User talk:CBM/Archive 8

MOS

On the contrary, I was the first target of personal remarks, and I will not shirk from defending myself in like terms. You should not presume things about my real life, and I'll do you the courtesy of refraining from proposing such hypotheses about you. Tony (talk) 14:01, 8 February 2008 (UTC)

Mind your own business. Tony (talk) 14:18, 8 February 2008 (UTC)

Your note

This had nothing to do with citation templates. Someone had used a mix of two systems -- Harvard referencing and footnotes. It meant the reader had to click on the footnote, be taken to the Notes section, then click again on that link, and be taken to the full citation in yet another section. There's no need or justification for that.

What is going on here? I feel almost as though I'm being wikistalked. Neither you nor Avi have ever edited that page before that I can see, and yet Avi turned up to undo my entire copy edit, and now you're asking a question. Also, it would be better to discuss this on Talk:Citation, so I'll move the conversation there. SlimVirgin ^{(talk)(contribs)} 22:46, 8 February 2008 (UTC)

You can find me on IRC for a while this evening. — Carl (CBM · talk) 22:53, 8 February 2008 (UTC)

Peer review (from DBCAPRA)

I guess I should join "Don't bug Carl about peer review anonymous", but it's nearly been a week now! PR is getting full, and it is not clear to me what the main issue is. A while back you produced a list of the top ten (or so) big transclusions at PR. Is this hard to do? Would you be able to do it again? Is it something that can be done automatically when, say, we get with 100KB of the limit? Geometry guy 19:53, 8 February 2008 (UTC)

PS. Thanks in addition for conciliatory comments and actions elsewhere.

This tool will let you make the list whenever you need it. — Carl (CBM · talk) 20:55, 8 February 2008 (UTC)

Great! Geometry guy 21:14, 8 February 2008 (UTC)

VeblenBot has fallen silent again, and someone at Peer Review is asking for info. Do you have any? Cheers, Geometry guy 22:06, 10 February 2008 (UTC)

Okay, just looked at contribs, and think I can guess! Geometry guy 22:09, 10 February 2008 (UTC)

It's a good guess, but unfortunately not the real cause. The bot scripts are completely independent programs, each of which is automatically run at certain times, and it shouldn't matter what other programs are running when that happens. The real problem has something to do with toolserver, but I can't pin it down. I copied the same code back to my home computer and am running it there (with no changes - that's why I blame the problem on toolserver). I'll check again at 1:20 UTC, but I think it is working again now. This was the only piece of the bot that was running on toolserver, which is why the other ones were still working. — Carl (CBM · talk) 00:30, 11 February 2008 (UTC)

That seems to be fixed now, but there's been an odd side effect that GAR's are no longer ordered by date, but by article name instead. Any ideas? Geometry guy 09:03, 11 February 2008 (UTC)

That should be fixed now. — Carl (CBM · talk) 12:28, 11 February 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. I've noticed that VeblenBot now lists some categories in chronological order and some in reverse chronological order. Thanks for adding this feature. However, it looks like it is the opposite way round to what I would prefer for the specialist peer review cats such as Category:Arts peer reviews: could you make these list most recent first, oldest last? I can provide a list of the 9 categories involved if you need it. Thanks Geometry guy 17:33, 11 February 2008 (UTC)

Sure. Here's the list of categories I am currently listing, with an X on the ones that I think you mean. Could you verify that? — Carl (CBM · talk) 17:38, 11 February 2008 (UTC)

• Requests for peer review
• A-Class mathematics articles
• Wikipedia featured article review candidates
• Wikipedia featured article candidates
• GAR
• GAR/34
• GAR/35
• X Arts peer reviews
• X Language and literature peer reviews
• X Everyday life peer reviews
• X Philosophy and religion peer reviews
• X Social sciences and society peer reviews
• X History peer reviews
• X Geography and places peer reviews
• X Engineering and technology peer reviews
• X Natural sciences and mathematics peer reviews
• February 2008 peer reviews
• General peer reviews

Those are the ones. For the rest, maintain the status quo, whatever that is. Thanks, Geometry guy 18:35, 11 February 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for fixing this. Meanwhile, I seem to have got somewhere with Wolfkeeper and so have posted at AN/I. Geometry guy 00:04, 13 February 2008 (UTC)

Cite book

I need an admin to change the code on Template:Cite book. Please see this post to see the code that needs to change. It has been 4 days with no comments or responses. The change in code only affects the anchor ID, which only involves linking to it. Cuñado ☼ - Talk 05:04, 11 February 2008 (UTC)

Astronomy versus Astrophysics

Please join the discussion here. WilliamKF (talk) 22:39, 11 February 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for the tip

I'll keep it in mind next time. bibliomaniac15 00:34, 12 February 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia administrators who will provide copies of deleted articles

I'm a Chippewa Indian who was looking through articles on defense contracting and I found one that included both topics on wikipedia. unfortunately it was deleted just a few hours after I viewed it and I became very disappointed when I returned to that page from my bookmarks. I understand you are one of the few editors who extend an extra effort to give back the code to users if an article is deleted. That is a very valuable service and I'm sure you receive much praise for it. I was wondering if you would you give me the code for the wiki article Ishpi as it is very important to me and my research. Thank you!!!!! —Preceding unsigned comment added by Georgelulu (talk • contribs) 06:08, 12 February 2008 (UTC)

Though the question wasn't addressed to me, I see that there is a copy of Ishpi in the Google cache. Perhaps this will meet your needs. EdJohnston (talk) 06:26, 12 February 2008 (UTC)

Speedy deletion of Template:Maths acd

A tag has been placed on Template:Maths acd requesting that it be speedily deleted from Wikipedia. This has been done under section T3 of the criteria for speedy deletion, because it is a deprecated or orphaned template. After seven days, if it is still unused and the speedy deletion tag has not been removed, the template will be deleted.

If the template is intended to be substituted, please feel free to remove the speedy deletion tag and please consider putting a note on the template's page indicating that it is substituted so as to avoid any future mistakes (<noinclude>{{transclusionless}}</noinclude>).

Thanks. --MZMcBride (talk) 19:59, 12 February 2008 (UTC)

Template:User edit?

Carl, I hope you are enjoying your travels. When you return, would you mind looking into making the edit on {{User}}? Thanks. ~ Paul^T+/_C 12:37, 15 February 2008 (UTC)

Peer review (from DBCAPR anon again)

Carl, when you get back, could you take a look at this thread? There's a chance I made need your help to set up a new category list from Category:General peer reviews: I switched this today to list only the peer reviews which do not have topic names, but it may still be useful to have a list which contains all peer review pages. If I understand correctly, such a list will be cached on your computer until sometime on Monday. Geometry guy 21:27, 16 February 2008 (UTC)

The cache data is kept indefinitely. It is only updated when the article is added to the category after being gone for 48 hours. So unless the pages in question have been added back, I do still have the cache data for them. If the cache file ever gets too long, I may remove the oldest outdated entries, but that will not need to be done more than once a year. — Carl (CBM · talk) 14:04, 17 February 2008 (UTC)

Visitors

How do we know? How many people visited any article in Wikipedia? Are there any way to know that? Thank you, —Preceding unsigned comment added by 195.229.236.214 (talk) 22:02, 16 February 2008 (UTC)

There are hit-count statistics available online; see http://stats.grok.se/en/200801/Mathematics . — Carl (CBM · talk) 14:04, 17 February 2008 (UTC)

Images

Is it allowed to use images from [British Museum], I am just wondering if I can use this image for example: [Sword]

Thank you for your help. —Preceding unsigned comment added by LakeOswego (talk • contribs) 22:52, 18 February 2008 (UTC)

According to their terms of use no. They only allow non-commercial content and per the GFDL (if I recall correctly) Wikipedia must allow commercial use images. ~ Paul^T+/_C 06:39, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

The situation is somewhat complex. But since the images do not appear to be under a free license, in general we should avoid using them. — Carl (CBM · talk) 12:24, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

Temporary rollback on Template:User

Hi CBM, I've temporarily reverted your change to Template:User because it was having the effect of adding a hard carriage return after every use fot he template. This usually resulted in a line break followed by a space, which meant Wiki layout was breaking in a lot of places. I think the problem is your first <noinclude> was on a separate line, which meant the template included a return. For now I've reverted back your change entirely to be on the safe side. Thanks, Gwernol 12:53, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for noticing that. Removing the extra newline did fix it - see User:CBM/Sandbox. It may have looked like it was still broken because the changes were still coming through the job queue. For heavily used templates you have to make a manual edit somewhere to test changes to the template. — Carl (CBM · talk) 13:05, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

