't bother too much, I just thought it could be fun to see the numbers, without actually looking at the user box. When I look at the sandbox I can only see XXX, no numbers. Dan Koehl (talk) 09:27, 5 March 2017 (UTC)
 * , sorry didn't get you, what exactly are you trying to do? If I understood you right, the sandbox will show XX as long as it's "unused", to use it copy paste the transclusion part to your userpace. So put . See, just did it in my dashboard. Minor issue is I can't figure out the how to remove the line break at the beginning. Easy fix is, add whatever text you want to the template itself (my sandbox in this case). Or solving it, maybe we could ask at VP/T or WikiProject Templates but you said it's OT. Don't forget that you'll need to make your own template since I'm might clean my sandbox sooner or later. Ugog Nizdast (talk) 09:50, 5 March 2017 (UTC)
 * Thanks for your time, I am simply trying to extract the records, seen in the user boxes 8 amd 9, (position on the leaderboard, number of edits with Stiki) in a text section on my user page. Dan Koehl (talk) 10:21, 5 March 2017 (UTC)

Top 5000
Why has the top 5000 page not updated? It normally updates Sunday afternoon in my time zone (UTC-8) but now it is Monday evening and it hasn't updated for last week yet. -A la d insane   (Channel 2)  01:12, 7 March 2017 (UTC)
 * This was due to network maintenance at UPenn where my server lives. You'll notice the reports have since generated. Since these stats share a server with the WP:STiki tool, we generally post about downtime over there. Thanks, West.andrew.g (talk) 15:37, 7 March 2017 (UTC)
 * :) -A la <font color="#000000">d <font color="#ef0000">insane  <font color="#ff00f7"> (Channel 2)  16:56, 7 March 2017 (UTC)

Second opinion needed
Good evening, I was working with Stiki earlier and an edit from an article titled Lake Oswego High School showed up where an editor wrote about various racial and gender discrimination incidents over the past few years at the school. I marked it as a good faith revert and left the standard depth of nature message because I felt that the wording was a bit strong for it to be an exyclopida article; I also felt that one of the incidents was not really notable. All of the incidents were backed up with a separate news article. The editor came forward to me and demanded that undo my edit be undone, which he undid himself later citing my judgment on his edits was false. This is where I'm stuck, did I do the wrong thing by reverting his edits and did I misjudge them? I am trying to learn about the actions I should take with the Stiki tool; so any help/tips would be appreciated. If you don't want to help me with this situation just let me know and I will go ahead and ask someone else for their opinion. Thanks,  KDTW Flyer  ( talk ) 05:12, 7 March 2017 (UTC)
 * Hello there. As a general rule, I try to focus on technical work and do not wade into content disputes. Moreover, I simply have little experience/expertise in that dimension. You are likely to get a more thorough response by posting to WP:STiki or a content-focused help board. That said, tricky situations are precisely why the "PASS" button exists within STiki. Thanks, West.andrew.g (talk) 15:45, 7 March 2017 (UTC)
 * Okay thank you, as I said I understand if you can't help, someone else has gone on there and edited the article so that it's more appropriate. Thanks,  KDTW Flyer  ( talk ) 21:40, 11 March 2017 (UTC)

Add column for Protection level?
Hello Andrew,

Longtime fan of your list of popular pages. I'd like to estimate the % of pages (and % of pageviews) that are protected. Could you include protection level in the tables?

Warmly, – SJ  +  21:31, 23 March 2017 (UTC)


 * Sure. I can probably do this in the next 1-2 weeks. I have a basic understanding of how page protection works, but could you brief me a little further? Namely, do protected pages end up with a category assignment I can easily parse (i.e., like the class memberships)? What are all these possible categories? Are they strictly hierarchical? Or is it possible to be under more than one type of protection at once? (i.e., do I need multiple columns for all the protections, or will one suffice)? Thanks, West.andrew.g (talk) 02:02, 28 March 2017 (UTC)


 * To the right is what the protection options look like. Protection levels are hierarchical, and listed in order of increasing protection.  There are separate protections for editing and for moving a page.  There are two ways a page can be protected: either directly (the only case, I think, for any of the top 5000) or via transclusion (the checkbox at the bottom of the options list: mainly applies to templates).
 * The interesting question to me is whether a reader is actually able to "edit this page", or if the wiki looks like a non-wiki to most readers. (Look at the % of all pageviews that are to protected pages in the top 5k...)  The most popular pages are more likely to be protected [protection is related to whether lots of would-be vandals, often students or trolls, visit the pages], so I suspect the % is much higher than I'd like to believe.
 * – SJ  +  17:55, 31 March 2017 (UTC)


 * Thanks. So it seems like one report column for "edit" and another for "move" protections might suffice? The "unlock further protections" option doesn't open up weirdness, does it?

