User talk:Thehelpfulone/Archive/March 2009
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Bot cleaning
I noticed that Thehelpfulbot made an edit with summary "Robot: Adding missing tag;". I'm wondering about a couple of other issues:
- The bot replaced some double spaces with a single space (excellent!), but did not delete trailing space at the end of lines. Is there a reason to not clean trailing spaces as well?
- The bot replaced "==Heading==" with "== Heading ==". Is there a policy guideline recommending that because, while some like it and some don't, I have noticed some editors removing those spaces when an article had a mixture of both styles (so I've done it a couple of times)?
- Shouldn't the edit summary give a hint that other changes might be made, even if just "and other cleaning"?
It is great that articles are made more consistent by the bot, and I'm sorry to bother you with what is essentially trivia. --Johnuniq (talk) 23:13, 26 February 2009 (UTC)
- Thanks for your reply, where in response to my query about why the bot replaced "==Heading==" with "== Heading ==", you said:
- I think this is something to do with the manual of style of Wikipedia, however I am not sure about this.
- But the MOS contradicts what your bot is doing. At MOS Section headings we see:
- Unspaced multiple equal signs are the style markup for headings.
- primary headings are then
==H2==
, followed by===H3===
,====H4====
, and so on. - Spaces between the == and the heading text are optional (
==H2==
versus== H2 ==
).
- The MOS leaves wriggle room, but it starts by saying unspaced equal signs are the style markup, so I think a bot needs a strong reason to change
===H2==
to== H2 ==
.
- I realize this is essentially trivia, but people have strong feelings about this kind of thing. I happen to prefer the "no space" rule, but I wouldn't dream of changing a carefully-written article where clearly master editors have been at work, without a good reason (I might make a change if most headings are one style, but a couple aren't). BTW on another wiki I have written a lot of Python bot code, so if you ever feel like trusting a stranger you could contact me if you want a hand. Johnuniq (talk) 00:00, 1 March 2009 (UTC)
Thanks
Thanks for Fixing the refrence tag on East Nashville High School, I was trying to fix it but I could not get it right. Thank you much! Terrancee (talk) 01:03, 1 March 2009 (UTC)
Dear thehelpfulone, I think this is more or less done. I am sure your bot will help. Please clean this up. Thanks. 7&6=thirteen (talk) 17:26, 1 March 2009 (UTC) Stan Well done! 7&6=thirteen (talk) 17:49, 1 March 2009 (UTC) Stan
WikiCup Newsletter
The WikiCup Newsletter | ||||||||
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- 18:10, 1 March 2009 (UTC) The Helpful Bot 18:10, 1 March 2009 (UTC)
Wikipedia Signpost — 2 March 2009
This week, the Wikipedia Signpost published volume 5, issue 9, which includes these articles:
- Books extension enabled
- News and notes: Stewards, Wikimania bids, and more
- Wikipedia in the news: Wikipedia's role in journalism, Smarter Wikipedia, Skittles
- Dispatches: WikiProject Ships Featured topic and Good topics
- Wikiproject report: WikiProject Norse History and Culture
- Discussion report: Discussion Reports And Miscellaneous Articulations
- Features and admins: Approved this week
- Technology report: Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News
- Arbitration report: The Report on Lengthy Litigation
Delivered by §hepBot (Disable) at 20:07, 2 March 2009 (UTC)
Protection of WP:CFD/W
Hi
I have just restored full protection of WP:CFD/W, and left an explanation at Wikipedia talk:Categories for discussion/Working#Full_protection_restored. This undoing your action on a request in December 2008 to downgrade it to semi-protection, and I have restored full protection because CFD/W provides a major security vulnerability which is also (after a previous exploit) very clearly documented.
I am sorry to change this without asking you first, but once the reduced protection had been noted on my talk page (which seems to be widely watchlisted), I thought it better to act promptly. If you feel that I have acted wrongly, please could we discuss it at Wikipedia talk:Categories for discussion/Working#Full_protection_restored?