Atomic sentence

You write "It isn't true that an atomic sentence is same as a sentence with no subsentence - "\forall x (Rx)"", though 'subsentence' is often defined so that for any term t not containing x free, Rt is a subformula of (x)Rx. By this generally accepted definition of subformula, an atomic formula is the same thing as a formula with no proper subformula. Perhaps you can give a reference which gives a different definition of subformula. I have repeated this discussion in the talk page. Nortexoid (talk) 21:36, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

What is Nortexoid trying to say? It is seurely true that no part of an atomic sentence less than the whole. Is her some counter example? --Philogo (talk) 14:43, 20 February 2008 (UTC)

Let's discuss it on the article talk page. — Carl (CBM · talk) 14:45, 20 February 2008 (UTC)

Request for comment on main page deletion incident

As you made an edit to the incident listed in the Administrators notice board, it is requested that you confirm the details of the incident here (section 1.1.2)

This is as the incident is used as the basis of an argument and needs to be confirm by persons familar with the event

Regards --User:Mitrebox talk 2008-02-22 —Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.11.244.78 (talk) 07:50, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

Your mathematics bot

• In regards to how your bot creates the ability to break down FA by importance in the math project, could you possibly do the same thing for the economics project? I would greatly appreciate it! Just let me know what I'd have to do on my end to get this setup. Cheers! Gary King (talk) 19:39, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

Full article count statistics

Hi!

We we talked a long time ago about full article stats for the WP1.0 project. I had to rewrite some of the code to get the data in a usable format - I've finally had enough time to put together a dump. You can find it here: http://stats.grok.se/~henrik/wikistats/ (these are stats from February 1 to February 23 2008)

There are four files: the top 1000, top 10000, top 100000 and the full list in that directory (about 2GB uncompressed). I plan on getting a more usable web front end with this data as well as keeping it updated as time progresses - it'd be nice to be able to get the most viewed pages in a specific category for example, but you might have some use for this as well. henrik•talk 15:57, 26 February 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for doing that; it will be a great help. I'm downloading the dump now, and I'll look through it this week to see how to integrate it into the selection data. — Carl (CBM · talk) 00:58, 27 February 2008 (UTC)

Great. Let me know if you'd like it formatted in a different way. henrik•talk 06:34, 27 February 2008 (UTC)

VeblenBot

Hya. There's been some talk over at wp:good article nominations about how we might switch from the edit heavy procedure GA follows now to a bot-assisted procedure similar to wp:pr. I'm thinking of volunteering to design/write/implement the bot we'd need, and as VeblenBot does a similar task, was wondering if I might be able to get a copy of it to build from? Also any other advice you might impart would be most appreciated ;-) --jwanders^Talk 09:05, 28 February 2008 (UTC)

I hope you don't mind me chipping in here. The task that VeblenBot carries out is fairly general purpose: it lists categories. This is used at WP:PR and WP:GAR, as well as several other places. A description of the category listing protocol can be found at Template:CF. It would be good to have more than one editor operating a category listing bot, as it spreads the work. Geometry guy 10:29, 28 February 2008 (UTC)

I don't mind at all sharing the code; I'll need a day to go through and clean it up a little. The code is written in Perl as a collection of scripts, which I run on a linux computer. Are you somewhat familiar with that environment? — Carl (CBM · talk) 14:05, 28 February 2008 (UTC)

Yup, I loves me some perl :-D More helpfully, yeah, I've a B.Sc. in Comp Sci and have worked a bunch in scientific research, so seen my share of Perl & Xnix. --jwanders^Talk 16:46, 28 February 2008 (UTC)

I uploaded the code into subversion just now. You will want

• svn co svn://hemlock.ts.wikimedia.org/cbm/subversion/mediawiki-api
• svn co svn://hemlock.ts.wikimedia.org/cbm/subversion/VeblenBot/categories

The mediawiki-api libraries are not in any way finished, and really were a proof of concept, but I have been using them for months. The API itself is under heavy development and occasionally the changes to it break my code. So you may have to follow the mediawiki-api mailing list to keep up with that. The reason for the separate editing library is that the API hooks for page editing aren't done yet, and when they are I will switch to using only them, rather than index.php. Let me know if you run into any issues, as I do want the code to be reusable. — Carl (CBM · talk) 17:53, 28 February 2008 (UTC)

Also, note that the sorting is off in that code, because I changed the cmsort parameter in API.pm to sortkey instead of timestamp. I'm going to add some code in the next released version to let the client select the sort order. There are some ongoing bugs with the API code, which show up as less than full category lists if the category has more elements than cmlimit and cmsort is set to timestamp. But if the categories only have a few elements it works with cmsort set to timestamp. — Carl (CBM · talk) 20:01, 28 February 2008 (UTC)

GAR again

VeblenBot decided today that it would be more fun to sort the GAR discussions alphabetically rather than by date. I've undone the edit, but could you provide suitable chastisement and remediation for the bot? :-) Thanks, Geometry guy 19:36, 28 February 2008 (UTC)

I changed it back. — Carl (CBM · talk) 19:46, 28 February 2008 (UTC)

Re: VeblenBot for economics project

WP:ECON already has a table, but I like the one you made for Math better. I like how you can click on the intersections of class and importance and clearly see which articles are in there. Let me know if you can do that for WP:ECON as well. I've already broken down our articles into more specific categories of class + importance rather than just class or importance, to make it easier. Gary King (talk) 17:35, 28 February 2008 (UTC)

Thanks, that's perfect! Once a day is fine. Also, leave the unassessed columns, as they may be populated one day and I'd rather know when an article is unassessed rather than don't know. Gary King (talk) 19:47, 29 February 2008 (UTC)

Your bot request

Hi CBM I wanted to let you know that Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/VeblenBot 6 has been approved. Please visit the above link for more information. Thanks! BAGBot (talk) 21:40, 29 February 2008 (UTC)

Peer review cache data

Carl, further to this thread, we really do need a category list for all current peer reviews: this is both to help with semi-automated peer reviewing and to help with maintenance. So I'd like to populate a category with all the current peer reviews, while also maintaining a category (presently Category:General peer reviews) of current peer reviews without a topic specified. I'd like VeblenBot to list both, but maintain the correct dates for all current peer reviews.

It seems to me that the easiest way to do this is to leave Category:General peer reviews untouched, populate a new Category:Current peer reviews with all current peer reviews, list it, but copy over the cache from Category:General peer reviews so that VeblenBot thinks the articles in it have been there for longer than they have. Is that doable? I won't populate the category yet, as it may be easier to make the cache fix first. There's no rush on this; enjoy your travels! Geometry guy 18:54, 26 February 2008 (UTC)

It's no problem for me to copy over the dates from one category to another. At the moment, the only cached peer review categories are Requests for peer review and General peer review, so for the other current peer reviews (the subject specific ones), but if the dates for the other current peer reviews are correct for their categories, I can get those dates into the cache for Current peer reviews as well.

A simpler way to fix the whole problem might be to add all the peer review categories to Category:Current peer reviews as subcategories; then a bot could recursively fetch the contents of this category to get a list of all the current peer reviews, without us duplicating categories so much. — Carl (CBM · talk) 00:58, 27 February 2008 (UTC)

This is a good idea. I've set up the category structure as you suggested (it was what I had in mind anyway). Could you then recursively list Category:Current peer reviews, sorting by date, with initial cache data taken from the General peer reviews cache and the current subject specific dates. Ideally, all the current peer review cats (including the subject specific ones) should have cache data, in case a peer review is archived prematurely and need to be relisted.

