User talk:Ravenpuff/Archives/2020/April

Page mover granted

Hello, Ravenpuff. Your account has been granted the "extendedmover" user right, either following a request for it or demonstrating familiarity with working with article names and moving pages. You are now able to rename pages without leaving behind a redirect, move subpages when moving the parent page(s), and move category pages.

Please take a moment to review Wikipedia:Page mover for more information on this user right, especially the criteria for moving pages without leaving redirect. Please remember to follow post-move cleanup procedures and make link corrections where necessary, including broken double-redirects when suppressredirect is used. This can be done using Special:WhatLinksHere. It is also very important that no one else be allowed to access your account, so you should consider taking a few moments to secure your password. As with all user rights, be aware that if abused, or used in controversial ways without consensus, your page mover status can be revoked.

Useful links:

• Wikipedia:Requested moves
• Category:Articles to be moved, for article renaming requests awaiting action.

If you do not want the page mover right anymore, just let me know, and I'll remove it. Thank you, and happy editing! Anarchyte (talk | work) 15:51, 14 April 2020 (UTC)

Apostrophes in templates

Good to see you've updated some translation templates to include apostrophes, which I'd flagged at Template talk:Literal translation a couple of months back. This needs to deal with existing punctuation, though, which people have often added themselves because the template hasn't. The Puerto Rico article, for example, now opens with two sets of quotemarks inside apostrophes:

Puerto Rico (Spanish for '"Rich Port"'; abbreviated PR), officially the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico (Spanish: Estado Libre Asociado de Puerto Rico, lit. '"Free Associated State of Puerto Rico"')

Would adding {{trim quotes}} to the passed translation do the job? --Lord Belbury (talk) 18:15, 11 April 2020 (UTC)

@Lord Belbury: As far as I'm aware, {{lang}} and its related templates and modules don't trim quotes from their parameter inputs either – see e.g. {{lang-fr|Exemple|lit="Example"}} (French: Exemple, lit. '"Example"'). I think that the best (and semantically preferable) solution would be to remove these existing quotes from the wikitext of any articles in which they appear, like I've just done with the Puerto Rico one. — RAVENPVFF · talk · 01:22, 12 April 2020 (UTC)

Agreed, but {{literal translation}} is used on over 2,000 pages and I get the sense that a lot of these articles will be already using quotes, where people have added them because the template doesn't. Until all those articles are fixed (can we get a bot to take a look at it?), adding {{trim quotes}} would avoid these articles having badly nested quotation marks. Are there concerns about processing overhead here? --Lord Belbury (talk) 11:05, 13 April 2020 (UTC)

@Lord Belbury: I see. Well, server processing load is one part of it, but what I feel is that this fix is simply masking a typographical error that remains unfixed in the article code. Furthermore, this trimming of user-added quotes might be non-intuitive for some users – for example, you could input double quotation marks into the template, which would then magically spit out single quotation marks, which would be confusing if you weren't aware of the template's feature. You can indeed make a bot request over at WP:BOTREQ; perhaps discussion there might decide that using {{trim quotes}} is a better solution instead. — RAVENPVFF · talk · 17:17, 13 April 2020 (UTC)

I just opened up the Puerto Rico article to quote the templates for a bot request, and noticed two more templates with the same problem, in the infobox ({{native phrase|es|"Isla del Encanto"|italics=off}} and {{Lang-en|"Island of Enchantment"}}). Is this worth a wider discussion and fix, if several other translation templates would also benefit from the same change? If so, where would you say was a good place to have that conversation? --Lord Belbury (talk) 11:03, 15 April 2020 (UTC)

@Lord Belbury: I don't think that those two templates are part of the same problem. Personally, I wouldn't place the Spanish text in quotation marks, but that seems to be an innocuous stylistic choice for the article. {{Lang-en}}'s documentation, on the other hand, specifically states that In most cases, there is no reason to use this template, unless you have a specific technical need for it; I've edited the article to remove them and correctly rephrase the translations. In my opinion, there's no need for a discussion regarding this at the current time. — RAVENPVFF · talk · 16:20, 15 April 2020 (UTC)