Thanks! --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 14:16, 3 March 2009 (UTC)
User talk:MTO Poster has an unblock on hold which has been there over 1 month, waiting for your response. Please resolve the matter, as this seems a long time... --Jayron32.talk.contribs 23:12, 4 March 2009 (UTC)
New to Wikipedia
Hello, I am new to Wikipedia, and I saw your page and wondered how you get it to look so neat. Is there some button that inserts the elements on your page that you have, or did you code it all from scratch? —Preceding unsigned comment added by TheZdrok (talk • contribs) 00:03, 5 March 2009 (UTC)
Please tweak. Thanks. 7&6=thirteen (talk) 14:16, 6 March 2009 (UTC) Stan
Call to actionAlarm! Alarm! We've been working on the country outline drafts for a year now. Therefore, I've moved them to article space. All of them. It's time to finish them up! The only accuracy problem they have are the government branches sections. Those need to be completed right away. I've been working on them and will continue to do so... But, this task needs everybody working on it now. Please click on some outlines and fix the government branches sections. The Transhumanist 00:57, 8 March 2009 (UTC) Move requestPlease move:
They share the formatting of and belong to the set of pages listed at User:The Transhumanist/Country-related topics list set. They have nothing to do with the country outlines we've been working on. There are currently redirects at the destinations listed above, and so I'm unable to make the moves. The Transhumanist 22:42, 7 March 2009 (UTC)
Thank you. The Transhumanist 21:32, 8 March 2009 (UTC) Country outlines project update - 2009/03/08Things have been slowing down again, so it's time for a big push... We've gone liveThis project needed a shot in the arm. Also, its draft pages have been littering Wikipedia's categories for months. The time seemed right to move all the country outline drafts to article space. WHAT??? Well, the drafts had been sitting in Wikipedia space for a year. WHAT??? Development has been moving at a snail's pace and we could use the help of the Wikipedia community at large (who are more likely to find these if they are in article space). WHAT??? Yes, we've gone live. :) This puts pressure on us to get the blatantly incomplete elements of these outlines done. The only glaring problem is the government branches sections. These need to be corrected ASAP. I've mentioned THE GOVERNMENT BRANCHES SECTIONS many times to many people over the past year, but the problem just doesn't seem to have been taken seriously. So let me put it another way: HELP!!! I need your help on this now. Almost all the countries have a government with an executive branch, a legislative branch, and a judicial branch. The links for these branches need to be completed for each country outline:
If you spot any standardization in links, and ways we can automate parts of this process, or for groups of countries that have links in common, please let me know! Administrative support for outlinesThere has been growing pressure on me to write up the administrative pages for outlines - their instructions, guidelines, etc. Therefore, I'm now in the process of composing these. Fortunately, it is mostly a matter of gathering material from messages I've written to you guys over the past year. Still, this is taking up most of my time, and I will be buried in these for the foreseeable future. Traffic controlThe next big task after the government branches sections are cleaned up is link support for the outlines. There's quite a list of links and notices that need to be put in place around Wikipedia, providing access to them to readers, and alerting editors to the need to develop and maintain these pages. This will keep our bot people very busy (and happy). But the most important thing right now is to get the government branches sections completed. So please, put your bots aside, roll up your shirt sleeves, and start typing. Thank you. The Transhumanist 02:32, 9 March 2009 (UTC) One of the country outlines has disappeared!I asked Juliancolton to move "Topic outline of Bermuda" to "List of Bermuda-related topics", and somehow he got that mixed up and moved it to Outline of Bermuda. Unfortunately, he appears to have erased the page that was already there! It was one of the country outlines we have been working on. Could you see if you could restore it? The Transhumanist 03:48, 9 March 2009 (UTC) BotInterestingly, over half of your bot's trial edits seem to have been in my userspace. Thanks for cleaning up after me :) — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 22:54, 9 March 2009 (UTC) Wikipedia Signpost — 9 March 2009This week, the Wikipedia Signpost published volume 5, issue 10, which includes these articles:
Delivered by §hepBot (Disable) at 01:21, 10 March 2009 (UTC) Please use reflist not < references />Could you ask the bot nicely to insert reflist rather than the < references /> template. It leaves a much prettier, and less intrusive impact on articles. Cheers, Jack (talk) 02:49, 10 March 2009 (UTC) HeadersPlease do not change ==This== to == This ==. There is no reason to do it, since both are acceptable and the first editor's style should therefore stand. -- Necrothesp (talk) 08:53, 10 March 2009 (UTC) Scripts for renaming pagesThe Transhumanist 22:54, 10 March 2009 (UTC) Cookie!download has given you a cookie! Cookies promote WikiLove and hopefully this one has made your day better. Spread the WikiLove by giving someone else a cookie, whether it be someone you have had disagreements with in the past or a good friend. Happy munching! Spread the goodness of cookies by adding {{subst:Cookie}} to someone's talk page with a friendly message, or eat this cookie on the giver's talk page with {{subst:munch}}!
