User talk:Andrew Gray/Archives/11

Latest comment: 11 years ago by Geneticcuckoo in topic Wikepedia Ada Lovelace edit-a-thod

Please comment on Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)

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The Signpost: 06 August 2012

Please comment on Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style

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New Pages newsletter

Hey all :)

A couple of new things.

First, you'll note that all the project titles have now changed to the Page Curation prefix, rather than having the New Pages Feed prefix. This is because the overarching project name has changed to Page Curation; the feed is still known as New Pages Feed, and the Curation Toolbar is still the Curation Toolbar. Hopefully this will be the last namechange ;p.

On the subject of the Curation Toolbar (nice segue, Oliver!) - it's now deployed on Wikipedia. Just open up any article in the New Pages Feed and it should appear on the right.

It's still a beta version - bugs are expected - and we've got a lot more work to do. But if you see something going wrong, or a feature missing, drop me a note or post on the project talkpage and I'll be happy to help :). Thanks! Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 00:11, 10 August 2012 (UTC)

Drexel 4257

Hi there. Just a little suggestion which you're welcome to ignore. I've just created an article on Drexel 4257 (which came out unintentionally long). This is a music manuscript from the Rimbault Library which was auctioned by Sotheby's in 1877 and is now at NYPL. I believe there was another manuscript owned by Gamble (and Rimbault) that went to the BL, though I can't determine which it is from the catalogue. If you can find out, it might be nice to make (or have someone else make) a corresponding entry. -- kosboot (talk) 14:37, 10 August 2012 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #18

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
    • Updated demo system
    • Reset, undo, reverts and other cool things are working now (not on demo yet unfortunately)
    • Edit is now disabled if item should not be editable (e.g. in diff view)
    • Decided on how to solve messed up DOM structure of items around the page header
    • Decided on how to proceed with JS-API
    • All of the test coverage for Diff extension
    • Extended test setup on local test machine
  • Discussions/Press
  • Events
    • upcoming: Campus Party (If you want a ticket let Lydia know. She might be able to get you one.)
    • Lydia will give a keynote at FrOSCon
    • Denny will give a keynote at SMWCon
  • Open Tasks for You
Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Global message delivery 15:15, 10 August 2012 (UTC)

Ave atque vale

I am sending this note to Wikipedians with whom I have most closely collaborated over the last six years or so. After pondering hard during a month's wiki-break in July I have sadly decided to withdraw fully from contributing. I have been worn down by continual carping, sniping and belittling from a wearisome few (you know the sort of people I refer to); the joy has gone out of taking part in this wonderful enterprise. I should be more resilient, but alas it's finally got to me.

Working with you has been a pleasure and a privilege: I count myself fortunate to have had such colleagues. My warmest wishes go with you for the future.

I am deeply conscious that I have let you down badly by backing out of Wikipedia after you have gone to such lengths to set up new contacts with the BL. Forgive me: it is not done impulsively or lightly.

With my very best wishes,
Tim. (Tim riley (talk) 16:09, 10 August 2012 (UTC))

Please comment on Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Politics

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The Signpost: 13 August 2012

Please comment on Talk:Gilgit–Baltistan

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BM+BL geonotice

Not too keen on adding another UK-wide geonotice at the moment - there are the regular meetup notice and the EduWiki notice already. Deryck C. 13:37, 17 August 2012 (UTC)

There's also a Wikipedia Takes Coventry notice. Talk to HJM about that. Deryck C. 15:08, 17 August 2012 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #19