Nice response time :) Just a column for 'edit' protection should be fine.  Almost noone moves or tries to move pages; it's much less relevant for readers.  "Unlock further protections" is what you have to select to even toggle move protections [I believe because it's such a low-frequency task]. –  SJ  +  18:03, 31 March 2017 (UTC)
 * Acknowledged. I'll put this in my queue and respond here when its operational. Probably not in time for this weekend's report; but I'd anticipate next weekend's. West.andrew.g (talk) 18:04, 31 March 2017 (UTC)
 * ✅ -- ... and regenerated the last report as a test of the functionality. Thanks, West.andrew.g (talk) 04:28, 7 April 2017 (UTC)
 * Lovely! Thank you.  –  SJ  +  03:56, 13 April 2017 (UTC)

Red links
Hello, I saw your list of popular red-links and wanted to ask if you could help me to extract all red links in this list or at least tell me the way to do it. Thanks! Brainist (talk) 06:41, 27 April 2017 (UTC)
 * When I was producing that list I needed to know the links were going to be red before I published them to Wikipedia. This involved API calls. It would seem you have the benefit of letting Wikipedia parsing the initial list for you. One can then view/parse the generated HTML and extract only the red portions. Is this a one-time or ongoing need? West.andrew.g (talk) 14:42, 27 April 2017 (UTC)
 * Thanks very much for letting me know about API and parsing. I parsed the page into json format and converted it to csv excel file. Using some simple excel functions, I could get a list of the red links. Brainist (talk) 20:04, 27 April 2017 (UTC)

Are the top 5000 and the top 25 pages still being updated?
It looks like the top 5000 and top 25 pages haven't been updated in a few weeks and I was wondering if these will continue to be updated? Sloughflux (talk) 01:58, 8 August 2017 (UTC)
 * See one thread above. I think we are close to a resolution. West.andrew.g (talk) 05:48, 8 August 2017 (UTC)
 * ✅ -- Fixed... and the two reports we missed as a result of the downtime were back generated. Thanks, West.andrew.g (talk) 16:07, 9 August 2017 (UTC)

Permissions
Hey, didn't know if you were aware or not, but I submitted a request for permissions a while back. --<span style="white-space:nowrap;text-shadow:#009200 0.3em 0.4em 1.0em,#009200 -0.2em -0.2em 1.0em;color:#009200">Figfires Send me a message! 17:29, 4 October 2017 (UTC)
 * ✅ - Permission granted over at WT:STiki. Thanks, West.andrew.g (talk) 13:14, 6 October 2017 (UTC)

Entry on Wikipedia:STiki/milestones
May I ask what NS0 means? --<span style="white-space:nowrap;text-shadow:#009200 0.3em 0.4em 1.0em,#009200 -0.2em -0.2em 1.0em;color:#009200">Figfires Send me a message! 01:43, 9 October 2017 (UTC) Edited: 02:24, 9 October 2017 (UTC)
 * Namespace zero. West.andrew.g (talk) 13:49, 9 October 2017 (UTC)

Pageview files not currently being generated
First, thanks for doing that script in a way it updates precisely every seven days. Yet last week's is late (it should've appeared on the 30th). Can you please check it out? igordebraga ≠ 14:40, 2 August 2017 (UTC)
 * Please see: Wikipedia_talk:Top_25_Report. Thanks, West.andrew.g (talk) 18:46, 2 August 2017 (UTC)
 * ✅ -- Fixed... and the two reports we missed as a result of the downtime were back generated. Thanks, West.andrew.g (talk) 16:06, 9 August 2017 (UTC)