Outline of knowledge project update - 2009/03/11Allow me to shift focus for the moment from the country outline project to outlines in general... Where's the Outline of knowledge project headed?It's growing fast, so fast that it is catching up to portals. I just stumbled on to a subset of 50 more outlines (one for the history of each state of the United States), and have added them to the top of the outline. Buaidh has been busy - it's nice to meet another fanatic outliner. :) That brings the total number of outlines in article space to about 450. It won't be long before there are more outlines than portals (which number about 600). How long before outlines outnumber portals?Four months, tops. Then what?I don't know. Do you have any ideas? Of course the set will continue to grow. Which branch of knowledge should we tackle next? And... Perhaps we should push for Main page coverage? Need for traffic analysisWe need to begin taking a deeper look at outlines and how they are integrated into (linked to from other pages on) Wikipedia, to optimize their usefulness. The Traffic counter is useful for monitoring page traffic on Wikipedia. Though I'm not sure exactly what it measures. Do you know? What interests me most is the difference between outline traffic and portal traffic. Use the above counter on various portals and the corresponding outlines, to see what I mean. Is the traffic volume of portals related to the structure of their links? Where is portal traffic coming from? Can the answer be found in "What links here"? And what about the portal menu bar at the top of every portal page? Does that account for the huge number of hits the main portal list gets each month? I also wonder how much of the traffic comes from the Main page. Is there any way to tell? If you have any ideas on this subject and how we should proceed, please visit my talk page and let me know! And if you know of any other traffic analysis tools that we could make use of, please let me know! The Transhumanist 19:23, 11 March 2009 (UTC) Geography outlines project update - 2009/03/12I needed a rest from countries... The states of the United StatesSo I switched over to states. United States. I've added outlines for all 50 to the Outline of knowledge. How?The main activity in creating these was using LINKY to execute advanced Google searches on all 50 states at the same time (do a single search on google, then on a Wikipedia user page create a list of state links, then search replace the front and back bracket pairs with the parts of the google search url that come before and after the state's name, respectively - once you have a list of searches, you can easily modify it with search/replaces. WikEd works great for this. The page I've been using for Linky loads is User:The Transhumanist/Google state searches - but I used it for more than just google searches: check the history to see the various link sets and google search sets I used for linky loads). The search strings "in x" and "of x" reveal a lot about a state. But the magic is in Firefox's tab navigation keys (Ctrl-W) and (Ctrl-tab), which provide a bird's eye view of the coverage of the whole set of subjects. Flipping between the search results for each state using the tab keys, you quickly notice the common titles ("Governor of x", for instance). As I found common titles, I added them to Template:Outline U.S. State. Besides Google searching, I used Linky to open all state articles at the same time, to look over their headings (those usually expand into stand-alone articles), and I added the main ones to the outline as well. Using Linky again, I opened all the lists on the list of lists by state, to look for those with state subheadings. The outlines contain section links to the few of those I found. When I couldn't stand building the template anymore, I used it to create 50 outlines! That was fun. It's like they appeared out of nowhere. Further developmentThe region section contains temporary links - I knew that subset of links would get at least some matches, so I figured that would be better than nothing. I'll swap those out with an accurate list of regions for each state as I find the time. Feel free to jump in and help - I'm not greedy. :) The standard links I used for the government branches sections matched almost all the states, except for a few in the legislative section. It won't take me long to finish fixing these - there are only a handful left. There are fewer fill-in items on these outlines compared to those for countries. So these will be much faster to complete. And there's only 50 pages, which makes passes go by very quickly (less than an hour for most passes). One nice side-effect of doing passes on these outlines is that you naturally memorize the 50 states (forward and backward, if you reverse your passes to alleviate monotony). :) That brings the total number of outlines on Wikipedia to about 500Which puts us within 100 titles of portals. Further coverage of geographyPolitical divisions lend themselves to rapid outline development because of common titles. Other sets that are begging for creation include:
That last item on the list above looks especially juicy. My mouth is watering. Cities are pretty fun. So far I've only completed two of them (because they happened to be city-states and were included in the set of country outlines we've been working on): Outline of Macau and Outline of Vatican City. I especially enjoyed outlining Vatican City, because WP:COMMONS had lots of pictures to choose from. Though cities in general will probably require the building of a new template. The Transhumanist 00:15, 13 March 2009 (UTC) Move requestPlease move Topic outline of history to Outline of history (it's currently a redirect). The Transhumanist 23:49, 12 March 2009 (UTC) Time to bother youTime to bother you once again. :) Can you add this image to my navbar? With a link to my Citation Storage? Thanks, ♪♫The New Mikemoraltalkcontribs 23:54, 13 March 2009 (UTC)
