User talk:Curps/archive16

I am

Hi Curps! I've added my opinion on the Talk page, but I'm sure we haven't heard the last of this issue...

I've just noticed you reverting 209.215.160.117 (talk • contribs • page moves • block user • block log) on Jorn Barger. This is one of a group of IPs engaging in a smear campaign against Barger. I've placed a (probably partial) list on Wikipedia:Vandalism_in_progress#IP_Moderate. I appreciate your help in chasing this vandal down. Owen× ☎ 20:57, 10 September 2005 (UTC)

Your message

Thanks — and yes, I should do that. I've thought about it, but never seemed to find the time. You've nudged me into action though. --Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης) 09:18, 11 September 2005 (UTC)

Thank you

File:Meles-face-1a.jpg

Thank you for supporting my RfA application! Much appreciated! The Singing Badger 16:12, 12 September 2005 (UTC)

Mick Grabham deletion

You obviously don't know the history of Procol Harum;Robin Trower was replaced by Dave Ball,Dave Ball was replaced by Mick Grabham(ex of Cochise).To delete someone because you don't find their name in a Wikki article is to assume the article is the only source of information on a subject and I would appreciate you not acting to edit things you are ignorant of...Huneric

The fact that the Procol Harum article doesn't metion him, and Wikipedia has no article about him, suggests he may not be notable enough for inclusion in the list.

By the way, be aware of Wikipedia:Civility.

Your contribution history also shows Jorn Barger edits [1] [2], of a kind very similar to anonymous-IP edits that were [3] reported as vandalism by User:OwenX. Would you care to provide an explanation? -- Curps 18:44, 12 September 2005 (UTC)

Get a Life!

Huneric thinks you should 'get a life' and believes in Vandalism with all his heart,as his name should tell you!Wikipedia should be fun!!!Huneric is not same English speaking as before!You confuse Huneric with simular Hobo?

RTL text with LTR text

I was reading User:Curpsbot-unicodify and I figured you might have the answer to the problems I've been having on pages such as Abu 'Abd Allah ash-Shafi'i. If you notice there is an inexplicable line break which, try as I may, I cannot remove. It is the same thing as you showed with interwiki parantheses with Hebrew. Do you know how I can fix that? I was looking for a way to convert it to escape characters so at least I could format it... but, is there a better way? or, what could I use to properly convert? gren グレン 09:27, 13 September 2005 (UTC)

Well, the text in that paragraph has line breaks. If you remove them and make the whole paragraph "one line" (with word wrap), you get:

His mother was Umm al Hasan bint Hamza ibn Qasim ibn Yazid ibn Imam al Hasan. (Arabic: أم الحسن بنت حمزه بن قام بن يزيد إبن ألإمام الحسن ) He was born in the Hijri year 150 or the year 767 of the common era in Asqalan, Gaza, Palestine. His father died when he was two, and he and his mother moved to Makkah, where they lived in extreme poverty.

As far as I know, the above is OK. To read it, you have to read the Arabic on the first line from right to left and then the Arabic on the second line from right to left. As far as I know, that's how it's supposed to work.

-- Curps 09:38, 13 September 2005 (UTC)

Whatever you did worked well for that section (what browswer do you use?) I tried for the first para and the best I could get was

Abu 'Abd Allah ash-Shafi'i (Arabic: إمام الشافعى ) c(767 [150 AH] - January 20, 820 [204 AH]) commonly called Imam Shafi'i (Arabic: ابو عبد الله الشافعى ) or fully, Muhammad ibn Idris ibn al ‘Abbas ibn ‘Uthman ibn Shafi’i ibn al Sa’ib ibn ‘Ubayd ibn Abd Yazid ibn Hashim ibn al Muttalib ibn ‘Abd Manaf.

If I attempt to move that 'c' it creates a jumble of the Arabic and dates.... do you have any idea why? gren グレン 10:10, 13 September 2005 (UTC)

From my talk page:

You can solve bidirectional algorithm problems by embedding a literal LRM or RLM, but these can be tricky because they're invisible. Another way to do it would be to embed an HTML comment.