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
    • Installed a lot of extensions on the demo system. Let us know if any important ones are missing.
    • Going to old versions and undoing changes works as expected
    • The history and recent changes show useable comments now
    • The Universal Language Selector is installed on the demo and replaces the Stick to that Language extension
    • Updated Wikibase client code for fetching and displaying links from a shared (with the repo) database table, and optionally overriding them with interwiki links from local wikitext.
    • Improved internationalization messages
    • Added selenium tests for undo, rollback, restore, diffs, old revisions, history and a few more
    • Setup MAC to be part of our selenium grid testing environment
    • Fixed many little bugs in the UI, including cross browser issues
    • Improved modularity of client side caching and generalized it to work with any type of entity rather than just items.
    • Wrote up interfaces for snaks, statements and related stuff for the second phase of Wikidata
  • Discussions/Press
    • Internationalization, localization and co in preparation for deployment discussions on a rtl-language Wikipedia
    • Some mentions of Wikidata in relation to a re-design proposal that became pretty popular. Like this one
  • Events
    • upcoming: Campus Party
    • upcoming: FrOSCon
    • We submitted a SxSW proposal. It’d be awesome if you’d vote for us.
  • Other Noteworthy Stuff
    • Logo is settled and all good now after some modifications: with and without text Stickers and stuff are next.
  • Open Tasks for You
    • If you want to code, check this
    • Help spread the word about Wikidata in your Wikipedia if it’s not being talked about there yet.
    • Help translate the most important pages on meta and the software on translatewiki.net
Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Global message delivery 13:55, 17 August 2012 (UTC)

Please comment on Talk:Georgia State University

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BBK Workshop

Hello Andrew! Gordo (talk) 13:32, 20 August 2012 (UTC)

BBK Workshop Sandboxen

Gordo (talk) 14:28, 20 August 2012 (UTC)

Please comment on Wikipedia talk:Teahouse

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The Signpost: 20 August 2012

Please comment on Talk:Isle of Wight Academy

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Wikidata weekly summary #20

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
    • Pywikidata, developed by Joan Creus, was released \o/
    • Updated demo system
    • The repository part of the demo system had — believe it or not — too many entries from user and bot activity, apparently making it difficult to find a page to create. We truncated and filled it with about 100 chemical elements again
    • Started to implement new layout: this includes restructuring DOM and introducing an action column
    • Started refactoring of selenium tests layout
    • Finished most of the core of the phase 2 data model implementation
    • Created abstract storage interface for the repository
    • Started generalizing the secondary storage to work for all types of entities
    • Picked up work on the ContentHandler again, addressing concerns voiced by WMF staff and tying up loose ends
    • Started work on edit collision detection, will be changed as we observed unexpected side effects
    • The new API module for linking titles is live
    • Launched a demo client site in Hebrew
    • Various internationalization improvements and fixes
    • Revising the Special:ItemByTitle page on the repository
    • Special:ItemByLabel will become Special:ItemDisambiguation
  • Discussions/Press
  • Events
    • Campus Party
    • upcoming: FrOSCon
    • upcoming: WikiCon
    • announced next office hours (5th and 6th of Sept.)
    • still looking for support for our SxSW panel
  • Open Tasks for You
    • for possible coding tasks check this
    • check the needs-input box here and see where you can give feedback
Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Global message delivery 21:25, 24 August 2012 (UTC)

Please comment on Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Education Program extension

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Coord?

Andrew, I see you're going to be tied up with the British Museum through at least October, but I'm wondering if you're ready for more work in the trenches at Milhist? Signups start Saturday-ish. - Dank (push to talk) 21:51, 28 August 2012 (UTC)

The Signpost: 27 August 2012

Please comment on Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Lead section

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Re: email!

Ok thanks, The information hasn't lost any value on my part. Cheers, --ceradon talkcontribs 20:36, 30 August 2012 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #21

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
    • Worked on version 2 of generic site handling in MediaWiki incorporating feedback from wikitech and mediawiki.org, as well as updating the WIkibase code to match
    • Rewrote SQLStore to accommodate phase 2 and phase 3 of Wikidata
    • Added maintenance script for rebuilding the store data
    • Implemented action column in user interface. All buttons for user-interaction are now aligned on the right side (for ltr-languages).
    • The language-code is now shown in a separate column in the site-links table
    • Started implementing sorting for site-link table columns
    • Lots of cleanup in JavaScript code
    • Edit conflict detection in a simple form is in place
    • Some minor changes to the API to support conflict detection, mostly “lastrevid” and “baserevid”
    • The configurable URL argument “usekeys” was removed. (Please check if your bots are still working.)
    • The special page “ItemByLabel” is about to be revitalized as a full “ItemDisambiguation” page
  • Discussions/Press
  • Events
    • Campus Party (video)
    • FrOSCon
    • right now: WikiCon
    • upcoming: State of the Map
    • upcoming: office hours on IRC
  • Other Noteworthy Stuff
    • Please vote for our SXSW panel. Voting ends today.
  • Open Tasks for You
    • for possible coding tasks check this
    • check the needs-input box here and see where you can give feedback
Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Global message delivery 21:45, 31 August 2012 (UTC)

Please comment on Talk:Croatian Liberation Movement

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Disambiguation link notification for September 3

Hi. Thank you for your recent edits. Wikipedia appreciates your help. We noticed though that when you edited HMS Rosario (1808), you added a link pointing to the disambiguation page Naval General Service Medal (check to confirm | fix with Dab solver). Such links are almost always unintended, since a disambiguation page is merely a list of "Did you mean..." article titles. Read the FAQ • Join us at the DPL WikiProject.