11 days since the last one (though you have been absent for five...), anything wrong? igordebraga ≠ 16:40, 21 September 2017 (UTC)
 * I lost connectivity with the machine last weekend, but was slow to notice due to some travel. Just today I have made contact with a colleague who should be able to restart the server. Once this is done, it will take a couple of hours to catch up on the missing data. Assuming we are able to get a restart today, everything should be in order to generate the next report on schedule (as well as back process the missing one). Thanks, West.andrew.g (talk) 15:27, 22 September 2017 (UTC)
 * Machine is alive. My office doesn't allow the SSH connectivity required to get in and restart the needed processes, but I'll be home in the next couple hours. West.andrew.g (talk) 17:57, 22 September 2017 (UTC)
 * ✅ -- Last week's report has now generated, everything should happen on time tonight. West.andrew.g (talk) 13:00, 23 September 2017 (UTC)

Just to not open another one, here's last week's report. Hope you like Tom Petty's eulogy in spite of the somewhat random song reference (even thought of writing that he deserved to get more views than the Linkin Park guy, that only beat him by a few thousand). igordebraga ≠ 18:27, 14 October 2017 (UTC)
 * Nice, thank you! I see the report has been written for a couple days, why hasn't it been transitioned to the front of WP:Top25Report?
 * I didn't think it deserved, lack of intro text and such. But will do so now. igordebraga ≠ 01:29, 17 October 2017 (UTC)

STiki leaderboard
Hello! Category:Wikipedia contribution leaderboards was renamed to Category:Lists of Wikipedians by contribution, per this discussion. Would you please update your wikicode for STiki/leaderboard so that you no longer add the old category—e.g. here and here? Thanks, -- Black Falcon (talk) 03:43, 16 October 2017 (UTC)
 * ✅ -- Change made in the generating code. Thanks, West.andrew.g (talk) 13:25, 17 October 2017 (UTC)
 * Much appreciated! -- Black Falcon (talk) 03:19, 18 October 2017 (UTC)

Final stats for 2017?
Hi Andrew! When can we expect a final update on the Top 5000 stats for 2017 as a whole? Not much should have changed over a couple days, but it would be nicer to deliver exact view counts to our readers when we push out the Top 50 report at WP:2017. Thanks in advance, and a happy year start! — JFG talk 23:44, 1 January 2018 (UTC)
 * They are posted now as per the talk page. West.andrew.g (talk) 04:03, 2 January 2018 (UTC)
 * Fantastic, many thanks! — JFG talk 14:07, 2 January 2018 (UTC)
 * Thanks for this. I've added "Based on the raw data from West.andrew.g and prepared with commentary by: ..." at Annual Top 50 Report. We couldn't do it without you! SchreiberBike &#124; ⌨   19:38, 2 January 2018 (UTC)

Promotion machine
The year end report has been published at Annual Top 50 Report. Many thanks for supplying the data upon which it is based - compiling the report would have been a literal impossibility without it. Now that it is published, we need to begin publicising it. In the past, you have mentioned emailing various internet outlets regarding the list. Do you have any informal list of such publications so that we can begin this progress. Thanks in advance. Stormy clouds (talk) 19:53, 2 January 2018 (UTC)
 * Basically any popular Internet publication that has online "tip submission" or an email address to drop off suggestions. When doing the submitting, it might be helpful to have a couple sentences summary (call out the most interesting points). NYTimes, WSJ, WashPo, The Atlantic, Gizmodo, Slashdot, etc. etc. etc. We're obviously aiming to get lucky with some of the larger publications, but submission en masse like this is pretty quick and easy. West.andrew.g (talk) 04:08, 3 January 2018 (UTC)

Dead links pages
Hi there. I've recently been fixing some dead links, and using Special:LinkSearch to find broken links. There are a batch linking from your 'dead link' archives, currently visible at the bottom (you will need to scroll down) of this set of results (dynamically generated). It is not essential, but is there a way to mark those dead links as dealt with or to otherwise de-activate those links? I can just ignore them if there isn't any sensible way to do this (I've been using 'nowiki' tags on some article talk pages, such as here, but that might have downsides of some sort).