Could you also list Category:March 2008 peer reviews, as I reckon we're going to need it in 3 days time :-) Geometry guy 18:52, 27 February 2008 (UTC)

I set up the March 2008 category. For the current reviews category, I completely failed to explain what I meant. My idea was that whoever runs the automated peer review bot should be able to use a second-level category instead of a first-level category. This assumes that the bot gets its list of articles from a category in the first place, but that shouldn't be a difficult change to implement. If you need me to list all the articles in the current peer review category, I would rather if it was actually populated with articles. — Carl (CBM · talk) 22:24, 27 February 2008 (UTC)

Yes, we really need a list of all the articles in the current PR cat (e.g., I want to track current peer reviews against requests for peer reviews to spot errors, and archivists want a reliable chronological list). (Also the automated peer review process is a script, not a bot, and the original script writer is not very active.) Would you like me to populate the current peer review category now, or should I let you set up the cache and then populate it? Geometry guy 22:43, 27 February 2008 (UTC)

Please go ahead, and then I will work on getting the cached dates correct. I can't test things without having the category populated. — Carl (CBM · talk) 22:51, 27 February 2008 (UTC)

Okay, its populating now. Thanks, Geometry guy 22:59, 27 February 2008 (UTC)

The data is at User:VeblenBot/C/Current peer reviews. I hope that is the correct sort order, let me know otherwise. — Carl (CBM · talk) 23:38, 27 February 2008 (UTC)

Thanks: the cache dates from Category:General peer reviews worked perfectly. Could you reverse the sort order (newest first at PR)? Also, the articles which were not in Category:General peer reviews have unhelpful dates which I'd like to fix. Can I provide these by hand, or can you get them from the subject specific categories? Geometry guy 20:33, 29 February 2008 (UTC)

I copied the dates from various other categories, looked through the diff to fix some issues that caused, and reversed the order. Fortunately the amount of manual work was very low; mostly copy/paste. If there are any particular ones I need to fix, let me know. — Carl (CBM · talk) 14:30, 1 March 2008 (UTC)

(←) Many thanks, Carl. I've checked through and the dates are almost perfect. The only issue is Wikipedia:Peer_review/2007_Hugo_Award_for_Best_Dramatic_Presentation,_Short_Form/archive1, which should be dated 21:54, 22 February 2008 (UTC). However, this may have been caused by a server error. Am I right in thinking that the 48 hour cache is not enabled for subject-specific reviews? Geometry guy 15:05, 1 March 2008 (UTC)

I fixed the cached date for the Hugo award article. Right now the only cached categories are Requests for peer review, General peer reviews, and Current peer reviews. I can add the subject categories very easily. — Carl (CBM · talk) 15:09, 1 March 2008 (UTC)

Yes please. They all need protection from glitches like this. Geometry guy 15:22, 1 March 2008 (UTC)

I added all the subject peer review categories, with the same 48 hour window as the others. — Carl (CBM · talk) 16:11, 1 March 2008 (UTC)

Thanks Carl. Incidently, I had a look at the original bot request in connection with User:Jwanders interest in helping out at GA, and your comment that VeblenBot "could be used for tracking contents of arbitrary (small) categories" made me laugh. If this insertion of an in-joke was deliberate, many thanks for that too :-) Geometry guy 18:21, 1 March 2008 (UTC)

(←) Switching on the caching appears to have had the side effect of reversing the sort order of the subject specific peer reviews. Could you switch them back (to newest first)? Thanks, Geometry guy 10:19, 2 March 2008 (UTC)

These sort order issues are very frustrating. The problem is that I tried in the original code not to sort (or even parse) the data unless necessary. That has the benefit that you can't break something if you don't mess with it. The downside is that it's hard to know exactly how the data is already sorted. The download and cache scripts ended up in conflict about the order, which leads to confusing results. I need to change the code so that each category is explicitly sorted just before uploading, so that any reordering done by the API, the download script, or the cache script is irrelevant. It's on my todo list, and once it's done all these problems should be resolved. — Carl (CBM · talk) 13:41, 2 March 2008 (UTC)

I understand. Thanks for the quick fix. Geometry guy 13:50, 2 March 2008 (UTC)

Anime project deletions

Hi. Per Wikipedia talk:Miscellany for deletion#Mass Uncontroversial Deletions, the deletion of the project pages has not been contested, so can they be deleted? The list is at User:Collectonian/WIP4. Thanks. Collectonian (talk) 07:55, 2 March 2008 (UTC)

I deleted them just now. — Carl (CBM · talk) 14:21, 2 March 2008 (UTC)

Awesome, thanks. Your help is much appreciated :) Collectonian (talk) 17:31, 2 March 2008 (UTC)

FAC sort order

Carl, could you reverse the sort order of User:VeblenBot/C/Wikipedia featured article candidates to present newest first just like WP:FAC does? I don't know if FAC will be interested, but I think it is worth demonstrating what can be done. Geometry guy 19:24, 3 March 2008 (UTC)

No problem. — Carl (CBM · talk) 23:31, 3 March 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. Meanwhile, I have become utterly perplexed about post-expand include sizes. Have you any idea why the post expand size of User:Geometry guy/Misc is 23K longer than the post-expand size of User:Geometry guy/Misc2? This might be the reason why we are having so many size problems at peer review. Geometry guy 23:57, 3 March 2008 (UTC)

I understand now, but the understanding is a bit depressing. In a sequence of transclusions which terminate with some text, then that text adds to the postexpand size for each transclusion in the sequence. Anyway, I can cut one such transclusion from WP:PR, which I hope will help, but I am too busy now to do it, so I will do it tomorrow. Geometry guy 20:58, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

I worked that out as well with some testing in my sandbox. I will see if there is any way that behavior can be changed, since I don't see any benefit to it. — Carl (CBM · talk) 22:16, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

It does seem to be a pointless feature. Have you asked a dev or posted a message somewhere about this? Meanwhile I figured out how to use this new information to shave some serious KBs off peer review, although I'm ashamed to admit it took me over a day to realise that parser functions obey the same rule as transclusions as far as the postexpand size is concerned. Geometry guy 21:11, 5 March 2008 (UTC)

I don't think it's a feature, per se, just the way the code happened to be written. I did mention it on IRC to Tim Starling, the author of the new parsing code, and he was noncommittal about it but did see the issue. I think it's worth filing a bug on bugzilla.wikimedia.org - would you like the honor, or should I do it? — Carl (CBM · talk) 23:08, 5 March 2008 (UTC)

I'm sleeping now and am happy for you to do the honours. If you don't then I will do them when I am awake again tomorrow. But tomorrow will be busy for me. Geometry guy 23:35, 5 March 2008 (UTC)

It's bugzilla:13260. — Carl (CBM · talk) 01:43, 6 March 2008 (UTC)

Special character

Hi! I made this change since the page wasn't correctly formatted (at least not for me), but your bot reverted the change. /P¤ntus (talk) 18:51, 5 March 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Assume good faith has been marked as a policy

Wikipedia:Assume good faith (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs) has recently been edited to mark it as a policy. It was previously marked as a guideline. This is an automated notice of the change (more information). -- VeblenBot (talk) 18:52, 6 March 2008 (UTC)

Math articles by field table

Woudl it be possible (assuming it woudl be useful) for VelanBot to produce a table showing "Math articles by field and importance", possibly as extra columns in the "Math articles by field and quality" table? Tompw (talk) (review) 12:28, 8 March 2008 (UTC)

I implemented that as part of a general update of VeblenBot a couple months ago. The table is visible at Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics/Wikipedia 1.0/Table. There are also lists of articles sorted by field and importance, but they aren't transcluded anywhere at the moment. — Carl (CBM · talk) 13:25, 8 March 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia:IP block exemption has been marked as a policy

Wikipedia:IP block exemption (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs) has recently been edited to mark it as a policy. This is an automated notice of the change (more information). -- VeblenBot (talk) 18:51, 8 March 2008 (UTC)

super-recursive algorithms

Pratt has asked me to look into COI regarding Multipundit. I checked the contribution history and it certainly looks like an SPA. Do you think notification at the COI board would be appropriate? I'm sympathetic to the thrill of discovering a new cool idea, but we all are burdened with peer-review and have to be patient. Pete St.John (talk) 19:03, 9 March 2008 (UTC)

I was aware Multipundit's edits are all related to super-recursive algorithms, and from what he or she has written on the talk page it's clear he or she is an advocate of the theory. But that's not a problem on it's own. I don't see anything other than good-faith edits in the edit history, no strong evidence that would indicate Multipundit's edits are motivated by anything other than good-faith professional desire to advocate for the theory.