It's OK to remove this message. Also, to stop receiving these messages, follow these opt-out instructions. Thanks, DPL bot (talk) 14:13, 3 September 2012 (UTC)

The Signpost: 03 September 2012

Please comment on Talk:Conservatism

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Wikidata weekly summary #22

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
    • Anja Jentzsch joins the team
    • Worked on sorting for site-links table on item pages; enhanced some code in MediaWiki core for that
    • Fixed issue with aliases breaking grid layout of item pages
    • Worked on fixing issues for right-to-left languages in site-links user interface
    • Worked on new SpecialPage to create new items
    • Two new fancy Special pages appeared: ItemDisambiguation (lets you search for all items that have a given label or alias) and ItemByTitle (gives you the ID of the item that is connected to a given Wikipedia page)
    • Gave an introduction on Selenium testing to the team
    • Added Selenium tests for undelete & conflicts on undeletion
    • Added Selenium HowTo to meta wiki
    • Part of the team participated in the bug-triage on Wednesday
    • Final preparations to move site code into MediaWiki core
    • Preliminary work on data value implementations
    • Additional work on edit conflicts and permissions
    • Updates to the input json form to wbsetitem
    • Fixing some issues with failing site-links
    • More than 50 aliases in one language for an item should now work (previously more than 50 failed in an ugly way due to an API limit)
    • Updated demo repo and client
  • Discussions/Press
    • Wikidata and ISO standards
  • Events
    • WikiCon
    • office hours (de en)
    • ongoing: State of the Map
    • upcoming: Health 2.0 Berlin meetup
    • upcoming: Software Freedom Day Hamburg
  • Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Open Tasks for You
Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Global message delivery 15:15, 7 September 2012 (UTC)

Please comment on Talk:Controversies at the 2012 Summer Olympics

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Thanks

For the star, and I am glad you enjoyed the paper! --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 15:13, 10 September 2012 (UTC)

Page Curation update

Hey all :). We've just deployed another set of features for Page Curation. They include flyouts from the icons in Special:NewPagesFeed, showing who reviewed an article and when, a listing of this in the "info" flyout, and a general re-jigging of the info flyout - we've also fixed the weird bug with page_titles_having_underscores_instead_of_spaces in messages sent to talkpages, and introduced CSD logging! As always, these features will need some work - but any feedback would be most welcome. Thanks! Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 18:15, 10 September 2012 (UTC)

Footnoting archival images

Hi Andrew, I wanted to run something by you. Recently, I have been working on a proposal (with mock-up) for citing historical imagery in articles with regular footnotes, rather than having to click through to the image description page. The idea came about during meetings with several Library of Congress staff recently, which I could talk more about—but I thought I would just show you first. The explanation of the rationale is at User:Dominic/Image citation and the mock-up is at User:Dominic/Image citation/Sample. The idea of changing the manual of style or WP:CITE and editing thousands of articles to add these is pretty daunting, but my eventual goal right now is just to make sure that this is deemed an acceptable practice that people won't revert for being non-standard. Before bringing it the broader community, I'm curious to hear any thoughts you have on that implementation or the idea in general. Thanks! Dominic·t 21:24, 10 September 2012 (UTC)

Please comment on Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)

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The Signpost: 10 September 2012

This Month in GLAM: August 2012

 




Headlines
Read this edition in fullSingle-page

To assist with preparing the newsletter, please visit the newsroom. Past editions may be viewed here.