For instance: <!--B--> serves the same purpose as a left-to-right mark, and <!--ب--> should serve the same purpose as a right-to-left mark. Except they're visible rather than invisible, so they can't be accidentally deleted during editing. -- Curps 10:53, 13 September 2005 (UTC)

Thanks Curps! There are several pages I was thinking of adding Arabic to, but I couldn't figure out how it worked on other pages I've seen without messing up the surrounding text. Is there any information about embedding RTL text in any wikipedia policy pages? There should be. --Yodakii 13:03, 13 September 2005 (UTC)

Thanks for the insight. I will also take a look at your post in the pump like you asked me to. gren グレン 20:00, 13 September 2005 (UTC)

(Miskin)

The problem occurs on a specific browser of a specific public place. I'll make sure it doesn't happen again. I hadn't contacted you because I knew what the problem was, and because I didn't have much time. Regards. Miskin 16:16, 14 September 2005 (UTC)

Request

I am asking past editors of the Karl Rove page to weigh in on a survey. If you can spare a couple of minutes, please visit this page: Talk:Karl Rove/September Survey, read the introduction, and answer the three questions that have been posed. Thank you. paul klenk 09:13, 16 September 2005 (UTC)

Barnstar

I, Flcelloguy, do hereby present the RickK Anti-Vandalism Award to Curps for his combat against the GORF vandalism.

Curps, good work to you (and your excellent bot) for blocking GORF, reverting, and then deleting! Flcelloguy | A note? | Desk 23:48, 20 September 2005 (UTC)

Well, the pagemove bot didn't revert and delete, I did that part. Some pagemove reverts show "Curpsbot-unicodify", but that was just a login thing, should have been logged into my main account... -- Curps 00:06, 21 September 2005 (UTC)

Block

Why are you blocking self? --Cool Cat ^Talk 02:33, 21 September 2005 (UTC)

Also I wasnt aware you were also coding an anti-vandal bot, care to join arms? --Cool Cat ^Talk 02:33, 21 September 2005 (UTC)

I have to make sure that things still work after modifications. What kind of stuff are you working on? Sorry but I tend to work best alone (for coding). -- Curps 03:02, 21 September 2005 (UTC)

Thats ok, we could exchange ideas on methods beter identifying vandals. Catch me on IRC of you like ;) --Cool Cat ^Talk 09:53, 21 September 2005 (UTC)

14 bytes, not 15

#redirect[[A]] is a valid redirect. -- Curps 08:45, 21 September 2005 (UTC)

Well. Yes. Firstly there should be a space between #redirect and A. Secondly I do not see any sane way a single letter should have a redirect. By default it will be redundent and perhaps get deleted. --Cool Cat ^Talk 09:52, 21 September 2005 (UTC)

A single letter could easily have a redirect, for instance if we decide that the S-caron article should be a redirect to Š instead of the other way around. A space should be added for clarity, but I've seen redirects that have omitted the space and they work just fine. The bottom line is, you need to set the magic number at 14, not 15, and you need to avoid deleting anything that contains a template even if it's less than 14 characters. -- Curps 10:06, 21 September 2005 (UTC)

We have Eng redirecting to a single letter by that name. Even A has two incoming redirects (LetterA and AaA), and C has Cee redirecting to it. There are probably many more examples. Other than the first one, these may not be very useful redirects, but that's not for a bot to decide automatically. -- Curps 10:15, 21 September 2005 (UTC)

The bot could read the contents of the page and check for the word "#redirect" and delete if it cant fint it. This could mean size cap can be further increased. --Cool Cat ^Talk 10:39, 21 September 2005 (UTC)

That's a valid point, although it's hard to define exactly what the shortest valid stub would be. The best thing might be a hybrid manual/automated approach... the bot runs in the background and beeps when it finds something suspicious (for instance, a newly created article with obscenities in it), displays the text and prompts for a decision. Then you take a quick glance at it, type "y" or "n" and then go back to your other work, and it continues in the background. -- Curps 11:17, 21 September 2005 (UTC)