Unless issues arise that can't be resolved on the talk page, I don't think there's any reason to worry about conflict of interest. I think it's enough to have a broad collection of editors contributing and watching the talk page, so that a wide variety of perspectives is represented. The article currently does a reasonable job of attributing Burgin's claims back to Burgin, rather than representing them as established fact. — Carl (CBM · talk) 23:16, 9 March 2008 (UTC)

fair enough. Pete St.John (talk) 23:20, 9 March 2008 (UTC)

RE: Edit Summaries

That was an auto generated summary by AWB. I wonder why the glitch? Sorry bout that anyways.  UzEE  13:36, 11 March 2008 (UTC)

Frequently viewed

Hi CBM, I think the frequentlyviewed param is a brilliant idea. As a matter of fact I hand-compiled my own table for some of the most frequently-viewed prob & stats articles, but i don't have the programming skills or the patience to take it any further. Do you have a table somewhere with the numbers you're using? Any plans to use this info in the existing tables you compile for Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics/Wikipedia 1.0 ? Regards, Qwfp (talk) 21:51, 8 March 2008 (UTC)

Yes, my plan was to tag the top 500 so that VeblenBot can generate statistics for them. It's all done now; see the "Frequently viewed" field at User:VeblenBot/MainTable. The statistics for these articles will be updated each day. I used the hitcount data provided by User:Henrik (http://stats.grok.se but with redirect hitcounts credited to the main article). Maybe in 6 months I'll go through and see if the tags need to be moved to different articles, but I expect the top 500 is pretty stable over time. — Carl (CBM · talk) 22:59, 8 March 2008 (UTC)

I think this is a good idea. Does anywhere like http://stats.grok.se publish user-agent stats based on the wikipedia server logs? - Neparis (talk) 02:16, 9 March 2008 (UTC)

I don't know what raw data there is; you'd have to ask Henrik about his data, or as on the technical village pump to see if there is other information available. — Carl (CBM · talk) 03:08, 9 March 2008 (UTC)

Ok, thanks. What is the threshold for your bot's labeling an article "frequently viewed"? - Neparis (talk) 00:42, 10 March 2008 (UTC)

I simply took the top 500 articles. I put a list here but I may copy it somewhere more permanent. — Carl (CBM · talk) 01:37, 10 March 2008 (UTC)

I see. How about changing the bot's messages that it puts on talk pages to say "One of the 500 most frequently viewed X articles." or perhaps "The 379th most frequently viewed X articles.", rather than just "One of the most frequently viewed X articles." ? When I saw this, it seemed odd not to be told how frequently viewed it was, and instead have to follow the link to stats.grok.se and type in the correct spelling of the article name over again. - Neparis (talk) 02:16, 10 March 2008 (UTC)

The message actually comes from {{maths rating}}, via a parameter. I changed that to link to a list of the 500 articles that I tagged, so that it's easy to look at the relative ranks. I don't want to tag each article with it's actual rank on the list for two reasons. First, that would significantly increase the work when I want to update the list using new data. Second, I think that gives too much weight to data that is going to be influenced by random factors. The data is probably mostly accurate, and certainly all the most-viewed articles are included, but the "actual rank" is hard to determine. — Carl (CBM · talk) 16:58, 10 March 2008 (UTC)

If necessary, the influence of random factors could be reduced by temporally smoothing the data for each article. Anyway, take my suggestions with a pinch of salt. I like what you are doing with your bot, and I'd like to end with a thanks! - Neparis (talk) 20:19, 10 March 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for putting the list somewhere more permanent and moving the link there. Is there any chance of incorporating the "frequently viewed" info into each field's subpage somehow? I've recently formally proposed starting a probability and statistics sub-project (feel free to add your name if you're interested). It would be useful to be able to see from a glance atWP:WikiProject Mathematics/Wikipedia 1.0/Probability and statistics how many of this field's 234 articles are frequently viewed, and also to have a "frequently viewed?" column in the detailed tables, or maybe even the raw hitcount or hits/day over that period of Feb if that's an option (not ranks as I agree with your comment above on the likely instability of the lower ranks). I've no idea how much work that would be for you, so it's just a suggestion. Thanks again for setting this up — most informative already and much appreciated. Regards, Qwfp (talk) 11:43, 13 March 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Administrators has been marked as a policy

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Wikipedia:Mediation has been marked as a policy

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Thanks for advice

Only today I discovered that I have a page "my talk." That's why I'm answering to your kind message of February 28 only now. I am really new at WIKIPEDIA and need advice from such qualified Wikipedians as you are. I will follow your advice related to repeatedly using bold for each occurrence of a term and I will not to remove references, when they are important for readers. However, what you would advise to do when references include some secondary publications and miss publications in important journals. Before I did my changes, I had looked on the Web what publications are attributed to Burgin in my effort to understand the theory of super-recursive algorithms. I had found that his publications in important journals are missing. I did not want to make the list of Burgin's publications too long as it's not an article dedicated to him. So, I excluded some secondary publications. Sorry about this.

Besides I have a question. What is the difference between contributors and editors?

With respect, Multipundit (talk) 21:06, 13 March 2008 (UTC)

Problem of future contingents

Hi - thanks for the message - not sure how I can fix this with my limited abilities. It should be the Problem of future contingents, indeed it seems to have existed under that name in some past life. But I don't want to break anything. Renamed user 5 (talk) 17:13, 16 March 2008 (UTC) [edit] I see you have fixed it anyway - I doubt I will have to do this again, that was an odd one - thanks Renamed user 5 (talk) 17:15, 16 March 2008 (UTC).

Thanks. I made a small correction to the Set theory article as an attempt to return the favour (I hope it is). Incidentally you should know there is or was a huge controversy as to whether Cantor originated naive set theory. By definition, naive set theory is a victim of Russell's paradox. Was Cantor's system naive? Not according to Zermelo, who claimed to base his 1908 version of the theory on Cantor. He said that the idea of defining a set in terms of an already existing set (which avoids the paradox) can be found in Cantor. I have a quote somewhere. I wrote the original version of Zermelo set theory which still survives, I see. Renamed user 5 (talk) 17:22, 16 March 2008 (UTC)

PR script

Hi Carl - could you update your script so that it checks Category:Current peer reviews instead of Category:General peer reviews? Thanks - Geometry guy 13:18, 17 March 2008 (UTC)

No problem. — Carl (CBM · talk) 14:00, 17 March 2008 (UTC)

Saying hi; WP:V

Hiya Carl. I saw that you were one of the participants in the older discussion at WP:V/Archive 21, and I just want to make it clear that I think your statements are both reasonable and an important part of the debate. I didn't answer your question about what change I'm asking for; that's because I don't really have any particular change in mind. I just want the final product to take my main concern into account: "The disconnect between all the previous discussion I can find (those 3 links I gave) on the subject of whether Wikipedia can and should be cited academically, vs. what WP:Citing Wikipedia and WP:V say, gives more than enough ammunition to anyone who wants to take a shot at us." And, of course, as a general principle, WP:V should be clear about past and present consensus, and I don't think it currently is. I'm putting this on your user page instead of WP:V because I think clarity and repetition are good when talking with a person and bad when they make group discussions longer than they need to be. - Dan Dank55 (talk) 16:27, 14 March 2008 (UTC)

I'm somewhat confused about where exactly you see this disconnect. There are valid reasons for us not to make citations from one article to another, but valid reasons an external person might want to cite one of our articles somewhere else. What's contradictory about that? — Carl (CBM · talk) 17:00, 14 March 2008 (UTC)

I've now read a lot of Wikipedia-space pages on the subject, I'll reply on the WP:V talk page. Btw, I wouldn't be working on Wikipedia if it weren't for the fact that there are a lot of people, like you, who know what they're talking about and stay vigilant over a long period of time. Thanks for your love of the project. - Dan Dank55 (talk) 14:21, 17 March 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for the kind words. We can discuss the cite thing here on on WP:V. Your comments have convinced me that Wikipedia:Citing Wikipedia could use some improvement, but I have to think about what should be there. What would be helpful is a good reference to some news stories about the issue of citing Wikipedia. — Carl (CBM · talk) 15:51, 17 March 2008 (UTC)

Still working on gathering information ... every time I turn around there's something new. - Dan Dank55 (talk) 21:36, 18 March 2008 (UTC)

BAG

My statement was based on a specific claim made a while back by a member of BAG (I can't find it now) that they never examine tasks for community consensus on whether the task should be done. —Random832 13:05, 19 March 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia:When to cite has been marked as a guideline

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Multifaceted topics

There are multifaceted topics related to many articles. Very often these articles have different discussion participants. That's why it would be useful to discuss multifaceted topics on all related article pages. That's why I did this. - Multipundit (talk) 01:59, 21 March 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia:When to cite no longer marked as a guideline

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Thanks!

		The Special Barnstar
		For fixing up my goof with WP 1.0 I hereby award you this Special Barnstar of Thanks. §tepshep • ¡Talk to me! 03:23, 24 March 2008 (UTC)

zeteo lexer

Hi Carl,

can you please run your lexer and pull out all citations of physics pages, please? If the gadget runs unter Windows, you can also send me the program, if it tedious for you, so that I can try it on my own. Thanks. I will try to include the physics references then.

