Welcome! I noticed you're a blatherer too, thx for creating the article. If I think of anything brilliant to say, I'll say it there :) Zero sharp 08:50, 2 March 2006 (UTC)Reply

Baked Potato edit

Note: See this user's IP talk

Well, the reason it was removed was because of the faggot link. Anyways, it is still my opinion that the paragraph shouldn't be added to the article, but I'm not going to stop you. — ßottesiηi (talk) 20:54, 18 May 2006 (UTC)Reply

Battle of Trenton edit

I revert by going to the article's history.

  • Click on the date of the last unvandalised version. On Battle of Trenton, I clicked "01:10, 23 October 2006", ERCheck's version.
  • Then click "Edit this page" at the top. You'll see "You are editing a prior version of this page. If you save it, any changes made since this version will be removed."
  • Type "rvv" (revert vandalism) in the edit summary, and hit enter. Done! Gotyear 16:27, 23 October 2006 (UTC)Reply
thanks, that's a little quicker than copying and pasting. still might be a good idea to have a 'revert to this version' link in the history page or when comparing versions. cheers. --User24 16:30, 23 October 2006 (UTC)Reply
That's a good idea. You can propose it at Village Pump (technical).
thanks, have done.--User24 18:01, 23 October 2006 (UTC)Reply
There are other ways of reverting vandalism. Some people use popups, VandalProof or VandalSniper. I haven't used any of these, but they're widely used on Wikipedia. Gotyear 17:24, 23 October 2006 (UTC)Reply
I use popups, it adds the functionality I suggested above. --User24 14:14, 24 October 2006 (UTC)Reply
Thanks for the help guys. The Battle of Trenton has been vandalized a lot lately! Valtam 17:44, 23 October 2006 (UTC)Reply

WP:AIAV edit

Hi. Seems that you don't know what to do when a vandal vandalizes after {{test4}}. Take a look at Wikipedia:Administrator intervention against vandalism. Jacek Kendysz 18:32, 27 October 2006 (UTC)Reply

cheers, that helps a lot. :-) --User24 18:37, 27 October 2006 (UTC)Reply

osteopath edit

Maybe I should make osteopath a redirect to osteopathy (disambiguation) then? Indeed I'll do that. Revert and message me again if you think this is a bad idea. --publunch

Spyderco edit

Hi. Thanks for the note on my talk page. I'm sorry for taking so long to get back to you. I think the Spyderco article looks terrible. It has too much knife model advertising on it, and reads too much like a brochure. Under the Wiki guidelines for spam, it should be deleted immediately. I would nominate it, but the problem is that all the knife articles are just like it. It seems that knife fans don't like to read or follow the rules. I don't have the time to edit every knife article, and I know that if I delete one (or all of them) it is likely to start an edit war.

Would you be interested in helping to create a to-do list for the Spyderco article that we can place on its discussion page? Thanks. Sam 17:21, 19 November 2006 (UTC)Reply

yes, sure. Good idea. I have been trying to clean up some of the knife articles (benchmade and wenger so far) so this sounds like a good project to me :) --User24 12:59, 20 November 2006 (UTC)Reply
I've put a preliminary todo list at Spyderco's talk page. --User24 11:53, 21 November 2006 (UTC)Reply

Watch Special Pages edit

Start from WP:VPT
Is there a way to add Special:xxx/yyyy to my watchlist? I ask because I've been going through disambiguation pages and changing all internal links so that they point to the right place, but of course, people continue adding ambigous links that I then have to change back. If I could add, eg Special:whatlinkshere/The_end to my watchlist, then I'd be notified every time a link needed disambig-ing. Which would be useful. --User24 14:40, 6 November 2006 (UTC)Reply

I believe the answer is no since special: pages are generated and have no timestamp that could be put in the database record corresponding to your watchlist. If I'm understanding what you want to do, the best solution I can think of would be to write a script you could run from your PC to access Special:whatlinkshere for a list of article names and manipulate the output to find what you're looking for. I have written a number of scripts that do various things more or less like this and would be willing to help if you'd like (although not for the next two weeks or so). -- Rick Block (talk) 14:59, 6 November 2006 (UTC)Reply
Yeah that'd be awesome; let me know when you have some time free, thanks. --User24 15:02, 6 November 2006 (UTC)Reply

End from WP:VPT
Want to talk about how this should work? It would be fairly trivial to write a script to download the current whatlinkshere into a file and diff it against a previous version stored someplace on your PC. Then when you're satisfied with the current links you'd run something to update your stored copy. Most of the scripting I do relies on Unix-ish stuff, so if you're not running Linux or Mac OS X we'd need to figure out an appropriate environment (perhaps the cygwin Unix emulator - Perl would work as well but I'm considerably less fluent in Perl). -- Rick Block (talk) 14:49, 21 November 2006 (UTC)Reply