Test blocks

I'm just curious, what are you testing by blocking yourself and other admins for 1 second? — JIP | Talk 10:24, 21 September 2005 (UTC)

The code that applies blocks is retested after modification, and is also tested against a non-ASCII name. -- Curps 11:03, 21 September 2005 (UTC)

bot

I would support creation of a separate admin account for your bot, and would be happy to nominate it at RFA if you wish. The Uninvited Co., Inc. 21:48, 21 September 2005 (UTC)

I'm not convinced it's really necessary. For one thing, I'd prefer to think of the bot as a temporary necessity pending a Mediawiki software fix, and if so, getting a permanent account seems premature. Also the main reason to get a separate account for bots is because they make a large number of edits that aren't all checked individually, so we need to distinguish bot edits from human edits. This particular bot doesn't edit articles at all and has only made a dozen or so blocks so far, so keeping track of what it has done doesn't really pose any problems. So at the moment I'm not seeking a separate account for it. -- Curps 06:14, 22 September 2005 (UTC)

Indian renaming controversy

How on earth did I misread that one? Thanks for picking up the error, and boy do I feel like a fool. Ambi 10:26, 22 September 2005 (UTC)

Your message

Thanks for the advice — I'll do that. --Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης) 18:23, 22 September 2005 (UTC)

Hiya

Righto, sorry bout that, hey i'm new.

That article is clearly a hoax, where are the citations, just because someone can string a few sentences together about a crocodile, a famous crocodile handler and the BBC doesn't mean they are authoritative.

I did the google search and came to the same conclusions.

smadge1 01:31, 23 September 2005 (UTC)

Trolling at Manchester

Now it's User:Walkwine. Cormaggio ^@ 21:16, 23 September 2005 (UTC)

Russian grammar

Could you run the your Unicodify bot on this? Seeing all those those html-entities is enough to make anyone crazy. ;) --Krun 22:24, 24 September 2005 (UTC)

I just ran it. 2700 numeric character references changed, that must be close to a record. -- Curps 22:26, 24 September 2005 (UTC)

Thanks a lot! --Krun 22:29, 24 September 2005 (UTC)

Incredible String Band

I noticed you've removed Licorice McKechnie from the ISB page. You may have more background info than me (which is very little, frankly), but you didn't leave a comment in either the edit summary or talk page. Could you comment, please? Thanks. -- Dave C.^{talk | Esperanza} 06:10, 25 September 2005 (UTC)

I didn't remove it, I unlinked it, part of reverting all edits by a troublesome anonymous vandal. On this page, the vandal may have made a valid edit, feel free to reapply it on your own authority. Please note, the vandal himself made the edit in question, not another anonymous user using the same IP half an hour later. Don't ask me how I know. The edit summary "(stop editing out licorice;this links!)" is misleading, he added this link for the first time with this edit. -- Curps 12:27, 25 September 2005 (UTC)

"North Carolina" vandal

Hi there. In one of the blocks you made, you mentioned in passing a "North Carolina" vandal here. Could you tell me more about this vandal? I think it might be related to this "King of the Hill" vandal I've been following around. See for example this. Thanks for your help! --HappyCamper 22:24, 25 September 2005 (UTC)

User:Kyla

Ya I've noticed that you found Jessica. She's gone through a lot of wiki-stress lately, (having her user page deleted and moved and her talk pages lost etc.) Thanks for helping her. JobE6 01:17, 26 September 2005 (UTC)

I was going over the pagemove log for today and yesterday and noticed that particular move. -- Curps 01:22, 26 September 2005 (UTC)

FYI: something is absolutely not right over there...I I mentioned that she shouldn't have so much personal info for her own protection...see the latest--MONGO 18:33, 27 September 2005 (UTC)

Actually, it seems like a typical online journal, it's just that Wikipedia is the wrong place for it. Also this user did some misguided page moves from user space to article space and trying to rename her username without going through a bureaucrat. -- Curps 18:48, 27 September 2005 (UTC)

---

NOTE: Curpsbot-unicodify messages have now been moved to User talk:Curpsbot-unicodify (which formerly redirected here). -- Curps 03:47, 24 September 2005 (UTC)

Re: Mr. Popo

I can think of one thing that may be able to fix it... but it will involve TONS of work. I would have to change the template for the Dragonball characters, and then (oh god) rename EVERY dbz character pic. Mr. Satan has the same problem. I don't know if this is worth it though....