Jakob.scholbach (talk) 11:00, 24 March 2008 (UTC)

WTBDWK

While we have had some trouble in the last day due to abuse (like the one you disabled), we will probably wind up using editprotected more often that you would like. If you look at the protection log for that page, you will be able to see the problem we are trying to work through. Even when we get the more mature editors from both sides working together, a couple of hotheads will show up, edit-war the hell out of the thing, and get it locked up again.

I can't ask you to make edits that you don't want to. I do ask that if you see a correctly formatted editprotected request, containing a pointer to a discussion, where that discussion reached a consensus on the change, that you let it sit for the next admin to look at instead of disabling it.Kww (talk) 20:50, 24 March 2008 (UTC)

Also, you missed the bogus editprotected that I was complaining about. It's here.Kww (talk) 21:03, 24 March 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject Universities/Article guidelines has been marked as a guideline

Wikipedia:WikiProject Universities/Article guidelines (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs) has recently been edited to mark it as a guideline. This is an automated notice of the change (more information). -- VeblenBot (talk) 18:50, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

Another GAR archive

Could you ask VeblenBot to list Category:GAR/36? Thanks. Geometry guy 22:58, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

PS. It seems to me that it may be sensible to substitute old archives (such as Category:GAR/34) and hence decommission VeblenBot listing for them. Let me know if you have any views on this.

I added 36 to the list. I think it makes sense to remove the older categories when they are unlikely to change again; what if I only follow the current one and the one before that? — Carl (CBM · talk) 00:37, 26 March 2008 (UTC)

Yes, that makes sense, both at GAR and Peer review. However, we need to coordinate it smoothly, as I guess the transclusion of the VeblenBot page needs to be substituted before the category listing is switched off. Geometry guy 00:44, 26 March 2008 (UTC)

zeteo

Hi Carl, take your time with the lexer for the physics references. I'm also off for a couple of days. Also, if I can do something to alleviate the work for you, I'm obviously ready to do so. Step by step, I plan to fill up the zeteo database with the refs in WP. Perhaps at some point it would be worth thinking about a somewhat automatic procedure which would do the work you do now. Thanks again, Jakob.scholbach (talk) 12:20, 27 March 2008 (UTC)

Harvard Style

I was unfamiliar with the Harvard Style of citations. I have now read the reference given to me, Thanks for the correction. Matthew Glennon (talk) 19:10, 27 March 2008 (UTC)

RfC

I've started drafting a user conduct RfC that you might be interested in here. There's a lot of evidence to sift through and present, so I think it will take awhile to get it put together. If you'd like to participate, please feel free to do so. Cla68 (talk) 06:34, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Requests for drama has been marked as a policy

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PR tool

http://tools.wikimedia.de/~cbm/cgi-bin/peerrev.cgi isn't working for me at the moment: it hangs at the "Getting lock" stage. I need this fairly soon to avoid archiving new peer reviews. Do you see what the problem is? Geometry guy 22:42, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

The problem was that I hadn't updated a library on the toolserver, but the API changed and broke the old one. I just ran it successfully. — Carl (CBM · talk) 23:09, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. I ran it too, and it is fine now. Geometry guy 23:38, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

an easy-to-fix misspelling

The typo "mitology" was particularly unfortunate there, since it does make the article incomprehensible.

How??? I'm as far from an expert as you can get on this topic, and I saw instantly the obvious fact that "mythology" was intended. I can't imagine how anyone could miss that no matter how hard they tried. It's about a god. So it's mythology. Michael Hardy (talk) 20:14, 30 March 2008 (UTC)

When I read the sentence, it did not occur to me at all that the term was supposed to be mythology (possibly because I read the word like might-ology). It looked just like just a made up term. It may be that I'm not giving enough benefit of a doubt to the author for situations like this.

I do think it's important to get the error rate on this sort of article to be acceptably low. I asked the creator of that article if there is any way to clarify the 'new article' messages. — Carl (CBM · talk) 20:34, 30 March 2008 (UTC)

Yikes

So I've been told I my userpage has (briefly) been the talk of the IRC channel and Bugzilla. D: Hope everything got sorted out and sorry for this interesting incident . . . I may request my user and talk pages be semi protected so as to avoid giving you guys more problems to fix. :P -WarthogDemon 03:30, 31 March 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia:User categories has been marked as a guideline

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fictional number?

You wrote:

by all accounts 95% of the articles tagged as nonsense really are nonsense.

Where did that number come from? When a newbie goes away in disgust after his contribution is mistakenly deleted, he doesn't get counted. Numbers like this appear to me to be just fiction. Michael Hardy (talk) 01:29, 1 April 2008 (UTC)

It came from people who do CSD category work, in numerous conversations I've been in. They consistently say that almost all pages tagged as 'nonsense' really are. I don't do much CSD work myself, so it's true that I am taking their word for it. Hence the 'by all accounts'.

I appreciate the issue with deleting what are actually good contributions from new users. On the other hand, I have yet to find a way to change the CSD system to further reduce the error rate while still permitting people to delete the nonsense pages that they are very eager to delete. I've thought about it quite a bit. — Carl (CBM · talk) 02:19, 1 April 2008 (UTC)

Your comments leave me surer than I was that it's fiction. Michael Hardy (talk) 03:14, 1 April 2008 (UTC)

Maybe. The two articles there right now are Henri_davis and Jailyn. — Carl (CBM · talk) 03:27, 1 April 2008 (UTC)

April 2008 peer review archive

Hi Carl - could you ask VeblenBot to start tracking Category:April 2008 peer reviews? Also, there is no need to track Category:February 2008 peer reviews any more: I've substituted to make WP:Peer review/February 2008 static. Geometry guy 09:43, 1 April 2008 (UTC)

No problem. — Carl (CBM · talk) 11:32, 1 April 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Department of Fun has been marked as a policy

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zeteo

I'm not sure whether you watch my talk page: so here is the reply to your request concerning the edition field in the zeteo database:

Are you talking about "edition" or about something different? The edition parameter is already provided in zeteo. Jakob.scholbach (talk) 12:26, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

I was using this reference [1]. The edition field is filled in, but the citation generated at the bottom doesn't include it. The {{citation}} template does accept an edition parameter. — Carl (CBM · talk) 12:29, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

Oh, OK. This is a bug. I will try to fix it soon. For example here, it works. I wrote a replacement routine which replaces 3 by 3rd in the output, probably somewhere I made a mistake. Jakob.scholbach (talk) 12:38, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Wikipedia is not for things made up one day no longer marked as a guideline

Wikipedia:Wikipedia is not for things made up one day (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs) has been edited so that it is no longer marked as a guideline. It was previously marked as a guideline. This is an automated notice of the change (more information). -- VeblenBot (talk) 18:52, 5 April 2008 (UTC)

Property (T)

The word "remarkable" is used fairly commonly in mathematics: it is not unencyclopedic. As you are probably aware, Gauss himself used the words Theorema egregium to describe his results on the Differential geometry of surfaces. Various results in mathematics are surprising and I do not believe it is for WP editors to suggest otherwise. As described in detail in Shalom's 2006 ICM talk (that I added to the references), the initial approach to property (T) was through the representation theory of real Lie groups, often where the dual was known explicitly. Even for SL(n,R), the representation theory of the semidirect product of R² by SL(2,R) was required. However, thanks to the work of Burger, Shalom, Gromov and others, there are direct methods, completely outside representation theory, for establishing property (T) for discrete groups, for which the unitary duals can never be determined (if nonamenable, they are not Type I in the sense of George Mackey and James Glimm). To say this is remarkable is not a "peacock" use of the word. It is standard practice amongst mathematicians. However, I have reworded the sentence from the lead (which I originally inserted) to avoid the use of this word but restore the original sense. Cheers, Mathsci (talk) 08:19, 7 April 2008 (UTC)

I think property (T) is definitely at the graduate level (I've given two graduate courses in France and England covering some of this material). At the moment I'm preparing material on harmonic analysis on SL(2,R) and SL(2,C), starting with Weyl-Kodaira theory, which might get put on WP if time permits. Cheers, Mathsci (talk) 21:18, 7 April 2008 (UTC)

PR messages

Bugzilla 13260 is the main issue here. I'm writing bad (opaque, confusing) code just to avoid nested transclusions, but there is a limit as to how far this can go: peer reviewers should not have to face a page of weird template code before they can get to the business of writing a review. I have documented the bug at WP:Template limits. Any other ideas you have to raise the priority of this bug would help a lot. Geometry guy 21:55, 7 April 2008 (UTC)

One thing you can do is get the people who help at PR to "vote" for the bug in bugzilla. I can try to find the right person on IRC and poke him about it, as well. But there is never enough developer time to meet demand, so we may have to work around it for a while. I hate to see it require a lot of manual effort - there must be some way to reduce that to a minimum. — Carl (CBM · talk) 21:59, 7 April 2008 (UTC)

You have to register to vote, if I recall, which is a big disincentive. Tim Starling has been assigned the case, I believe.