Unsubscribe · Global message delivery 17:03, 12 September 2012 (UTC)

Please comment on Talk:MassResistance

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Inclusion of sounds

A late reply at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style#Inclusion of sounds, in case you're not watchlisting still. :) —Quiddity (talk) 03:13, 16 September 2012 (UTC)

Doppler effect sound files

Hi Andrew,

I copied the sound examples from de-wiki onto Talk:Doppler effect, maybe you can find a spot for them in the article. Regards,--Cirdan (talk) 10:50, 16 September 2012 (UTC)

Thanks! Andrew Gray (talk) 11:01, 16 September 2012 (UTC)

BL edithathon

When you say "wireless and workspace will be provided" does this mean that no computers will be provided and I'm expected to bring a laptop? Thanks. Secretlondon (talk) 02:33, 9 September 2012 (UTC)

I've got a laptop - I just wanted to know whether I should bring it or not. When I'm working in libraries I usually use pen and paper or their computers. In a conference room I'm presuming that a laptop would be required.. Secretlondon (talk) 12:37, 9 September 2012 (UTC)

Thanks Andrew. That would be great. —MistyMorn (talk) 11:09, 10 September 2012 (UTC)

I didn't come to the event as I wasn't really sure what it was for. We don't have access to the collections- is the idea that we would just edit in a room like we would edit at home? If so - why bother? Secretlondon (talk) 13:36, 10 September 2012 (UTC)

Mentioned you here about a query that's been bothering me. Regards, —MistyMorn (talk) 21:08, 16 September 2012 (UTC)

Please comment on Talk:Ronald Reagan

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Wikidata weekly summary #22

 
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
    • Made new CreateItem special-page (also working JavaScript-less)
    • Special:ItemDisambiguation got lots of love and awesome autocompletion
    • Special:ItemByTitle also got lots of love and awesome autocompletion
    • The client-wiki now gets notified if a connecting Sitelink gets removed
    • Wrote Selenium tests for client-code
    • Editing/adding site-links will display a proper link to the page again
    • Removed auto-expansion for description/label input fields
    • Tested setting Mediawiki to use HTML5 to make sure it works as it should
    • Finished up work on new sites functionality in Wikibase and moved it as a patch to core (which is still awaiting review)
    • Worked on ValueHandler extension which will be used for our data values
    • Added “Type” entity type, plus skeletons for its associated Content, ContentHandler, ViewAction, EditAction and UndoAction
    • Implemented safeguards against text-level editing of data pages
    • Allow Sitelinks to Wikipedia only (fixed regression)
    • Wrote permission checks and edit conflict detection for ApiSetItem, undo/restore, etc.
    • Fixed display of deleted revisions of data items
    • Added --verbose option to pollForChanges maintenance script to show change summary
    • Bug fixes and improvements for right-to-left languages
    • Updated demo system
    • The long format (more like the json output format) for wbsetitem API module is now alive
  • Discussions/Press
    • Sent note about Wikidata to all Wikimedia projects via Global Message Delivery - generated quite some feedback on Meta
    • Started page to coordinate discussions about bots around Wikidata
  • Events
    • State of the Map
    • Health 2.0 Berlin meetup
    • upcoming: Software Freedom Day
  • Open Tasks for You
Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Global message delivery 15:30, 14 September 2012 (UTC)

The Signpost: 17 September 2012

Please comment on Talk:Donnie Darko

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Wikidata weekly summary #24

 
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
    • Met with a group of database experts from different projects to get input for phase 2 of Wikidata
    • Updated demo system (the corresponding git tag is c2425396f765ee77c990fd4b235c3d8d9f569018)
    • Selenium Tests for Edit Conflicts
    • Bugfix for weird behaviour of NOEXTERNALINTERLANG magic word
    • Bugfix for updating language links on client (they were not updated when the connecting link got removed or changed)
    • Windows support for pollForChanges-Script
    • New special page Special:CreateProperty for creating property entities
    • Property entities can be displayed now, editing them does not yet work
    • The API is generalized to handle additional entities
    • Created initial DataType implementation
    • Created store for the client
    • Improved and extended store for the repository
    • Started on initial DataValue implementation
    • Wrote tests for client
    • Fixed localization bugs
    • Special:ItemDisambiguation page now automatically populates the language field
    • Created a central place for associating entity content models with namespaces
    • Created functions for checking whether a given namespace is an entity namespace and whether a given content model is an entity model
    • Worked to make Items work in the main namespace, removed assumptions about the content model of the main namespace in several places
  • Discussions/Press
  • Events
    • Software Freedom Day
    • upcoming: Leipziger Semantic Web Tag / MLODE
    • upcoming: Datengarten
  • Open Tasks for You
Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Global message delivery 13:20, 21 September 2012 (UTC)