Super Saiyan Plough 22:10, 26 September 2005 (UTC)

Æ → Ash (letter) Aesc

After consulting a source I respect, I've modified my request at Talk:Æ#Requested move to Aesc. Please have a look there for my justification and reconsider your vote. Thanks. —Michael Z. 2005-09-26 22:46 Z

renaming page

hi, I've been trying to move the Securities and Exchange Commission to U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (which has never been more than a redirect), but it won't let me as the destination page already exists. Can you help deleting it so I can move the original? Most pages already link to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission page, and I'm cleaning up the final potential double redirects. Thanks!, DocendoDiscimus 09:34, 27 September 2005 (UTC)

U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission

Sir, would you move Securities and Exchange Commission to U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for User:DocendoDiscimus and I? It should be U.S....WikiDon 09:36, 27 September 2005 (UTC)

OK, I moved it. -- Curps 09:43, 27 September 2005 (UTC)

Thanks. WikiDon

Userpages were intended to tell about yourself.

I thought Userpages were supposed to tell about yourself which I did. I see no reason why it's wrong. What am I supposed to write in a userpage? I can't write a xanga or myspace during schooltime. This is like the only site that the school doesn't block. (Kyla 22:01, 27 September 2005 (UTC))

Are you a robot? Cause you respond pretty fast. How long do you spend on Wikipedia? (Kyla 22:14, 27 September 2005 (UTC))

So-called 'personal attacks'

I'm taking the time to respond to your comment on my talk page, only because I'm sick of this flamewar, and because I think you, unlike most of the clowns in this war, might have a chance at being reasonable. The flamewar — and I forgive you for being unfamiliar with the back history — has been an irritation that's been going on for two years and I honestly don't know why it even started. It doesn't make sense that the minor accomplishment writing a card game would incite a bunch of loser-fuckers to attack me of all people. Maybe I'm wrong, but I see myself as low-profile in the world and don't know why I would be their target.

You wrote:

You claim the following:

spiteful lower-middle-class underachievers, semieducated real-life losers, inflict their […] idiotic opinions on the world. […] LotsOfIssues […] fits this mold." [4]

is not a personal attack? Not to mention "rv snot-nosed prick loser-fucker" in the edit summary and many other examples. Not really interested in debating this issue: we have an official policy of no personal attacks and when necessary it is enforced. You have been temporarily blocked.

Well, Curps, the fact is that I made an accurate observation of the social dynamic of Wikipedia that is dead-on. There are a lot of very intelligent and accomplished people on Wikipedia, but there's also the contingent I described: resentful, bitter life failures who use Wikipedia as an outlet for their loser-fuckery. For whatever reason, a number of them embarked on a mission to defame both a card game I invented and, further, my character. All of this was entirely unnecessary. Regardless of his background, if Lotsofissues engages in that campaign, then he is as much a loser-fucker as the rest of them. This is not so much a personal attack as a logical deduction from observations.

Warmly,

Mike Church 02:40, 28 September 2005 (UTC)

Part II

You wrote:

The usual thing that's done with personal attacks is to remove them, see Wikipedia:Remove personal attacks. That's the reason I removed the personal attacks on your user page, and will do so again, and most any other admin will do the same. Nothing personal, I'm not looking to start something with you, it's purely enforcing the existing policy.

