User talk:Mr. Stradivarius/Archive 21

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Request

Latest comment: 9 years ago5 comments2 people in discussion

Regarding your proposal: Though I've found a certain amount of information about this situation, I've yet to divine or find advice as regards what's considered an effective way for the... indictee? to proceed. I'd appreciate, therefore, your advice/assistance.

Sincerely,
Sardanaphalus (talk) 19:21, 23 January 2015 (UTC)

@Sardanaphalus: As Tryptofish advised you, you should post a comment at the ANI thread. If you don't comment there, it will probably lower other editors' opinions of how well you collaborate with others. For things to go as well as possible, you need to a) show that you understand what the complaints about you are, b) accept responsibility for the issues brought up that are your fault (apologising helps here), and c) show that you are committed to improving your actions in the areas that you accept responsibility for (an action plan will help here). Though I started the thread about you, I don't actually want to see you topic banned if it can be avoided. I started the thread because I thought that a topic ban might be the only way to get you to change your behaviour after you seemingly ignored advice from myself and others. Perhaps this is all just a communication problem and can be sorted out through discussion - if that's the case, then so much the better. — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 13:16, 25 January 2015 (UTC)

Thank you very much for this message. In short: yes, I feel there's been an accumulation of misunderstandings, misinterpretations and unfinished conversations, some of which – perhaps many of which – have been prompted, I think, because of my attempts to take advice on board. I'm heartened to read that you don't want to see me topic (namespace?)-banned if it can be avoided; this is what the question at the end of a follow-up to the above that I'd been drafting had addressed ("...is there any kind of outcome other than the one proposed that you'd prefer to see / like to see..?").

Do you think, therefore, that linking and/or copying the contents of this thread to the ANI thread – to see if/how anyone following it responds – is a good initial post for me to make there..?

With my thanks again, Sardanaphalus (talk) 09:16, 26 January 2015 (UTC)

PS Despite, for instance, LT910001's own userpage, this may also be timely.

@Sardanaphalus: Yes, I think that linking to this conversation as part of your initial post would be a good idea. You should also try and address my points a, b and c above. But you shouldn't make the post too long - the thread will go smoothest if it is a conversation rather than a series of walls of text. Also, you should comment there soon, preferably today - the longer you leave it, the more it looks to other editors like you are ignoring the thread. — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 10:15, 26 January 2015 (UTC)

I'm required elsewhere for a while now, so will make the post sometime later today. Thanks for your confirmation. Sardanaphalus (talk) 11:25, 26 January 2015 (UTC)

Yourt recent change to Template:Asbox

Latest comment: 9 years ago13 comments3 people in discussion

Your recent change to {{asbox}} seems to have messed up the sortkey for upmerged stub tags. I'm reeverting your edits; feel free to re-instate them once you (or someone else) have fixed the bug. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 17:03, 28 January 2015 (UTC)

@Od Mishehu: Sorry about that, and thanks for reverting. I'll take another look at it once Codehydro has fixed the bugs in the module. Best — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 21:59, 28 January 2015 (UTC)

@Od Mishehu: Can you give an example of which pages were broken? Also, User:Mr. Stradivarius, I need template editor permission. I think at this point I've satisfied the guidelines. —CodeHydro 22:12, 28 January 2015 (UTC)

@Od Mishehu and Mr. Stradivarius: I think it might be fixed. A typo caused {{Stub}} to fail to transclude, which is probably what handles the upcategories. Looking at {{Stub/sandbox}} it's seems to be working now. —CodeHydro 22:36, 28 January 2015 (UTC)
@Codehydro: I've given you template editor rights and re-protected the module, so you can now convert the template back to the module once you're sure that everything is working. Also, before we carry out the conversion, we will need to address Edokter's points on Template talk:Asbox and come to a consensus there. — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 23:43, 28 January 2015 (UTC)

Thanks Strad! I'm waiting on User:Od Mishehu's response before I convert it back. Based on his vague description, I'm pretty confident that what I did fixed it, but I'll hold off just in case it's not what I thought. —CodeHydro 00:17, 29 January 2015 (UTC)

I reinstated it and checked; the results were that the upmerged stub tags are in the middle again (at the location of the "tempsort" value). To be precise, I null-edited the templates of Category:Virginia sport stubs ({{Virginia-baseball-venue-stub}}, {{Virginia-basketball-team-stub}}, {{Virginia-sports-venue-stub}}) and checked where they ended up. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 16:07, 29 January 2015 (UTC)

I gotn it to work - see these edits (my first LUA edits). עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 16:41, 29 January 2015 (UTC)

@Od Mishehu: Are you sure your edit is what is supposed to happen? the original code was:

-->{{#if:{{{category|}}}|{{#ifeq:{{{tempsort|}}}|no||[[Category:{{{category}}}| {{#if:{{{tempsort|}}}|{{{tempsort}}}| *{{PAGENAME}}}}]]}}}}<!--
-->{{#if:{{{category1|}}}|[[Category:{{{category1}}}| {{#if:{{{tempsort1|}}}|{{{tempsort1}}}| *{{PAGENAME}}}}]]}}<!--
-->{{#if:{{{category2|}}}|[[Category:{{{category2}}}| {{#if:{{{tempsort2|}}}|{{{tempsort2}}}| *{{PAGENAME}}}}]]}}<!--

In other words, tempsort was not prefixed by * in the original template if tempsort was provided and only prefixes * if it was omitted. Your edit forces * on all categories, even those with tempsort set. —CodeHydro 16:59, 29 January 2015 (UTC)

wait a sec, I see it now; I missed the condition if tempsort was set to 'no' in my conversion. —CodeHydro 17:01, 29 January 2015 (UTC)

actually, nevrmind; I didn't miss it. It's just checked a few lines down... —CodeHydro 17:02, 29 January 2015 (UTC)

@Od Mishehu: I think it's actually fixed now; on closer examination, I realized that I neglected to include the space character in front of the tempsort and the asterisk. Hard to notice the whitespace char. I've changed the module to do this instead of your edits. Does it work now? —CodeHydro 17:31, 29 January 2015 (UTC)
- Looks good to me. See the test I defined above (null-editing the templates of Category:Virginia sport stubs ({{Virginia-baseball-venue-stub}}, {{Virginia-basketball-team-stub}}, {{Virginia-sports-venue-stub}}) and confirming that they all show up at the beginning, in that order) - whichj the current version passes. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 08:15, 1 February 2015 (UTC)

RfC - Helper Script access

Latest comment: 9 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

An RfC has been opened at RfC to physically restrict access to the Helper Script. You are invited to comment. --Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 14:29, 1 February 2015 (UTC)

New Email Message

Latest comment: 9 years ago2 comments1 person in discussion

Hello, Mr. Stradivarius. Please check your email; you've got mail!
Message added 05:41, 6 February 2015 (UTC). It may take a few minutes from the time the email is sent for it to show up in your inbox. You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{You've got mail}} or {{ygm}} template.

Command and Conquer Expert! ^{speak to me...}_{review me...} 05:41, 6 February 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for the fast reply! I've replied and addressed a couple more things. Command and Conquer Expert! ^{speak to me...}_{review me...} 07:41, 6 February 2015 (UTC)

Q

Latest comment: 9 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion

Hey Mr. Stradivarius, apparently you know stuff--that's good, because I don't. This template, something must be wrong--I'm looking at User talk:Writ Keeper/Archives/13 and the "do so on the current talk page" bit is a redlink going to this, which I know isn't what we want. I hope you can fix it--what if someone gets lost in Writ Keeper's archive? There would be hell to pay. Thanks, Drmies (talk) 04:38, 13 February 2015 (UTC)

That's true - heaven forbid we would have to send in a search party. Unfortunately, I don't think this can be fixed in the template, as people can never quite decide whether they want to talk about things on base pages or root pages, so we will have to resort to the age-old device of the Redirect, which I have now done. May the masses now wander Writ's archive's in peace. — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 06:44, 13 February 2015 (UTC)

TY muchly. He probably got lost in his own archives... Drmies (talk) 17:23, 13 February 2015 (UTC)

RfA

Latest comment: 9 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion

Hey Mr. Stradivarius! Many months ago I came up to you to see if I could be a possible candidate for adminship. Yet again, I recently got messages about considering being nominated for adminship by several editors. Would you mind re-reviewing me to see if I could be a candidate for an RfA? Best, ///EuroCarGT 01:47, 16 February 2015 (UTC)

Sure, I'll take a look when I next have a spare moment. Best — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 02:04, 16 February 2015 (UTC)

Cr

Latest comment: 9 years ago4 comments2 people in discussion

Why you had to protect Template:Cr, I also found that you might have protected totally wrong version. Right version is here. Hajme (talk) 15:11, 16 February 2015 (UTC)

Actually, I lowered the protection level, from sysop to template editor, and I didn't change the contents of the template at all. If you think that the version you linked is better than the current one, then you should start a discussion about it at Template talk:Cr. Let me know if you have any other questions about this. Best — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 15:15, 16 February 2015 (UTC)

@Hajme: ping (I messed up the first notification). — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 15:24, 16 February 2015 (UTC)

Searched again, current version is correct and it was protected because of the edit war. Thanks for answering anyway. Hajme (talk) 09:32, 17 February 2015 (UTC)

Article history problem

Latest comment: 9 years ago7 comments3 people in discussion

Today's TFA talk page (Talk:Tintin in the Congo) is displaying the message "This article is currently on on Wikipedia's Main Page as Today's featured article." If I could find where to change "on on" to "on" I would do so - could you please fix this? Thanks, Bencherlite ^Talk 11:25, 16 February 2015 (UTC)

Fixed. Bencherlite ^Talk 11:32, 16 February 2015 (UTC)