DYK for Roman d'Alexandre en prose

The DYK project (nominate) 16:02, 21 September 2012 (UTC)

Please comment on Talk:Chalcedon Foundation

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Thanks

Thanks for the barnstar. As you probably guessed, I was inspired by the Independent article about the coverage of women in science. Southdevonian (talk) 21:49, 23 September 2012 (UTC)

Page Curation newsletter

Hey Andrew Gray/Archives. This will be, if not our final newsletter, one of the final ones :). After months of churning away at this project, our final version (apart from a few tweaks and bugfixes) is now live. Changes between this and the last release include deletion tag logging, a centralised log, and fixes to things like edit summaries.

Hopefully you like what we've done with the place; suggestions for future work on it, complaints and bugs to the usual address :). We'll be holding a couple of office hours sessions, which I hope you'll all attend. Many thanks, Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 11:12, 24 September 2012 (UTC)

Web analytics, usability, market research, and blanket use of diacritics in article titles

I see this as basic market research that can be easily and quickly done by testing with web analytics and anonymous cookies. It is surely WMF's responsibility to do usability testing and market research, and even A/B testing a small number of popular pages with and without diacritics in the title could resolve this issue. It doesn't only affect Wikipedia users and supporters, it is also a hit on editors who believe in following guidelines and keeping a neutral POV vs. those who believe in mob rule—whoever has the biggest private army. No publisher would be so stupid as to use complex Vietnamese diacritics in the title of a book intended for English readers. Article titles, book titles, and movie titles are not a "content" issue, any more than book cover design and layout. Most publishers understand how important such issues are. Talk:Buôn Ma Thuột city#Survey is just one example of ongoing diacritics pushing. The diacritics pushers say that "redirects are cheap", but that is yet another issue the WMF should be able to give numbers for. Knowledgeable web people never say that "redirects are cheap". LittleBen (talk) 03:31, 25 September 2012 (UTC)

Please comment on Talk:California Proposition 8

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The Signpost: 24 September 2012

Bibliography of encyclopedias: history

Started this. Need help expanding. Can you help looking in google books and making references using http://reftag.appspot.com/?♦ Dr. Blofeld 20:27, 28 September 2012 (UTC)

Please comment on Talk:2012 Toronto FC season

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Wikidata weekly summary #25

 
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
    • Updated demo system
    • Added per-language uniqueness restriction for property labels (You can only have one property with a given name in a language. For items this applies for the combination of label and description.)
    • Tests for noexternallanglinks, CreateProperty, PropertyView
    • Finished base of DataTypes and DataValues extensions
    • Added resource module for loading site information
    • Improved change handling on the client, including when items are deleted and inserting changes that affect the client wiki in the client’s recent changes (still rough)
    • New "List all datatypes" Special page
    • Finished property view. Property entities can be edited now
    • Changes to some of the containing structures in the API, items to entities and item to entity
    • Change to token handling (gettoken has died in flames, use edit token from action=tokens instead)
    • Some cleanup for the security audit
    • Worked on encapsulating auto completion widget from EditableValue.autocompleteInterface
    • Started work on supporting access to remote wikis via the ORMTable class
    • Discussion and fixes regarding transaction logic in core
    • Made a git branch for the first deployment that is currently being reviewed by WMF (current review status)
    • Test coverage for Wikibase and its extensions is now recorded and visible online
  • Discussions/Press
  • Events
    • Leipziger Semantic Web Tage/MLODE
    • Datengarten
    • upcoming: Wikipedia Stammtisch Berlin
    • upcoming: Berlin Open Source Meetup
    • upcoming: Data Days
  • Other Noteworthy Stuff
    • If you are doing a Wikidata intro or something like that at an event we can send you some swag like stickers and flyers. Let me know well in advance please so it reaches you in time.
    • We have a shiny new contribute page
  • Open Tasks for You
Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Global message delivery 08:40, 29 September 2012 (UTC)