I would support this policy if enforcement were consistent. However, every time I revert the personal attacks made against me, which are more damaging than calling someone a "loser-fucker", they are preserved against my will. So I flame back with the goal of deterring these users from participating in the flamewar to begin with. I don't have magical sysop powers to abuse like everyone else so this is my resort and it's quite a reasonable one. You fight in a flamewar with the abuses you have, not the ones you might want or wish to have, right? Mike Church 03:03, 28 September 2005 (UTC)

Part III

I will not reinstate the material removed from my user page; the reason why is discussed there along with related stipulations. Please make sure the L-F's keep away from me on 10/1, and thereafter as well. Mike Church 03:24, 28 September 2005 (UTC)

thanks for your info

Hi Curps: It's Nemo re: Shah Jahan ja link. I don't have any japanese fonts installed on my Windows XP/Firefox machine.--Nemonoman 05:45, 28 September 2005 (UTC)

NPOV Advice

Hi again, you seem to know what you're doing round here, I don't

I have a question on NPOV. The Article Intelligence Quotient does not seem to raise the issue of Intelligence as an undefined property. now, i'm not a psychologist, and i don't pretend to be, but I've been reading some material (which I've referred to in the article's talk page). what do you propose i can do? Is there a way to discuss these matters? Here is a page defining the term "Reification" which I believe can be applied to Intelligence Quotient.

smadge1 01:05, 29 September 2005 (UTC)

It's not a field I have any expertise in, I can't really offer much advice at all. As with anything else on Wikipedia, try to have some references that you can cite and describe any potentially controversial changes on the talk page. That's not much of an answer, but there you go. -- Curps 02:29, 29 September 2005 (UTC)

Technical Advice

Curps, I wonder if I may pick your brain about a technical matter I trust you've a much better shot at solving than I. It concerns Sam Hocevar's godmode rollback tool. There's a bug in it that adds the ampersand (&) Unicode in some reverts [5], [6], [7]. It adds it when the text contains "&". (Incidentally I've noticed the same problem in blogging software, such as when one adds url's to the NYT or WaPo). This is annoying because one then has to go back and manually correct the additions, which often damage the text.

I've asked Sam about it but no reply in two weeks, so I'm asking you, O wielder of Arcane Technical Wizadry. Any ideas?—encephalon 03:20, 29 September 2005 (UTC) NB. The monobook script for godmode light can be seen here, copy pasted from Sam's site.

In the RevertStepThree function it looks like he's parsing the old version into its elements and then rebuilding it out of its elements... I'm not sure why it's doing it that way. Unfortunately, I'm not that familiar with JavaScript, though I intend to work with it more in the future, so I'm not really able to debug it. As far as I know, User:Sam Hocevar is reasonably active, though from his contributions he might be taking a bit of a break recently, but it seems he also has an account on the French wikipedia at fr:Utilisateur:Sam Hocevar where he has many recent contributions, so you could try to contact him there too. At the moment, though, it does seem that the script isn't safe to use. -- Curps 03:42, 29 September 2005 (UTC)

Thanks Curps.—encephalon 04:17, 29 September 2005 (UTC)

Curps, thought I'd just let you know about this discussion as a courtesy. It looks like it may be browser related, but just as easily it may be one of a million things that my system has (or doesn't) that Sam's doesn't (or has). Incidentally, in view of your Unicode expertise, it may interest you to learn that this thing essentially seems to be doing the opposite of what your bot is doing—for certain characters. It's converting (some) literal symbols to codes. Look at what it did for "<" —encephalon 12:41, 30 September 2005 (UTC)

Block of DaGizza

He is on mailing list complaining. Why did you block him? Fred Bauder 21:46, 29 September 2005 (UTC)

Sorry, it seems I mistook him for the recent persistent Girls Aloud/Obesity/Manchester vandal. I've unblocked him. He added a religion-stub template to the multiply-re-created and deleted Obesta article, and I mistook him for a sock re-creator of that article when in fact it turns out he just added that template five minutes after the article's re-creation. For background on the actual vandal (many socks and many pages affected), see the deleted history of Jocker City and Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents#Jocker City and Wikipedia:Administrators%27 noticeboard#Request for vprotection and also Wikipedia:Vandalism in progress#Girls Aloud and Wikipedia:Vandalism in progress#Manchester .2F obesity .2F Girls Aloud vandal. -- Curps 01:02, 30 September 2005 (UTC)

Thank you for unblocking me 'DaGizza 01:07, 30 September 2005 (UTC)

A bit confused

I'm a bit confused.