I don't know what other relevant templates exist; would it not apply to lang-en in the situations outside of those "most cases" where it still got used? But if you think it's only {{literal translation}} and {{langnf}} that benefit from applying the quotemarks inside the template, fair enough. I'll go ahead and start the bot request. --Lord Belbury (talk) 10:27, 16 April 2020 (UTC)

Redirects from Unicode emojis

Hi Ravenpuff! Are all these redirects really needed? (e.g. 👨🏾‍🍼). It looks implausible that all these combinations serve an encyclopedic purpose. Thank you. --MarioGom (talk) 22:27, 16 April 2020 (UTC)

@MarioGom: These redirects aren't actually combinations of emoji[s], but are designed to be displayed as a single character that you could type in the future. In the case of the one you linked above, it's meant to be seen as a man with a medium-dark skin tone feeding a baby with a baby bottle, but you probably don't see that at the moment because manufacturers (iOS/Android/Microsoft/whoever) haven't gotten around to incorporating it and the other emojis in the Unicode 13.0 standard yet. Dozens of similar redirects have been created in previous years, taking into account variations in skin tone and/or gender, as these are all plausible emojis that someone could input with one keystroke, not as multiple characters typed one after another. I hope this clarifies! — RAVENPVFF · talk · 00:31, 17 April 2020 (UTC)

Ravenpuff: Thanks for the explanation! I do see the emojis, but I didn't know they were designed to be combined somehow. Is it expected that users enter these emojis as part of some voice or text autocompletion system? Because otherwise the obvious target would be Emoticons (Unicode block)? --MarioGom (talk) 07:43, 17 April 2020 (UTC)

@MarioGom: These emojis should be able to be entered like any other emoji in current use that incorporates genders and/or skin tones. For example, the 👨🏾‍🔬 emoji (which links to the Scientist article) is in fact a combination of the medium-dark-skinned man emoji and the microscope emoji, the only difference being that your platform should already recognise the combination and display it correctly. The way you normally enter this character is by tapping and holding the default gold-coloured male scientist emoji on your keyboard and then selecting the skin tone, not by selecting the man and then the microscope one by one. The redirect I created for 👨🏾‍🍼 is principally the same, just that most people can't actually type it out in the same way yet. — RAVENPVFF · talk · 09:52, 17 April 2020 (UTC)

Ravenpuff: Sure, they can be entered. But if people actually looks for these emoticons on Wikipedia, they are probably looking for an article about the emoticon itself, not the represented image? For example, if I enter "☃", I'm probably looking for Snowman#Unicode, or "←" for ← with proper disambiguation. Or Emoticons (Unicode block) as a fallback. --MarioGom (talk) 09:57, 17 April 2020 (UTC)

Anyway, I see this is currently quite common practice and not just you... --MarioGom (talk) 09:58, 17 April 2020 (UTC)

@MarioGom: WP:REMOJI provides the relevant guideline and a few other examples. There are very few articles about specific emoji or emoticons (e.g. 😂 and 💩); in most cases, it would be more useful for readers to redirect to an article about the topic illustrated by that particular emoji. — RAVENPVFF · talk · 10:01, 17 April 2020 (UTC)

Ravenpuff: Thank you! --MarioGom (talk) 10:04, 17 April 2020 (UTC)

Picture of the day

I spend quite a long time writing the caption for the POTD, trying to make it accurate and informative, and I am aware that you often copyedit the blurb. I normally look to see what you have changed and it is often an improvement but sometimes merely cosmetic and occasionally makes the caption inaccurate. The "Main page errors" page is not overly-focused on POTD, but two captions you changed recently (the polar bear and St George) would I think have been picked up there for criticism.