DYK for Mary Buckland

 — Crisco 1492 (talk) 16:05, 29 September 2012 (UTC)

Please comment on Category talk:Grandes écoles

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The Signpost: 01 October 2012

Beginner in need of help with Brick Lane Market article

Hi Andrew- I'm editing the Brick Lane Market article for a class project. Our teacher warned us that our contributions could be deleted if we don't have backing from other Wikipedia editors. As a resident of London, I was wondering if you could help my project group by looking over our additions to the article in the next few days. Any advice you have would be much appreciated. Thanks! User talk:D4n2elle/BrickLaneMarket Joey236 (talk) 20:50, 1 October 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for getting back to me! We will be compiling the article in the draft space User talk:D4n2elle/BrickLaneMarket, unless you think we should do it on the article page itself. Joey236 (talk) 23:04, 2 October 2012 (UTC)
Most of our content is up on that draft pg. Thanks again for helping us out! Joey236 (talk) 20:10, 3 October 2012 (UTC)

Thank you!

Thanks for your suggestions on our Truman markets article. I tried finding some more information about how it started up in the 80s but have been unsuccessful so far... hopefully another knowledgable Wikipedian can find something! As for secondary sources, they are sparse, so unfortunately we have to rely on a wealth of primary sources for now. Will definitely try to improve upon this article in the future though. Thanks again! D4n2elle (talk) 02:30, 4 October 2012 (UTC)

Please comment on Wikipedia talk:Mirrors and forks/Abc

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DYK nomination of Marjory Stephenson

  Hello! Your submission of Marjory Stephenson at the Did You Know nominations page has been reviewed, and there still are some issues that may need to be clarified. Please review the comment(s) underneath your nomination's entry and respond there as soon as possible. Thank you for contributing to Did You Know! LauraHale (talk) 21:38, 5 October 2012 (UTC)

VIAFbot

I suppose it's too late now, but it would have been helpful if you had provided a more meaningful edit summary when reverting VIAFbot's edits. I just wasted time working out why an apparently constructive edit had been reverted in one of my watchlisted articles, and I'm sure that the same goes for many other editors. Don't be surprised if many of these edits of yours get reverted as unexplained removal of valid content. Phil Bridger (talk) 20:49, 4 October 2012 (UTC)

Copying reply here to keep the discussion in one place.

I would have liked to be able to leave an edit summary, but unfortunately doing it via rollback doesn't seem to allow one! However, given the complaints about formatting, I decided it was best to mass-rollback and then overwrite with the "correct" edits as soon as possible, which will hopefully minimise the impact on watchlists.
Apologies for the inconvenience! Not the best solution however I did it, I guess. Andrew Gray (talk) 21:10, 4 October 2012 (UTC)
That is an abuse of rollback, which is only for reverting vandalism. It should not be used for reverting edits that made the ultra-trivial mistake of leaving certain elements in article source in the "wrong" order - something that isn't even visible to readers in the rendered article. Phil Bridger (talk) 21:22, 4 October 2012 (UTC)
My apologies again - this isn't the sort of thing I handle often! I had asked for advice (on IRC) and the recommendation had been to use mass rollback - I'm currently investigating better mechanisms for future, but I hope not to have to do this again anyway!
Regarding abuse, though, the guideline gives one case as "revert[ing] widespread edits (by a misguided editor or malfunctioning bot) which are judged to be unhelpful to the encyclopedia". While I would tend to agree with you that non-rendered changes aren't particularly problematic or unhelpful in and of themselves, I know that the ordering of elements has been a very sensitive issue in the past, and I was very keen to avoid causing any additional conflict over this... Andrew Gray (talk) 21:35, 4 October 2012 (UTC)
Thanks for the reply on my talkpage. I've posted about another issue that I think you know about on the Bot's talkpage. Happy botting! Lugnuts And the horse 09:23, 6 October 2012 (UTC)

Women scientists

Hi, I've a list at User:Dsp13/Redlinks/Women#Science_etc. which I thought might come in handy for your Ada Lovelace day. Good luck with that, Dsp13 (talk) 13:12, 7 October 2012 (UTC)

Great - I'll try and merge some of them in. And thanks for producing the article on Andrews! Andrew Gray (talk) 13:17, 7 October 2012 (UTC)