I wonder if the links will show up from this page now as well? Poking around, it is actually quite useful to have a record of when those CWGC dead links were dead. Carcharoth (talk) 18:14, 7 February 2018 (UTC)


 * These lists of dead links are from a bot I wrote to perform research into link rot on Wikipedia. When that research stopped, consensus was to stop the bot as well, because it was making a lot of edits and no humans were really making an effort to clean up anything from its output. This was years ago. These are obviously static pages and now contain links that now may be (a) fixed, or (b) no longer appear on Wikipedia articles. If it makes things "cleaner" for you to not have them show up, feel free to just blank them from the pages where they appear. Honestly, any strategy you want to apply to these pages isn't going to offend me. West.andrew.g (talk) 18:30, 7 February 2018 (UTC)


 * OK, thanks. Will consider what to do at some later point. Carcharoth (talk) 18:44, 7 February 2018 (UTC)

Your User:West.andrew.g/Dead links and its 1054 archive pages have numerous links with 2 or 3 consecutive apostrophes, which are treated as italic and bold  markup. I assume that the apostrophes are actually part of URLs and need to be escaped as  to avoid being treated as italic or bold markup. I edited a few archive pages and User:West.andrew.g/Dead links, making such changes, although the first one I edited, I assumed that the triple apostrophe was intentional bold markup, so I edited that one differently. I will stop now pending discussion. Please be aware that of 2,089 Unclosed quotes in heading lint errors, 1702 are in the User namespace, and of those, most are in your dead links archives, so I would like to know for sure if my theory is correct that these apostrophes really need to be escaped. —Anomalocaris (talk) 20:31, 21 February 2018 (UTC)

Hello? Anybody home? —Anomalocaris (talk) 07:54, 28 March 2018 (UTC)
 * Again, from my perspective this a dead project (pun not intended). I am unsure if the apostrophes need to be escaped, or not, leaning towards the latter without having performed any experimentation myself. It seems like this is an area you are passionate about. By all means, be bold and decide what is best in terms of clearing up parser errors vs. other considerations. You aren't going get any push back from me. West.andrew.g (talk) 14:13, 28 March 2018 (UTC)

top viewed without biographies
Hi Andrew! Thank you for making this. I have two questions: 1) Is it possible given what you've already created (or what would it take to create as new) to make a popular page list without biographies? Or, without biographies, places, sports, films, television, etc. I saw the popular list for MED is based on the wikiprojects, but I don't know how it would be best to go about this. Best I can think of is some kind of post-sort addon that skims to the category section of each page from the dump and excludes from the list any entry with the words "births," "sports," latitude and longitude, etc. It's hard to consider how to do this because I don't think naming conventions for categories have been consistent enough to leave out only the content desired without for instance removing the article "television" alongside any series. 2) Is it possible to create a "random article" link that does not return biographies, locations, sports, films, etc. I have had the random article link as my homepage for some time, but it's not much use for learning about ideas I'd not have searched by name when 9/10 times it's the 1971 cricket team from somewhere, or a small town in uzbekistan, etc. --- I really appreciate any feedback or information you have about this issue! If it really is a small tweak of what you or someone else already has running, I'd love to know and you seem like the perfect person to ask. — Preceding unsigned comment added by JDontology (talk • contribs) 00:23, 4 May 2018 (UTC)
 * As a technical matter, what you describe is straightforward. It's easy to drop a certain article from a top list, or silently re-query for another random article, based on string/regular-expression matching criteria. The problem might be in determining and authoring that criteria with any sense of completeness or correctness. Indeed, the category structure of WP:MED is standardized, convenient, and well maintained, which is why it is so easy and beneficial to do reporting in collaboration with them. Personally, I am not an expert in the category conventions on WP. Seems like you might already be ahead of me in understanding that ontology. I don't have the bandwidth to come to an understanding of it, either -- though I'd be willing to install the matching logic someone else has determined into my reporting framework. Thanks, West.andrew.g (talk) 03:03, 4 May 2018 (UTC)
 * Oh thank you for the timely response! -- Per 2 the random article link: I looked and saw that the random link is apparently a server side algorithm that picks a number which is then used to determine the article it returns. I agree that some client side regex (in a chrome addon or is there an easier approach) could simply requery by scanning the category section. However, that has the potential to query the server a lot very quickly, and I'd imagine that's considered bad. Do you know who, or how I could get in contact with someone, that has access to the random article algorithm to request category exclusionary versions? I have a theory using virtual namespaces that would have the same processor load as the current random article algorithm. -- Per 1 top viewed: I agree it would be straightforward to create a top viewed without bios, if you're already using regex to format from the dump for your top viewed, if you externally queried each page from your regex app or editor and excluded the ones with the string " births" or " albums" to correspond to anything from "1981 births" to "2018 albums" in the category section (even " films" and " television series" wouldn't have false positives as far as I can tell). I could be getting how you do your top viewed wrong. Also, I do not want to ask you to do work if I or someone else could do it easily. Are you just using regex on the dump? I don't know how I'd go about designing the matching logic for your reporting framework, and I apologize if you put that somewhere easy to find and I haven't found it. -- I greatly appreciate your time, and I wish I could say I understand the WP conventions better than you say you don't, but I really am new here and as far as I can tell, everything is very disconnected. Apparently the category editors are different from the WP editors? JDontology (talk) 15:10, 12 May 2018 (UTC)