It seems to me that you often expand captions unnecessarily. The average caption now is about twice as long as it was in 2016, 2017 or 2018. On a different theme, today you changed the captions to the multiple bank note images for 24 April with the edit summary "Copyedit, to more closely match the style of previous banknote POTDs". The result is unexceptional but involved quite a bit of effort on your part, and I'm not sure how necessary it was, considering that I had used a previously used banknote set to guide me when I wrote it. Perhaps you would like to look at the POTD for 6th May before I replicate it for the other images in the set. Incidentally I am planning to ask C&C whether it is feasible to add the reverse of the notes to the picture displayed, ie the two FPs of the obverse and reverse of each note would be visible simultaneously, one above the other. Cwmhiraeth (talk) 08:57, 22 April 2020 (UTC)

@Cwmhiraeth: The current trend in the length of POTD blurbs has been ongoing for some time now. The shorter blurbs from a few years ago were primarily created by Crisco 1492, but since Amakuru took over in August 2018 and I started getting involved in May 2019, I believe that the focus of the blurb has shifted towards being more informative as opposed to a simple caption (which is what Commons POTD does); there's a thread at WT:POTD that discussed this back in July. That said, I don't think that any expansions on my part have been strictly "unnecessary". I try to include both a brief description of the linked article (shorter than in TFA blurbs), as well as some information about the POTD itself.

Regarding the polar bear and St George POTDs, I saw that you revised my copyedits, which is perfectly fine by me, but they weren't in fact picked up at ERRORS. I revised the banknote POTDs primarily following 24 January's set, as well as avoiding sentence fragments like "A 1918 Federal Reserve Bank Note in the denomination of $1", which could be reworded in a better way. I'll certainly go through the 6 May's POTD as you suggested. Your proposal with both FPs of the same banknote featured simultaneously does make sense, although I confess that I haven't seen any such featured pictures and that this would probably require some modification to the POTD generating templates to accommodate it. Cheers. — RAVENPVFF · talk · 09:57, 22 April 2020 (UTC)

There weren't any error reports because I had removed the errors in the polar bear caption before the POTD went live, and of course St George's Day is tomorrow. I see the subject of the blurb was widely discussed in the page you linked above, with no real conclusions. I suggest that you lengthen the caption if you think that there is material that you consider should be included, but not to achieve some arbitrary length requirement. Or you could select more pictures and write the blurbs yourself! Cwmhiraeth (talk) 10:32, 22 April 2020 (UTC)

@Cwmhiraeth: That's understood; there isn't any specific length requirement for blurbs I aim to meet, except that it be at least sufficiently detailed in covering the basic subject matter. Anyway, thanks for correcting the errors in the POTDs you mentioned above and for drafting numerous blurbs over the past months. I do schedule POTDs occasionally, normally to ensure that e.g. featured pictures involving individuals run on birthdays, but I usually leave the blurb-writing to be done later, as there's a possibility that it might become a little stale or that the article might be edited in such a way that the blurb might need to be changed. — RAVENPVFF · talk · 11:04, 22 April 2020 (UTC)

The Proms

I am not sure what "not ordinarily" means. The article is The Proms, "The" being part of the name. My understanding is that The should be capital when named that way. In case that seems too pompous or what, I think "the Proms" might also work, but I don't understand linking to the name but not treating it as a name. Willing to learn, --Gerda Arendt (talk) 09:17, 17 April 2020 (UTC)

@Gerda Arendt: The main article (The Proms) uses a lowercase "the" before "Proms" in prose, so I believe that the DYK hook should follow this convention. This is what I meant when I said that the word is "not ordinarily capitalised"; I apologise for not making my edit summary clearer. Linking "the Proms" should be acceptable, as set out at MOS:THEMUSIC (which more specifically covers band names, but should also be applicable in this scenario). — RAVENPVFF · talk · 09:38, 17 April 2020 (UTC)

Trying to understand, but not yet there. I am not surprised to find "the Proms" in the article, once established, that Proms is short for "The Proms" or "The BBC Proms" - as it also said until you just changed it, not "the BBC Proms", - so that's what I came from. - I now (for the first time) read the guideline, and it's not the first guidelie that makes NO sense to me. My suggestion would be to delink Proms altogether in the hook, - how is that? Being part of a name but then lower case looks as if you'd address me as gerda Arendt ;) --Gerda Arendt (talk) 10:01, 17 April 2020 (UTC)

@Gerda Arendt: Delinking is fine. For the record, the official website for the Proms is consistent in not capitalising "the". It might in fact be preferable to move the page to just "Proms", since that's what's prominently displayed on their website. I agree that the MOS can be quite difficult to comprehend sometimes, but I still believe that it's better to have a set of guidelines to use to keep the encyclopedia at least fairly consistent.