Robot?Hi THO
Thanks & Cheers, Amalthea 12:15, 15 March 2009 (UTC)
WikiCup Newsletter
Geography WikiProject update - 03/15/2009The award images are complete! After months of toil and attention to detail, Penubag has completed the set of images for this WikiProject's awards! There are five race ribbons: There's an engraved medallion: And by far the hardest to create, a golden trophy: If you have any ideas about awards these images can be placed upon, and how to award them (to show appreciation and to attract participants), please let me know. And be sure to pop by Penubag's talk page to let him know what you think of his graphics artistry. The Transhumanist 21:27, 15 March 2009 (UTC) P.S.: Thehelpfulone, what should we do now? RE: Geography WikiProject updateHi there, Well I'm not sure what we could use the images for - awards maybe, but is the Geography WikiProject active, is that what I've been helping out in? I thought this was the "Wikipedia:WikiProject Topic outline" project - not the Geography one? If it's for this WikiProject - then perhaps everyone who has been helping so hard should get a special one, customised with their name and a personal comment once the outlines are complete? The Helpful One 21:35, 15 March 2009 (UTC)
How can I edit the flag for Puerto Rico in 1952 Olympics?Hi, I'm trying to update the flag used by Puerto Rico in the 1952 Summer Olympics. Here is the Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puerto_Rico_at_the_1952_Summer_Olympics Please refer to the following PDF to reference the information below: http://www.la84foundation.org/6oic/OfficialReports/1952/OR1952.pdf If you look at page 234, you can see that the flag matches what the wiki entry shows, which is fine. However PR used the flag in the article for the Olympic Opening Ceremony, and got their real flag while the games were in progress. If you look at page 86, it shows the Puerto Rico flag in the background (the new and current flag), and the following explanation: "Greece wanted her state flag in the March Past and ceremonies, but sanctioned the use of her merchant flag in general decorations. Great Britain never used her merchant flag on any occasion. The Netherlands Antilles marched under the Dutch flag, but Puerto Rico after having used the U.S.A. flag on the arrival of her team in Helsinki, acquired while the Games were in progress the national flag to which her new independence entitled her. Certain teams wished to march under the flag of their national Olympic Committee This could not be permitted, the I.O.C. protocol specifically laying down that national flags are to be used." How can I make this change, or perhaps have both flags included? Thanks. Kasht —Preceding unsigned comment added by Kasht (talk • contribs) 22:11, 15 March 2009 (UTC) thehelpfulbot adding References section in middle of External linksHi, re this diff on Ben Chapman (footballer). The bot has added the References section in the External links section, between the asterisk denoting the first ext link and the ext link itself. Perhaps this was the "L" of links was capitalised, so the bot didn't recognise it as such? but even so, between an initial asterisk and the data following it seems an odd place for it to choose. cheers, Struway2 (talk) 10:04, 16 March 2009 (UTC) Wikipedia Signpost — 16 March 2009
Delivered by §hepBot (Disable) at 00:08, 17 March 2009 (UTC) Please take a looksee at this. If you have any suggestions, I'd appreciate them. Happy St. Patrick's Day! Have a Harp's lager or Guiness Stout (which ironcally are owned by the South African Brewing Company) on me. 7&6=thirteen (talk) 15:42, 17 March 2009 (UTC) Stan Happy Saint Patrick’s Day!On behalf of the Wikipedia:Kindness Campaign, we just want to spread Wikipedia:WikiLove by wishing you a Happy Saint Patrick’s Day! Sincerely, --A NobodyMy talk 15:48, 17 March 2009 (UTC) Followup - Puerto Rico in 1952 OlympicsHi TheHelpfulOne: If you go to the site itself, you can get it from there. Here is the URL: http://www.la84foundation.org/5va/reports_frmst.htm Look for the 1952 Helsinki report. I would recommend you Right-click and Save As to get it. It is about 30MB big, so most likely it wont open on the browser. Once you get it, refer to my previous post to search for the page references I mentioned. Let me know if you have any further questions. Kasht —Preceding unsigned comment added by Kasht (talk • contribs) 21:44, 19 March 2009 (UTC)
Delievered by SoxBot II (talk) at 04:50, 24 March 2009 (UTC) Wikipedia:WikiCupCan I substitute in for a withdrawn entrant at Wikipedia:WikiCup?--TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/WP:CHICAGO/WP:LOTM) 23:13, 27 March 2009 (UTC) Just to make sureJust to make sure, but I thought I qualified for round two. [1] according to that, you say I didn't. But on this page, it says I passed on through. Is this a mistake or something? Just wondering.--WillC---Joe's gonna kill you!!!) 00:07, 29 March 2009 (UTC)
AWB bot task: search/replaceIn the pages listed at User:The Transhumanist/Country outlines, please replace:
with:
Thank you. The Transhumanist 00:23, 29 March 2009 (UTC) ACC reactivationHi, my toolserver account creation interface account was suspended/ blocked due to 45 days of inactivity (I wasn't aware an extended break would do this). When you have a chance, would you please un-suspend my ACC account? Its the same as my Wikipedia username - "Mr Senseless" (without the quotes.) Thanks so much! -Senseless!... says you, says me 02:50, 30 March 2009 (UTC) RE: AWB Bot taskHi there, I did this task on my main account - as there were less than 10 pages that needed the find/replace! Thanks, The Helpful One 00:39, 30 March 2009 (UTC)
I'm having an insoluble problem (no matter what I do) with footnote 8. Please help. thanks. 7&6=thirteen (talk) 11:49, 31 March 2009 (UTC) Stan
Delievered by SoxBot II (talk) at 20:49, 31 March 2009 (UTC) WikiCup Newsletter
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