In its current form, the partial transclusion trick would be tricky to automate. You need to "onlyinclude" the nominators statement, which means identifying automatically where this statement ends. (Adding the "includeonly" statement is then fairly easy.)

There are some frills I could trim to save one or two hundred MBs, but my experience is that the page just expands to fill the space created. Ruhrfisch will comment on this soon, from the ground perspective: he is the one doing the hard manual work. Geometry guy 22:12, 7 April 2008 (UTC)

Possible Bot work at Peer Review

Hi Carl, thanks for your work with VeblenBot to keep PR running smoothly. I was wondering if it could also do some or all of the archiving of peer reviews? If it could that would be great, if not would you suggest submitting a bot request or is there another user to ask (that is a bot operator)?

Anyway, here is what needs to be done in order of most useful to least useful:

1. Archive peer review requests that have had no new replies in the past two weeks
2. Archive articles that have gone to WP:FAC or WP:FLC - since this involves adding either {{fac}} or {{flc}} to the article's talk page, it seems like it would be relatively easy to check
3. Close imcompletely archived peer reviews - some editors will do the talk page half of archiving without changing the template in the PR itself, others change the PR template (or just add the words "This peer review is closed") but do not change the article talk page. This sometimes happens with FAC and FLC - they close only at the talk page when adding fac or flc, so the PR stays open at WP:PR
4. Close peer reviews that are at least a month old and have had no responses in the past two days.

One complicating factor is that whenever the partial transclusion trick is done, it is an edit and so extends the deadline for no responses - I ignore these when I archive.

Thanks in advance for considering this, but please don't feel obligated. Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 01:13, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

PS I wondered if the Peer review space warning threshold could be made slightly larger - say 93% instead of 90%? Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 01:13, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

I can work on #1, #2, and #4 above. #3 seems harder to detect. This will take a while for me to implement; I raised the warning threshold some in the meantime. — Carl (CBM · talk) 01:28, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

Thanks so very much. Just os you know, #1 and #2 are the most pressing issues, while #4 has hardly arisen recently. I can watch out for #3 and fix it myself. Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 01:46, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

Complex number

This is the same editor who reverted my change: [2]. From the edit summary it appears that this is not an accomplished mathematician. See also this editor's weird remarks at Talk:Complex number#Shouldn't the lack of ordering be mentioned?, culminating in the suggestion that I don't understand the table I constructed myself. Earlier he conceded that "formally" was (see talk:Complex number#Definition of a 'complex number' and check point 2 ("I agree") in the first response of 17:30, 23 February 2008 (UTC).  --Lambiam 20:25, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

zeteo bug

The zeteo bug you kindly reported is now fixed. Jakob.scholbach (talk) 13:42, 6 April 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. I will have the citation tags you requested later today. Rather than pull just the physics ones, I wrote a faster parser so I can scan the entire database dump. I'll email you with details. — Carl (CBM · talk) 21:59, 6 April 2008 (UTC)

Merci! Uiuiui, that's huge. Actually already opening the unzipped txt file is a challenge for my computer. I think I need to split the file somehow. Do you know a tool (for Windows) which is able to split such a huge file without actually opening it? Or how do you handle it? I take it, you don't have a blue gene at home? I'll then try to get the csv file with the physics sections and proceed with the stuff. Jakob.scholbach (talk) 21:18, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

There's a lot of data there, so opening it in a word processor would be difficult for anyone. I can make a list of articles inside Category:Physics a few levels deep, extract the data for those articles from my master file, and send that data. That should be a much smaller file.

Alternatively, you could write a program to scan the big data file to split it into pieces. Just copy it line by line into the other files, count how many PAGE lines you have output, and move to a new file when you hit some limit like 10000 pages. There are about 6,000,000 total "pages" in the file, but most of them don't have any reference tags.

— Carl (CBM · talk) 21:47, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

OK, I'll try that. If I don't succeed I'll get back to you. Jakob.scholbach (talk) 12:20, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

VeblenBot

Would it be possible for me to receive the policy/guideline notices on my talk page (or, probably better, a sub-page of my talk page)? - jc37 19:10, 7 April 2008 (UTC)

Sure, just let me know the page, and I'll add it to the bot's list pages to spam. — Carl (CBM · talk) 19:39, 7 April 2008 (UTC)

User:Jc37/Tracking/Policy and guideline changes - best name I could think of at the moment. (And thank you : ) - jc37 14:01, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

I set that up. — Carl (CBM · talk) 17:54, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

WASSUP??????

Ok, so are you having a totally groovy day? I hope you are. Have a wonderful wonderful life! Because its like my goal to be friends with everyone in wikipedia. Will you be my totally awesome groovy wiki-friend?

216.229.227.142 (talk) 15:36, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

I don't get it

What's wrong with trying to make friends so that I can become a more knowledgable and active wikipedia member, that's all I'm doing and people are saying its vandalism. This is making me seriously sad!

-(

216.229.227.142 (talk) 15:46, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Don't template the regulars has been marked as a guideline

Wikipedia:Don't template the regulars (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs) has recently been edited to mark it as a guideline. This is an automated notice of the change (more information). -- VeblenBot (talk) 18:51, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

Template:Main

I see you answer on the template talk page quite a lot. What do you think of my proposal? (See the bottom of the template talk page) Simply south (talk) 17:24, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

NOR discussion

I would like to invite you and Phil Sandifer to discuss the matter from WT:NOR further at User talk:Vassyana#NOR discussion. Thanks! Vassyana (talk) 23:13, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

On a related note, how would you improve Wikipedia:These are not original research? Feel free to improve away if you feel the urge. Cheers! Vassyana (talk) 06:13, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

WPM discussion

Hi Carl, I didn't want to post the whole laundry list of MathSci's transgressions at first, but since you and a few other editors were genuinely confused by what I meant, and moreover, since he continued to attack me on the math project talk page, I did mention a few of them, after all. By the way, you hit the nail on the head with the unencyclopaedic character of the formulation at Property (T), this is exactly why I wanted it changed. I would have written much the same justification, but I simply cannot handle MathSci's arrogant and denigrating attitude any more, and my own peace of mind is becoming more important to me than the objective quality of articles on Wikipedia. It has been pleasure working with you, and I truly admire your steadfastness, common sense, and objectivity. Many happy years of editing and administrating to you! Arcfrk (talk) 08:14, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

Moved protected pages on WP:PERTABLE

Please fix the bot to recognize pages which were moved after being protected. The source of the page can be found in the history, and information from that log may be helpful for admins considering the request. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 08:39, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

I appreciate the benefit of having log entries; that's why I wrote that script to begin with. I'm glad to know someone else uses the table too. When I wrote it, I knew it had these shortcomings, I just didn't have a good way to fix them (hence the "by magic" message). Since then, there is new functionality in the API, and I am more experienced.

I wrote code this morning (not live yet) to handle the case where a page was moved. There is a separate issue, visible in the log of Template:R from UN/LOCODE, that some old log entries have a different format than the current log entries. I had formerly just ignored these, but now I should be able to use them to get the log comment, and then get the expiration date from the API. I'm planning to work on it this afternoon, and I hope to have it done within a few days at most. — Carl (CBM · talk) 13:21, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia:CheckUser has been marked as a policy

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Orphaned talk pages misunderstanding

At ANI you said "I'll need to look into this more. I was under the impression they were all orphaned pages with no edit history." Did you ever get the chance to do that? I made this post that might explain some of the confusion. It is also possible that people confuse orphaned talk page redirects, orphaned redirects, and talk pages without a corresponding page (also sometimes called orphaned talk pages). In this case, as I said over there, orphaned means no backlinks. Except of course that these pages did have backlinks to the Wikipedia and User namespaces (the bot was programmed to ignore those when looking for talk page redirects without backlinks). Carcharoth (talk) 21:11, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

I now realize I was mistaken about what the deletion summaries meant. I thought orphaned meant the corresponding article page didn't exist. Given that the article pages did/do exist, I'm pretty neutral about deleting the redirects. — Carl (CBM · talk) 21:13, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Burden of evidence has been marked as a guideline

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Wikipedia:WTF? OMG! TMD TLA. ARG! has been marked as a guideline

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More on VeblenBot archiving PR requests

Hi Carl, I have had a few more observations on PR archiving that would be potential bugs for VeblenBot.