While we're on the topic of this hook, I'm a little confused about the phrase with 18 oboes and a band to match. The Le Concert Spirituel article states that the Handel piece was played with "a large formation including 18 oboes, 9 trumpets and 9 trombones, and strings to match". Unless we're considering the trumpets, trombones and strings as the "band" and the oboes as a separate section (a definition I haven't heard of), I believe that a better alternative phrasing for the hook could be "with a formation including 18 oboes". Would that be acceptable to you? — RAVENPVFF · talk · 10:19, 17 April 2020 (UTC)

Now that we "freed" the hook from everything interesting about the ensemble (doing HIP performances of predominantly vocal music as at the Versailles court) we'd have room to mention the exact number of trumpets as well, and perhaps even trombones. - And yes, I believe that the article should be moved to Proms then, - only I'm not good for requesting moves, see Der fliegende Holländer and Ein feste Burg, - all other stage works by Wagner are original, all other hymns by Luther are original. Große Fuge, grrr ;) --Gerda Arendt (talk) 11:11, 17 April 2020 (UTC)

Anyway, Gerda, if the article doesn't end up being moved, I don't think that it's strictly wrong to link "the Proms" – MOS:THEMUSIC indicates that links such as "the Beatles" and "the Moody Blues", with a lowercase "the", are acceptable. I've also revised your hook to "... with an ensemble that comprised 18 oboes, 9 trumpets, 9 trombones, and strings?" to add some precision. — RAVENPVFF · talk · 10:55, 19 April 2020 (UTC)

Thank you for the precise numbers. The next question will be 9 vs. nine. Would you write "the reviewer from the New York Times? --Gerda Arendt (talk) 11:21, 19 April 2020 (UTC)

@Gerda Arendt: If we spell it out as "nine", I think we would also have to spell out "eighteen" for consistency (MOS:NUMNOTES). The NYT example is a slightly different case, as the word "The" is officially part of the newspaper's name and is consistently capitalised when referring to it. — RAVENPVFF · talk · 11:26, 19 April 2020 (UTC)

If "The Proms" is not consistently/officially the name, our article title should not be "The Proms" ;) - lets hope. Swallowing the numnotes but finding that inconsistent itself. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 11:32, 19 April 2020 (UTC)

Next concern

I didn't watch it closely enough, so somehow the linked "the Proms" made it to the Main page, - see my talk and enjoy listening to the mentioned music, and see in the video that no "the "is shown in the hall ;) - I now try to come a bit earlier: The Cathedral of St. John the Divine (now in prep 3) was never really completed, - so what does "completed" do in the hook and the image caption? Sure the design was completed, but that's not worth mentioning, right? --Gerda Arendt (talk) 21:17, 23 April 2020 (UTC)

@Gerda Arendt: I think "completed" is worth mentioning somewhere to let readers know that it's not depicting the cathedral as it appears presently – it's a "rendering of the completed cathedral", but the hook clarifies that its construction is unfinished. The bracketed portion of the hook is similar in function, although in retrospect it would also be acceptable if we just used "(design shown)", removing the word in question. Of course, if the building was actually complete, we wouldn't need to clarify it, would we? — RAVENPVFF · talk · 08:30, 24 April 2020 (UTC)

Perhaps it's my limited English. "Completed building" tells me the building was completed, but you say that's wrong, - I'm learning. For me, just "design" would be less ambiguous, KISS. The biggest clash between the design and reality is all that free space around the church, DYK ;) --Gerda Arendt (talk) 08:35, 24 April 2020 (UTC)

@Gerda Arendt: Well, the "completed" in the caption is only describing how the building looks in the picture, not its current state, so I can see why it can be confusing for some readers. You could start a discussion at WT:DYK (it's still more than 12 hours too early for WP:ERRORS) to get more opinions on the issue if you think that's necessary. — RAVENPVFF · talk · 09:04, 24 April 2020 (UTC)

Fixing ping @Gerda Arendt. — RAVENPVFF · talk · 09:08, 24 April 2020 (UTC)

Alternatively, you could return to the approved version ;) --Gerda Arendt (talk) 09:17, 24 April 2020 (UTC)