Please comment on Talk:2012 Green Bay Packers–Seattle Seahawks game

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This Month in GLAM: September 2012

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The Signpost: 08 October 2012

VIAF errors

In the case of David Morris (Conservative politician), the problem seems to be in the VIAF record itself (assuming that he didn't write the "Gift of America" book, as seems likely!). The VIAF record has the link to his Wikipedia article. I don't know how those links were added, but I hope it isn't symptomatic of too many wild assumptions that any two persons of same birth year and name are identical. But it can't be blamed on the bot which is assigning VIAFs to WP articles - should that be a distinct category of Wikipedia:VIAF/errors? (And what a lot of librarians there are around on Wikipedia - nice to meet yet another one.) PamD 15:13, 10 October 2012 (UTC)

I've had it confirmed from his office that he didn't write the book! What mechanism is there for getting the VIAF database corrected in cases like this? PamD 15:44, 10 October 2012 (UTC)
In this case, log it on that page - Max is working directly with OCLC, and we have a commitment from them to feed these corrections back into the system.
Regarding the content, we're using the list generated by VIAF/OCLC themselves, so it'll be the same as the links on the record (modulo the occasional pagemove). Errors like this should go in the first section - "Wikipedia article is not the same as the VIAF identity"
Their system uses Wikipedia articles as "nuclei" to cluster groups of authority records around, as I understand it, though I'm not massively clear on the details of the algorithm - it works well for major figures, where we have a lot of extraneous data, but can sometimes be shaky for less well-recorded individuals. (Counterintuitively, Wikipedia has vastly more - and vastly more reliable - data on most people than our lovingly curated authority files!) I always suspected we'd find a number of these, but it's interesting to see which are turning up. I'm hoping to do some sampling in the next day or two to get an idea of what the error rate is like in practice (and what we have to do about that). On the plus side, once we've got through these teething stages it'll result in much cleaner data for both sides.
As to librarians, indeed! There's a lot more of us than it seems. :-) Andrew Gray (talk) 15:49, 10 October 2012 (UTC)
Of course, Wikipedia will be much stronger on people who don't happen to have written any published books - such as MPs in this case, and other notable people who aren't authors, aren't academics, and haven't yet produced a ghosted autobiography or celebrity cookbook etc! It seems an interesting collaboration, though with plenty scope for getting things wrong. PamD 18:08, 10 October 2012 (UTC)

Please comment on Talk:Kickstarter

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Wikidata weekly summary #26

 
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
    • Added various new DataValue classes
    • Worked on ‘edit’ buttons for non-JavaScript version of entity views
    • Worked on resourceloader module for sites
    • Tests for PropertyView and CreateProperty
    • Tests for Uniqueness of Properties & Items
    • Tests for propagation of Item deletion/undeletion to client wiki
    • Tests for change propagation to Watchlists on client wiki
    • HTML validation results for Wikibase are now online
    • Special:CreateProperty is renamed to Special:NewProperty, to avoid naming conflicts in translatewiki with other extensions
    • Work on scripts for rebuilding and resetting data stores in the client
    • The client now handles when an item gets deleted on the repository
    • Wrote fixes for security concerns raised during review by WMF
    • Working on Wikidata branch in preparation of merging it into core/master soon.
  • Discussions/Press
  • Events
    • Wikipedia Stammtisch Berlin
    • Open Source Meetup Berlin
    • Data Days
    • upcoming: KESW (keynote by Markus Krötzsch)
    • upcoming: Wikimedia CEE meeting
  • Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Open Tasks for You
    • Hack on one of these
    • Test some of the less common things you do on Wikipedia on the test repository and report bugs if you find anything that’s not working as it should
Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Global message delivery 14:35, 5 October 2012 (UTC)
 
Hello, Andrew Gray. You have new messages at A Thousand Doors's talk page.
Message added 23:08, 11 October 2012 (UTC). You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{Talkback}} or {{Tb}} template.