First off, some users put the PR template on the article page instead of the talk page. Geometry guy has recently made it so that doing this generates a warning. Prior to this, I have seen about 2-4 instances each month of this reviewing and archiving PR. Not sure if the warning will stop it or just reduce the incidence.

Second, some users try to close the PR by simply deleting the PR template from the talk page and leaving the actual /archiveN page unchanged. I add the PR template back in by hand then.

Finally, I was wondering if it would be possible for VeblenBot to do the semi-automated peer review (AndyZ's script) for each new entry as it is added to the PR page the first time? I can explain in detail how I do this now if you want / need to know. It is not that much work, so I can do it - the real timessavings would be automating archiving. Thanks, Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 19:08, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

Another possible problem - the name of the article is changed during peer review. See this diff for example. Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 01:17, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

In the amount of time that I have to spend writing code, I'd rather focus on just one task at a time. I haven't written any other code to do archiving, so it will take me some time to think about the best way to do it. Thanks for pointing out those common errors that I need to detect. — Carl (CBM · talk) 01:40, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

I understand and was not trying to push you, sorry if it came across wrong. I would be glad to be a person that VeblenBot notifies if it runs into an odd situation (and I could still archive those by hand). I think most people doing a review and seeing the PR template in the wrong place move it to the talk page, so that is probably not a huge problem. The deleted template is rarer, but perhaps if people knew FAC and FLC would archive PR within the hour, they would not do this. I will keep an eye out for other odd ducks. Thanks again, Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 02:04, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

G'day CBM

Hi CBM - hope you're good! I've been talking a bit lately about how wiki friends should try and support each other by affirming great behaviour, and by criticising less than good behaviour (although in a friendly fashion!).

It is with this in mind that I thought I'd pop over here and let you know that I didn't really think your post to Giano's talk page was a very good idea. You may not see it as a big deal (and actually, that'd likely be right - it isn't in the scheme of things!) - and you're certainly correct that assumptions of bad faith etc. are not on. There is at the moment, however, a bit of a feeling that some sorts of criticism, particularly Giano's plain speaking, are being unnecessarily squished - and that's a very bad thing; much worse, in my view, than the worry that Giano is somehow saying something surprising or upsetting. I, and maybe many others, feel that Giano is not only a huge project asset, but is owed some significant apology from the community for recent, and not so recent events. Unfortunately there are a few editors in this unhappy situation, and it's really not on!

Do pop by my talk page if you want to talk about any of this stuff, otherwise have a great wiki week, and cheers for now! Privatemusings (talk) 22:21, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

I had just popped by your talk page to say pretty much what PM has said but perhaps not as cordially as he would have. I'd really appreciate it if you didn't give the appearance of baiting other editors, whatever your intent was, because that's what it appeared like to me. Hope that's helpful. ++Lar: t/c 03:27, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

Just give it a rest with the constant negativity, please. El_C 13:20, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

Footnotes change

Carl, thanks for your kind comments. Here's the February diff of the Footnotes page. Please let me know if I got it wrong. Tony (talk) 14:08, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Overcategorization/User categories has been marked as a guideline

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Semi-automated peer reviews

In connection with your kind offer of help with peer review archiving, could you also think about the semi-automated peer review (SAPR) process?

At the moment these are essentially all done by Ruhrfisch. Partly because not all editors like to be reviewed by a script, and also now to keep within page size limits, these SAPRs are stored separately, in pages organized by month (see WP:Peer review/Automated/April 2008). This also helps Ruhrfisch make efficient use of the time he generously contributes to the peer review process because he can do a whole bunch of SAPRs in a batch and paste the results into the currently monthly page. To let editors know that an article has received an SAPR, and link them to it, a notice is added to the peer review page of the article. These notices also help Ruhrfisch to see which articles have not received SAPR as he scans through WP:Peer reviews by date — something which he can do at the same time as looking for peer reviews to archive.

Ruhrfisch commented a while ago that adding these SAPR notices was very time-consuming, because it couldn't be done in a batch, but only article by article. In response, I came up with a "clever" way to produce them automatically: on the monthly SAPR page, each SAPR has an onlyinclude section containing the signature of the editor who ran the script (almost always Ruhrfisch, under the SAPR pseudonym of AndyZ); each peer review page (using {{PR/header}}) transcludes the monthly SAPR page and tests whether there is an SAPR for the article; if there is, {{PR/header}} generates the notice and transcludes the signature. Net result: Ruhrfisch no longer has to add the notices — great!

Well, not so great, because the problem with my "clever" solution is that each peer review page has to transclude the entire monthly SAPR page twice. Of course, it is just the "onlyinclude" sections which get transcluded, and these are small when the pagename test fails, but still, it must amount to at least 500 bytes. With 100 articles typically at peer review, that's a transclusion of 50000 bytes, which gets multiplied by a factor of four, thanks to the preprocessor bug, because it is nested through {{PR/header}}, the peer review, VeblenBot, and WP:Peer review itself. Suddenly my "clever" idea costs 200000 bytes!

The trouble is, I can't think of a way to do it without using a bot or making the process more time consuming for Ruhrfisch. I could save a transclusion by moving this code out of {{PR/header}}, but that doesn't really address the issue. The whole thing needs a rethink. A bot could help: it could automatically add SAPR notices to peer review pages, avoiding the embarrassing transclusion. Of course, at one extreme the (S)APRs could be automated entirely. I'd be really grateful for your thoughts and ideas.

I'm really sorry to bother you with all this, but peer review has become a victim of its own successful rebirth: we have been walking on a knife edge for months and it shows what a generous and good natured editor Ruhrfisch is that he hasn't thrown in the towel by now. Anyway, enough cliches, this post is way too long, and I'm grateful to you just for reading it! Geometry guy 16:21, 21 April 2008 (UTC)

Tango arbcom evidence

Hi Carl - Just following up on our earlier conversation at my talk page, where you offered to help me build a wikitable with the expanded evidence for the case noted above. I've now finished the evidence gathering (and identified that we need to have a cheat sheet for all the AN and ANI archives—but that is a project for another day), and have it stashed here. I'm visualising a table with 8 equally wide columns, and the 9th, which will probably need to be 50% wider than the others. Do you think that would work? And would you be able to at least get me started? I usually only need to be shown something once, so with luck this should be a one-off request.

As a suggestion, you or another admin might want to look at a random sampling of Tango's deletions; one thing I can't do, but expect is fine, as almost all of the articles remain redlinks. I am thinking it would be helpful to the arbitrators to be reassured there are no concerns about Tango's administrative work in other areas, so they can focus on the one issue before them.

Thanks again for your offer of assistance. Risker (talk) 01:16, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

It's no problem. I am going to be busy for a couple hours here, but I made one possible table just to give an idea of the things that are possible. Of course you can play around with that one. Pretty much any layout you desire can be achieved; when I get back, I'll be able to do more formatting. — Carl (CBM · talk) 01:32, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

Sorry I did not get back to you sooner, Carl. Your proposed setup looks very good to me. Fingers crossed I might be able to spend some time on it late this evening, but if you have a chance please feel free to proceed. Thanks again for your help. Risker (talk) 15:44, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Polling is not a substitute for discussion has been marked as a guideline

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Wikipedia:Harassment has been marked as a policy

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Peer review

Hi Carl, I made the new archive page for peer review for May at Wikipedia:Peer review/May 2008, but the VeblenBot archive page there needs to be made.

Also if you are going to implement a size criterion for automatically going to partial transclusion, I am currently switching any peer review larger than 8 kB to partial translcusion (used to be 10 kb, but WP:PR got too large).

Thanks as always for your help and great bot, Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 11:52, 1 May 2008 (UTC)

I've also stabilized the March archive, so VeblenBot no longer needs to track it. Geometry guy 19:38, 1 May 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. I removed the March category earlier today and added the May category. — Carl (CBM · talk) 02:33, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Independent sources has been marked as a guideline

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List of mathematicians disambig

Howdy, would you be willing to modify your dab lister in two ways for a little project of mine: I want to find all *mathematician* articles that do *not* have a disambig link to them.

Well technically, I want those that don't have links from their surname disambig pages, but with naming conventions being so loose I'm not sure I feel comfortable asking for such a thing as a "minor" modification. If you see an easy way to do it, I am happy of course.