Using STiki
Hi Andrew, having rollback perm give additional permissions when using STiki? Thank you! Robertgombos (talk) 19:40, 6 June 2018 (UTC)


 * There are no additional permissions when using STiki, only the criteria that determines if you can use it in the first place. You got access because you have 2000+ main namespace edits. One can also get access by having the "rollback" permission. Regardless the entry criteria, the tool functions identically at the surface-level (some of the interior plumbing is different, but this is transparent to an end-user). Thanks, West.andrew.g (talk) 06:10, 7 June 2018 (UTC)
 * , great, thanks! It's awesome that users can leave custom messages or tips when warning. I love that feature. Robertgombos (talk) 06:19, 7 June 2018 (UTC)

Your subpage 2013 popular pages is timing out on mobile
It appears when I try to view your page https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:West.andrew.g/2013_popular_pages on mobile, the page times out displaying "Our servers are currently under maintenance or experiencing a technical problem. Please try again in a few minutes."

The issue is the number of images in your article (11612). Could these be converted to unicode characters/emojis per mobile image recommendations so that this can be viewed on mobile? Jdlrobson (talk) 00:09, 18 September 2018 (UTC)


 * I welcome anyone who wants to make the change -- I'm sure there are others already familiar with the tools that expedite this kind of work (AWB?). These lists are generated using Java code and database processing, but given that we are talking about the 2013 aggregate, I've long since deleted the underlying raw data that would make it possible to just re-run the script with pointers to Unicode article quality indicators instead of images. Thanks, West.andrew.g (talk) 04:38, 18 September 2018 (UTC)

Request for creating "popular economics pages" page
Hi Dr. West! It would be much appreciated and vary helpful if there was a "popular economics pages" page, like the "Popular medical pages" page. Thank you. Ra1han (talk)Ra1han (talk) 15:25, 1 October 2018 (UTC)


 * You'd need to begin by convincing me: (1) there is an audience for this sort of thing who is going to get some type of ROI from the list (i.e., a very active WikiProject, as is the case with WP:MED), and (2) that there is a well curated category structure surrounding economics topics. West.andrew.g (talk) 18:34, 1 October 2018 (UTC)

The message
Hello! I was very pleased to receive this message from You.

I try to use all possible ways to fight vandalism on Wikipedia.

Thank you. Good luck and success! Respectfully, -- Baden-Paul (talk) 17:09, 24 February 2019 (UTC)

Happy Adminship Anniversary!
<div class="boilerplate metadata" id="SCOTW" style="background-color:#E6E6FA;border: 1px solid #7D00B3; margin: 0.5em; padding: 0.5em;width:90%;float:center"> Happy Adminship Anniversary! Have a very happy adminship anniversary on your special day! Best wishes, CAPTAIN RAJU (T) 18:53, 27 February 2019 (UTC)

How accurate is the popular medical articles listing?
Hello,

I'm one of the Kiwix people, and in order to accomodate an improvement suggestion we had for the Wikimed app, I started looking into your most excellent Popular medical pages. I was sort of expecting Migraine or influenza to be near the top, but apparently greatly underestimate the prevalence of Myofascial pain syndrome. Given the huge number of pageviews and the fact that only .2% of them are mobile I suspect some sort of glitch or outlier; but then looking around I also see that Lobar pneumonia (#221) is more than twice as popular as sore throat (#1119). Any thoughts on that? Thanks, The other Kiwix guy (talk) 17:00, 21 March 2019 (UTC)