I pulled some content from a page onto a separate page.

On that seprate page, I spent some time expanding on the content, and explaining things.

While I was doing so, you put a redirect on the page (the copy I didn't care about, which was nothing more than content extracted from the first page).

When I saved my work, it seems to have vanished.

I've deleted the redirected page, because there's no point to it. But I'm having a problem figuring out where the substantial copy went. It doesn't seem to show up in edit history anywhere.

Any ideas on where my edit might have gone?

(Note also that I've no problem moving it to the source wiki -- however, since this was more descriptive than any particularly useful source, I'm not sure that's appropriate?)

Go to Block yourself

Yes block your own Ip and U will get another Star<nonwiki>*<notify>

Azerbaijan double redirs

Please stop! I'm working on these in order. First i'm moving them all properly, THEN I'm going through the double redirs. There are 76 or so of these after all. You doing it might ruin a little of my mental planning. I can't put {inuse} everywhere. ;) --Golbez 06:23, 1 October 2005 (UTC)

OK, I lied. I said that to make you stop sooner. I didn't mean to make you feel bad, it's just that, it's my mess, I'll clean it up. No real mental notes. ;) Don't worry. --Golbez 06:33, 1 October 2005 (UTC)

Innocent

You appear to have block my IP address because of someone elses "vandalism".

• vandalism: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Andreas_Johansson&diff=prev&oldid=23952053

The reason given is this: Autoblocked because your IP address has been recently used by "Jayh2724". 
The reason given for Jayh2724's block is: "vandalism".
Your IP address is 165.21.154.14. Please include this address, along with your username, in any queries you make.

Is is a pool IP address, and I suggest U missed your target. I am surprised that you blocked an account as the result of 1 violation. Has this person being vandalising under other identities?

⊄ Sumburgh 11:01, 1 October 2005 (UTC) ⊅

Me too. And I suggest if you block anyone, it would be befitting for you to leave your email address for contact. You have not done so. Mandel 16:20, 1 October 2005 (UTC)

Regarding Jayh2724, there was not just one violation, that user also committed pagemove vandalism. I believe the block was justified. It's unfortunate that you happened to attempt to use the same IP address within a certain time period and were affected. Due to the way Wikipedia's software works, that happens sometimes -- Curps 16:25, 1 October 2005 (UTC)

I have no record of blocking User:Mandel. Can you provide more details? -- Curps 16:26, 1 October 2005 (UTC)

I share the same IP address. In fact close to 1/2 million people I reckon use this IP address. So you better get ready to be bombarded with complaints. If Jayh2724 has done vandalisms, I suggest you warn him beforehand on his talk page. You seemed not to have done that either.

As can be seen, the blockage is not entirely successful. This ISP network uses a range of IP addresses rather than one, and the vandal can easily get past your block by trying enough times (of which the IP block will be switched randomly to another, if similar IP address) Mandel 16:43, 1 October 2005 (UTC)

I blocked Jayh2724 by username not by IP address. There was no way for me to know what IP address or ISP he used or what part of the world he is in... that information isn't available to admins. Because of the way Wikipedia software works, when a username is blocked, the underlying IP address is also blocked for a time (but, again, this is done internally, and the IP address is not revealed to the admin who places the block). There is no way to avoid this and just block the username... perhaps the software should allow this, but that's something only the developers can change. -- Curps 16:43, 1 October 2005 (UTC)

templates substituted by a bot as per Wikipedia:Template substitution Pegasusbot 08:03, 26 March 2006 (UTC)