I suspect there are tons of pages without surname links (really MOST I have looked for), and I suspect most have no redirect or disambig linking to them at all. I've been on a small crusade to fix them as they appear on the Current Activity, but you know how crusades are these days. Can hardly find time to get the suit of armor on before something else comes up.

Anyways, D.A. Mr. Roboto in advance. JackSchmidt (talk) 17:56, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

I think this is what you want:

• All mathematicians from the list
• Mathematicians linked from a dab page
• Mathematicians not linked from a dab page

— Carl (CBM · talk) 18:12, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

Thanks! This has already found 3 or 4 without surname disambigs. However, I've noticed that really a lot of the ones listed in o4f have disambigs already. For instance Alfred Young from Young (surname) ({{surname}}), Henri Cartan and Élie Cartan from Cartan ({{disambig}}), Émile Borel and Armand Borel from Borel ({{disambig}}), Lyapunov, and many others. I think the pages they are linked from include the {{disambig}} or {{surname}} template. Like I said, the list is already useful, and a good excuse to cleanup the dab pages that do exist, but I thought you might like to know about the extra entries. JackSchmidt (talk) 18:40, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

I'll need to look into this and be ore careful in generating the data. I'm not sure why only one of the Cartans is in the list of people linked from disambig pages, for example. — Carl (CBM · talk) 19:06, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

The problem with the Cartans was strange behavior by mysql. I have updated the list, which fixed the Borel and Cartan issue, and added the surname template, which fixed the Alfred Young issue. I hope the list is more useful now. — Carl (CBM · talk) 19:26, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

Thanks again! The results have been much more uniform now. There are still a few false hits, but these can be explained by redirects or extremely weird dab pages. It's probably better for me to check those anyways, rather than filter them out by machine. Thanks, this is much faster than going through the whole list. JackSchmidt (talk) 20:06, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

WP bot not running

Hi Carl. WP 1.0 bot is not running recently. Do you happen to know why? You can comment at Wikipedia talk:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Index. Thanks. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 05:38, 4 May 2008 (UTC)

Signature (mathematical logic)

I tried to move signature (mathematical logic) over the redirect from signature (logic), but I can't because it has pseudo-nontrivial history. Would you mind doing it? The "mathematical" part is a bit clumsy, and there seems to be no homonym in logic. This is part of my new project of refurbishing first-order logic. --Hans Adler (talk) 16:56, 4 May 2008 (UTC)

I moved it and fixed the redirects. — Carl (CBM · talk) 18:06, 4 May 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. Now I could do with some advice. From what I learned today about philosophical logic, it seems that the notion of a model in philosophy is exactly the same as in mathematics, and "interpretations" are the fuzzy version of that. For people coming from the philosophical side the rigour in the definition of a model could be a bit counterintuitive. I see two options:

• Discuss everything in structure (mathematical logic). Problem: There is no suitable name for the article. "Structure" makes no sense for the philosophers, and "model" is the wrong term for universal algebra (because they have no theories).
• Start a new article at model (logic) (currently a redirect to model theory). Duplicate some of the material from structure (mathematical logic), but stress the logical aspects, including "model of" and fuzzy semantics.

What do you think? The context is that I am trying to build supporting "main" articles for first-order logic before touching that article itself. I noticed the problem while preparing non-logical symbol for that purpose. --Hans Adler (talk) 18:51, 4 May 2008 (UTC)

I think it's better not to create a new article; the article interpretation (logic) can explain the philosophical terminology, while the article on structures covers interpretations in the mathematical sense. I generally favor having fewer articles, with more content each, rather than the opposite. But some people prefer to have lots of "one definition" articles, so my opinion isn't unanimous. — Carl (CBM · talk) 19:18, 4 May 2008 (UTC)

Please consider taking the AGF Challenge

I would like to invite you to consider taking part in the AGF Challenge which has been proposed for use in the RfA process [3] by User: Kim Bruning. You can answer in multiple choice format, or using essay answers, or anonymously. You can of course skip any parts of the Challenge you find objectionable or inadvisable.--Filll (talk) 04:20, 5 May 2008 (UTC)

veblenbot glitch?

hey Carl, many stats are not being updated, can you please fix it? Wikipedia:WikiProject Lebanon/Assessment#Assessments

The bot was paused for a few days to fix a problem that had developed. It has been started again, and it's about 40 hours into a run right now. Lebanon just happens to be near the end of the list this time. It should be updated within a day. — Carl (CBM · talk) 10:50, 6 May 2008 (UTC)

Gr8 thank u :) Eli+ 16:16, 6 May 2008 (UTC)

It's updated now. — Carl (CBM · talk) 17:01, 6 May 2008 (UTC)

Thanks

Thanks for your question. We really need to figure out what the basics are - where do we agree, where do we disagree. That whole discussion has gotten out of hand. Guettarda (talk) 18:04, 6 May 2008 (UTC)

You're completely correct. — Carl (CBM · talk) 18:28, 6 May 2008 (UTC)

Request for Rollback

Thanks! Ejg930 (talk) 17:29, 7 May 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Naming conventions (Hebrew) has been marked as a guideline

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Peer review problem

Hi Carl, WP:PR is only displaying the first 5 topics of 10, and the date sorted PR page says there is a "node count limit exceeded" error. There should be over 120 peer reiews there, but it is chopping off the bottom 50 or so. Can you fix this? I will also post this at Geometry guy's talk page. Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 19:47, 9 May 2008 (UTC)

Someone has dropped the node count limit from 1million to 50000. The devs mean well, but their communication skills are severely lacking. Geometry guy 20:15, 9 May 2008 (UTC)

Lucky I saw this. I'll ask them if they can find a compromise. — Carl (CBM · talk) 20:48, 9 May 2008 (UTC)

My guess is that Peer Review would still work with the node count limit set to 200,000. I am thinking about redesign. Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 00:24, 10 May 2008 (UTC)

Peer review redesign

It would be great if the semi-automated peer review (SAPR) were added to the article when it is listed at peer review. If that were the case, not only would it save me work, but it would also save transcluding the SAPR to the PR page, which would save some space. If the archiving were automatic, the link to edit the article talk page would also not be needed (at least by me to archive). The other idea I has was to have the topic be a pull down menu, much [like] the license is on images at Wikimedia Commons uploading. I am not sure if these are the kinds of things you are looking for. I have a much more radical idea, but need to ask some people about that. Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 00:39, 10 May 2008 (UTC)

Handling SAPR is going to be task #2 for PeerReviewBot; I can do that no matter what else we do.

What I am thinking of is changing the way that the pages get listed on WP:PR, moving away from the VeblenBot method currently being used. VeblenBot does fine, but we keep having these mediawiki problems. For example, I could make the bot directly transclude pages onto WP:PR, skipping all the template hassle. But with a bot we have a lot of flexibility, so the question that should be asked is: what should a user have to do to list a peer review. — Carl (CBM · talk) 00:46, 10 May 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. I think the fewer steps people have to do to list or archive a Peer Review the better - the more steps there are, the more likely it seems that something will get messed up. Another idea I had was that if the person lists their article for PR as topic X, then when they are all done, they are taken to section X of WP:PRV to ask for a volunteer peer reviewer who has signed up to review topic X.

My other worry is that of size of PR. While automated archiving will help, it seems that some version of the partial transclusion trick will almost certaily still be needed. The other radical idea I had was to somehow split PR into three parts. I am not sure how this would work, but initially all PRs would be in one area. If enough editors thought an article was good enough, it would be moved to either GA or FA (and FL) peer review. I was going to ask Sandy Georgia and Geometry Guy and The Rambling Man about this. The idea was if everything was spilt into three separate peer reviews (regular, GA prep, FA/FL prep) then size would not be an issue. Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 01:59, 10 May 2008 (UTC)

Formal interpretation

I just noticed that the article on abstract model is now called formal interpretation. Does this really make sense, given the kinds of non-formal models discussed in that article? Several years ago there used to be a single article on "models" (which covered scale models among other things) and this was one reason for splitting off this article. Maybe we should get rid of it altogether.--CSTAR (talk) 05:16, 10 May 2008 (UTC)

PS. have a look at Talk:Formal interpretation/Archive 1.--CSTAR (talk) 06:04, 10 May 2008 (UTC)

Apparently the person who moved it, Gregbard, did so with no discussion. This is related to the article logical interpretation, which several people have been discussing lately. I hope he will explain soon exactly what his plan is, since I can't see it. I was going to wait a little while to give him a chance to make his case. But I also don't see the purpose of the move; it's not clear to me that "abstract model" is the same thing as "formal interpretation". — Carl (CBM · talk) 10:46, 10 May 2008 (UTC)