 * I aggregate the data from, and I am pretty sure I do that accurately. The larger question is what that data captures. We know it to include human views as well as automated activity (both malicious and benign). Mobile percentages outside the norm are often indicative of non-human views. Organic sources of traffic (second screen; cultural events; Google Doodles; Reddit) are interesting and can be challenging to discover. This is the subject of endless discussion and debate at the talk pages of WP:5000, WP:Top25Report and editorialized at Wikipedia_Signpost/2013-02-04/Special_report. West.andrew.g (talk) 19:32, 21 March 2019 (UTC)

Question about STiki and default edit summaries
Greetings!

I'm Nate TeBlunthuis, a PhD student at the University of Washington. I'm working on a research project that involves tracking the historical activity of various editing tools on Wikipedia. My approach is based on matching default edit summaries. I'm looking for the history of default edit summaries used by the STiki tool. Can you help? Groceryheist (talk) 17:00, 3 August 2019 (UTC)


 * Hey there, happy to help! You'll find the STiki source code over in version control over at GitHub, but it hasn't been there for a majority of its history, so that wouldn't capture the earlier period when the summaries were probably most dynamic. Some quick thoughts: (1) I've always tested new versions of the tool, so there should be edit summaries under my account that capture all the default one's that STiki ever used. Not sure how best to aggregate this up. (2) Maybe not right of the gate, but since pretty early on summaries have always included a wikilink to WP:STiki, in order to try to build up a user base. (3) Have you seen before? Not sure their logic on counting automated edits. (4) I do have logs of every action taken using the STiki tool. I could dump these in some format convenient to you. Thanks, West.andrew.g (talk) 13:09, 6 August 2019 (UTC)


 * Thanks for getting back to me! It looks like xtools is using hardcoded regular expressions in English. I'm working on a similar approach with the goal to have regular expressions for every mediawiki going back as far as possible.  A dump of revision ids made with STiki would be ideal for me. I'll detect reverts and convert them to regular expressions. One revid per line would be fine. Groceryheist (talk) 23:28, 6 August 2019 (UTC)


 * ✅ -- You have (e)mail. West.andrew.g (talk) 03:06, 8 August 2019 (UTC)

WP:5000 hasn't updated
Anything wrong? igordebraga ≠ 20:55, 17 November 2019 (UTC)
 * I was trying to get a head start on the year-end stats by doing some of those huge computations. I paused the nightly WP:5000 process so the database wouldn't freak out. I think I forgot to re-enable. I'll confirm my error and restart when I can reach that network tonight. West.andrew.g (talk) 14:55, 20 November 2019 (UTC)

I think there's a bug in your algorithm this week
The numbers aren't matching up to the pageviews link for each individual article.  Serendi pod ous  10:05, 11 December 2019 (UTC)


 * This week's report came out on schedule, Dec. 8. The version that appeared on Dec. 11 was the result of re-processing towards end-of-year totals. I forgot to tell it not to push out a report. I've restored the correct version. West.andrew.g (talk) 14:10, 11 December 2019 (UTC)
 * I figured something like that was going on. Thanks for all your work. It will be fun to see the year-end total.  Serendi pod ous  14:44, 11 December 2019 (UTC)

list from the list
Hi, if it is only possible, asking for your help to generate the list of articles from English Wikipedia's top 5000 that don't have Ukrainian articles. I need just a list without any additional data. I know that petscan can help but I'm not sure how. Thank you! --Anntinomy (talk) 17:41, 12 January 2020 (UTC)


 * I've never really worked with other languages or related API functions (assuming they exist?). Maybe you could put something on the 'petscan' talk page? West.andrew.g (talk) 23:37, 12 January 2020 (UTC)

Top 5000 pages
It looks like the top 5000 list is outdated (even if the list was recently edited) because of the number of hits for Kobe Bryant. He recently died and I wouldn't expect him to be lower than 1000 on the list; since he got over 20 million views, I think it would be within the top 5. The list looks like it was made before he died last month. I&#39;m not perfect but I&#39;m almost (talk) 21:17, 11 February 2020 (UTC)
 * As discussed at WT:Top 25 Report, the code that does the top 5000 reporting is undergoing maintenance and a change of ownership. It is known to be out of date. We should be close to resuming functionality. The authors of WP:Top 25 Report are using alternative sources for the time being to produce their list. West.andrew.g (talk) 14:02, 12 February 2020 (UTC)