Thank you very much

This thing has been in draft form on one of my userpages for months if not years. Now making the push to add it to all the articles... :-) Lozleader (talk) 21:36, 11 October 2012 (UTC)

That looks quite good... I'm not sure why World War I has its own template and WWII doesn't, so that arrangement kind of makes sense.Lozleader (talk) 21:59, 11 October 2012 (UTC)

VIAF re footballers

Hello. Most of the ones I've listed have very "common" names (David Smith and suchlike), so it's perhaps not unlikely statistically that software finds matches on name/vital dates. Alan Ross (footballer born 1942) has the same years of birth and death as the one listed at VIAF 169058377, and Dave Smith (footballer born 1950) has a date of birth only one day away from the Dave Smith at VIAF 49405649. I'm only finding these mismatches because, having seen a couple of VIAF links added to pages on my watchlist, clicked them and found they referred to other people, I started looking for them. Perhaps if people in other fields were checked, there might be similar levels of mismatch among people with similarly common names? cheers, Struway2 (talk) 10:43, 12 October 2012 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #27

 
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
    • Wikidata branch was merged \o/ (about 10.000 lines of code) This also means that MediaWiki now has shiny new ContentHandler features to enable storing data and other content types
    • Updated demo system
    • Fixed MediaWiki core bugs and responded to feedback about the ContentHandler
    • Looked into Solr
    • Added statement interface for items
    • Added claim interface for entities
    • Added IRIValue and GeoCoordinateValue
    • Added GeoCoordinate parser
    • Added base for the ValueFormatters extension
    • Initial work on create claim API module
    • Initial work on better API transformation handling of the data model components
    • Made the API aware that entities, not items are the thingies we really want to get
    • Finished implementation of non-JavaScript edit buttons
    • Switched local integration server to use core master branch
    • Improved how recent changes from the repository are displayed in the client
    • Worked on tests for recent changes on the client
    • Added Wikipedia-compatible URL rewrites for subdomains en, de, hu and he (en.wikidata-test-repo.wikimedia.de/wiki/Helium leads to the item)
  • Discussions/Press
  • Events
    • KESW
    • upcoming: Wikimedia CEE meeting
  • Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Open Tasks for You
Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Global message delivery 13:30, 12 October 2012 (UTC)

GWU editathon Geonotice

Hey, Andrew! Thanks for putting up the geonotice for the GWU Wikipedia Loves Libraries events! Specific coordinates for the corners could be: Washington DC area: lat:39.303416, long:-76.470337; opposite point: lat:38.740088, long:-77.486572. Thanks again! Lisa N Marrs (talk) 14:26, 12 October 2012 (UTC)

Please comment on Talk:Outing

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The Signpost: 15 October 2012

Please comment on Talk:Deception

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Page Curation newsletter - closing up!

Hey all :).

We're (very shortly) closing down this development cycle for Page Curation. It's genuinely been a pleasure to talk with you all and build software that is so close to my own heart, and also so effective. The current backlog is 9 days, and I've never seen it that low before.

However! Closing up shop does not mean not making any improvements. First-off, this is your last chance to give us a poke about unresolved bugs or report new ones on the talkpage. If something's going wrong, we want to know about it :). Second, we'll hopefully be taking another pass over the software next year. If you've got ideas for features Page Curation doesn't currently have, stick them here.

Again, it's been an honour. Thanks :). Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 12:18, 17 October 2012 (UTC)

This is so cool :) – SJ +

Geonotice maintenance

Thanks all the same. We have someone in Boston who might be able to help - where do people sign up to join the set of maintainers / how are updates applied? emw used to do some of this but is busy off-wiki these days. – SJ + 12:53, 17 October 2012 (UTC)

COI overhaul

I noticed you commented on the mess that is our COI guidance. I've started a rewrite at WP:Conflict of interest/draft and would appreciate input and collaboration. Gigs (talk) 01:27, 19 October 2012 (UTC)

Recent Geonotice.js edit

Please be careful about the commas in JS pages. This is the most common cause of JS errors. Kaldari (talk) 01:25, 20 October 2012 (UTC)

Please comment on Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (capitalization)

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Wikepedia Ada Lovelace edit-a-thod

Hi Andrew,

I was looking at the article you created for Alice Everett, you did a really great job and there is lots of information, but none of it is referenced. Could you please include the references so everyone can link to where you obtained your information, as the key to Wikipedia is that everything is verifiable. (I know this is a pain, but there is a shortcut toolbar for templates for references and you can just put in the web address to make an easy reference).

Many thanks, --Geneticcuckoo (talk) 13:41, 21 October 2012 (UTC)