Hi, well at the moment, I'm trialing Tra's monobook-based solution, but I'm not sure if it's exactly what I was after (haven't played with it enough yet)..
The 'diff' idea is a good one (and I think is exactly the functionality I was after), but I'd envisaged something that integrated more closely with wikipedia (as in the monobook solution).
I run windows (sorry). C(++)/PHP is best for me. Let me know your thoughts --User24 23:05, 21 November 2006 (UTC)Reply
-and thanks for getting back to me ;) --User24 23:07, 21 November 2006 (UTC)Reply

If you prefer an integrated solution and can find one, then by all means use it. The kinds of things I do (like WP:WBFAN, and the alphabetical indices for WP:CFD like Wikipedia:Categories for deletion/Archive debates/2006 October index), I do from a shell (sorry, command prompt) window. WBFAN is kind of involved, but the CFD indices are pretty much just type a command, like ./CFDindexer October 2006, and out pops the wikicode for the October index (which I then copy and paste into the article). There are commands available (that can be run from scripts) to fetch a web page and put the contents in a file, and from there pretty much anything is possible (like diff against the last version that was fetched). If you want, you could put a list of disambig pages you're watching on a subpage of your user page and have the script use that list as the input list of pages to check. So, what you might get as output would be a list of new links to check (all the "+" diffs since the last time you ran the tool) that you could copy and paste into a preview window (so the links would work). Operationally, you might open a command window and run a command like checklinks that would output a list of article names. If you'd be willing to install cygwin, I could whip something up in a few hours (alright, let's say by Monday) that you could try. -- Rick Block (talk) 02:34, 22 November 2006 (UTC)Reply

yeah if you want to then great; it would help me out. I can run it inside cygwin. The way you describe it working with subpages etc sounds great to me - cheers --User24 21:26, 22 November 2006 (UTC)Reply

Here's a version you can play with (requires curl.exe to exist on your machine as well - I got a binary copy from here). What it does is read a list of pages you're interested in (e.g. User:Rick_Block/disambigs), and for each page in the list fetch up to 500 links to it storing the page names in <pagename>.current (first moving the previously fetched links to <pagename>.prev), and then diff the current and prev displaying the output as wikilinks (in a format suitable for yanking and putting to a wikipage for at least preview). Seems to work OK for me (on my Windows machine). -- Rick Block (talk) 18:12, 23 November 2006 (UTC)Reply

#!/bin/bash

# usage: checklinks

# variables
CURL="/usr/bin/curl"  # on a mac OS X
LIMIT=500             # for popular pages may need to increase
PAGELIST="User:Rick_Block/disambigs"  # page list (URI format)

#
# get list of pages we're interested in
$CURL "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/$PAGELIST" 2>curl.out | awk >pagelist '
/^<li><a/ {
  page=$0;
  sub("^.*/wiki/","",page);
  sub(". title=.*","",page);
  print page
}'

for page in `cat pagelist`; do
  echo
  echo "New references to [[$page]]"
  if [ -f "$page.current" ]; then
    mv "$page.current" "$page.prev"
  else
    >"$page.prev"
  fi
  $CURL "http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Whatlinkshere/${page}&limit=$LIMIT" 2>curl.out | awk >"$page.current" '
/<li><a/ {
  page=$0;
  sub("^.*<ul>","",page);
  sub("^.*/wiki/","",page);
  sub(". title=.*","",page);
  print page
}'
  diff "$page.prev" "$page.current" | awk '
/^> / {
  page=$0;
  sub("> ","",page);
  print "* [[" page "]]"
}'

done

AfD nomination of Blather edit

An article that you have been involved in editing, Blather, has been listed by me for deletion. If you are interested in the deletion discussion, please participate by adding your comments at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Blather. Thank you. --B. Wolterding 14:08, 23 June 2007 (UTC)Reply

Barnstar edit

  The Barnstar of Good Humor
I don't know if you meant it to be funny, but I laughed out loud for a solid three minutes after reading that the article for history was tagged as a current event. That's funny stuff. --Sharkface217 02:20, 5 March 2008 (UTC)Reply

(thanks, yes I absolutely did mean it as a joke, the idea tickled me too. I'm glad you appreciated the humour of it!)

Wikiproject Cutlery edit

I'm trying to start a project to work on all the cutlery related articles, to get them cohesive, sourced, etc and protected from the anti-knife coalition. If you want to participate, let it be known here:[1]--Mike - Μολὼν λαβέ 05:52, 16 July 2008 (UTC)Reply