Old edits
Hello, could you have a look at this, if you get some time? Regards. --Titodutta (talk) 04:00, 20 March 2020 (UTC)
 * I noticed that you are not active for more than 2 weeks, I hope you are ok. Regards. --Titodutta (talk) 19:40, 21 March 2020 (UTC)

I hope you are okay
Hi Andrew. I hope everything is fine in real life. I often see your activity; I realised you havent edited in a while so I came here only to find out you havent edited since March 5. Please take your time to come back to the project, but please take care of yourself, and yours. Best wishes, —usernamekiran (talk) 05:05, 9 September 2020 (UTC)

Happy New Year!

 * Spread the WikiLove; use {{subst:Happy New Year elves}} to send this message

Happy Adminship Anniversary!
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Best wishes, CAPTAIN RAJU (T) 16:17, 27 February 2021 (UTC)

Pending suspension of administrative permissions due to inactivity
Established policy provides for removal of the administrative permissions of users who have not made any edits or logged actions in the preceding twelve months. Because you have been inactive, your administrative permissions will be removed&#32;if you do not return to activity within the next month.

Inactive administrators are encouraged to rejoin the project in earnest rather than to make token edits to avoid loss of administrative permissions. Resources and support for reengaging with the project are available at WikiProject Editor Retention/administrators. If you do not intend to rejoin the project in the foreseeable future, please consider voluntarily resigning your administrative permissions by making a request at the bureaucrats' noticeboard.

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Administrators will no longer be autopatrolled
A recently closed Request for Comment (RFC) reached consensus to remove Autopatrolled from the administrator user group. You may, similarly as with Edit Filter Manager, choose to self-assign this permission to yourself. This will be implemented the week of December 13th, but if you wish to self-assign you may do so now. To find out when the change has gone live or if you have any questions please visit the Administrator's Noticeboard. 20:07, 7 December 2021 (UTC)

Merry Christmas!
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Happy New Year!
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 West.andrew.g , Thanks for your contributions to Wikipedia, and a Happy New Year to you and yours! CAPTAIN RAJU (T) 22:13, 2 January 2022 (UTC)


 * – Send New Year cheer by adding {{subst:Happy New Year}} to user talk pages.

How we will see unregistered users
Hi!

You get this message because you are an admin on a Wikimedia wiki.

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Instead of the IP we will show a masked identity. You as an admin will still be able to access the IP. There will also be a new user right for those who need to see the full IPs of unregistered users to fight vandalism, harassment and spam without being admins. Patrollers will also see part of the IP even without this user right. We are also working on better tools to help.

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We have two suggested ways this identity could work. We would appreciate your feedback on which way you think would work best for you and your wiki, now and in the future. You can let us know on the talk page. You can write in your language. The suggestions were posted in October and we will decide after 17 January.

Thank you. /Johan (WMF)

18:14, 4 January 2022 (UTC)

<div class="boilerplate metadata" style="background-color:#E6E6FA; border: 1px solid #7D00B3; margin: 0.5em auto; padding: 0.5em; width:90%; text-align: center"> Removal from member list You have been inactive for more than 6 months and have been removed from the Wikipedia Birthday Committee birthday list. If you become active again please feel free to re-add yourself.

Best wishes, CAPTAIN RAJU (T) 01:52, 28 February 2022 (UTC)

Pending suspension of administrative permissions due to inactivity
Established policy provides for removal of the administrative permissions of users who have not made any edits or logged actions in the preceding twelve months. Because you have been inactive, your administrative permissions will be removed&#32;if you do not return to activity within the next month.

Inactive administrators are encouraged to rejoin the project in earnest rather than to make token edits to avoid loss of administrative permissions. Resources and support for reengaging with the project are available at WikiProject Editor Retention/administrators. If you do not intend to rejoin the project in the foreseeable future, please consider voluntarily resigning your administrative permissions by making a request at the bureaucrats' noticeboard.

Thank you for your past contributions to the project. —&thinsp;JJMC89 bot 00:05, 1 March 2022 (UTC)