@Bencherlite: Well-spotted, and well-fixed! That was exactly the edit that was needed. Sorry for the the inconvenience. ;) — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 11:51, 16 February 2015 (UTC)

Me again... The article history at Talk:SMS Bayern has a misplaced, or missing, ' somewhere, causing a mis-match of bold/italic. I can't find the same problem at other pages within the same featured topic e.g. Talk:SMS Posen so I suspect it has something to do with the fact that the article is today's TFA - can you find the cause? Bencherlite ^Talk 18:48, 18 February 2015 (UTC)

(talk page stalker) Fixed by removing the line breaks in {{SMS}}. It looks like {{SMS}} may not tolerate line breaks as well as it should. Just a guess. – Jonesey95 (talk) 19:51, 18 February 2015 (UTC)

Marvellous. Thanks. Bencherlite ^Talk 20:18, 18 February 2015 (UTC)

The proper fix would be to trim whitespace from the parameters in Template:Ship. But then, the problem might not crop up enough for it to be worth it. — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 22:00, 18 February 2015 (UTC)

Re: onlyinclude

Latest comment: 9 years ago11 comments2 people in discussion

I know of it, actually! However it's not much use changing the configuration of a child page, if you wanted to fix that it'd be better to go for the master template.

All this is giving me a massive headache. I already know Python pretty well, guess it's time to learn Lua too? ResMar 02:56, 22 February 2015 (UTC)

(PS: Don't actually change that, I'd do it later myself once I'm done getting smashed in by parser functions. ResMar 02:57, 22 February 2015 (UTC))

Ah, yes, it will change the page size and affect the calculations, increasing your headaches. Sorry about that. I have some more thoughts as well, but I'll put them on VPT so everyone can see them. — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 03:00, 22 February 2015 (UTC)

So it's pretty clear that I'd have to if not quite completely redo everything approach the problem from an entirely different angle. How can we embed Lua into this to make it work smoother? I confess that I was even thinking of really, really dirty tricks—like silently overlaying the edit pane with a screenshot of one with the link disabled—to make sure no one breaks it. So a Lua auto-counter implementation would be strictly better. Are you up for writing one? I confess that I've spent far, far too much time working on this already—I was supposed to beg back to studying for classes yesterday, let alone today...

Anyway if you want to take a stab at it you have the floor for a while. Hopefully I can exercise enough self-control to keep from hurting myself again with parser functions for at least another week! ResMar 03:40, 22 February 2015 (UTC)

Ack. Your script did in five minutes what I failed to do in two hours. Everything's been ported over and is working optimally: see here. Opinion polls—coming to a news-desk near you! In time. I hope. ResMar 07:08, 22 February 2015 (UTC)

It's done! ResMar 21:10, 22 February 2015 (UTC)

Very nice. I should probably move the module to a better name so that you don't have to type "User:Mr. Stradivarius" everywhere. :) I'll try and get round to that later on. — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 01:44, 23 February 2015 (UTC)

I'm going to have a really hard time justifying the time away from my classes I had to spent to get this done a week or so from now, but I'll be damned if I'm not proud of having gotten it done anyway, now. ResMar 05:36, 23 February 2015 (UTC)

Yes, here's looking forward to lots more new Signpost polls. :) — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 05:43, 23 February 2015 (UTC)

There are a lot of aggressive things that could be done at the Signpost now that a proper programming language is live, stuff that wouldn't necessarily make sense in the mainspace but would be really amazing for a newspaper, so I think my next project is going to be to learn Lua and work up some competency in it—time to increment the number of languages I know how to operate a matrix in to four... ResMar 20:07, 23 February 2015 (UTC)

On further reflection I'm going to need to think about whether or not this'd be necessary and productive. ResMar 20:32, 23 February 2015 (UTC)

RfA (again)

Latest comment: 9 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion

Hi Mr. Stradivarius,

I know that I recently said I was going to wait longer than the beginning of this fall, but this recent thread made me think twice. In the thread alone, there's about five potential supporters, more or less, including another one on WT:RFA. (Three of these users are admins.) It was recommended that I wait for about six months (which I fully agree with), but one admin even suggested April (!). So, it looks like an RfA about six months from now (early to mid September, perhaps) has some potential. Since it is advised that candidates should start preparing six months before the RfA, it is about the right time. I would be grateful if you could review my contributions (take as long as you need). You could reply here or via email, which I would prefer. Thanks, --Biblioworm 20:16, 23 February 2015 (UTC)

Sure, I'll try and have a look some time this week. — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 13:57, 24 February 2015 (UTC)

Sardanaphalus

Latest comment: 9 years ago5 comments3 people in discussion

pretty sure CSDix, 195.147.24.214, and 195.147.31.104 are socks of Sardanaphalus. Frietjes (talk) 19:37, 22 February 2015 (UTC)

I think so too. So now he's IP hopping. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 22:02, 22 February 2015 (UTC)

Sardanaphalus wasn't topic banned in 2013 when CsDix was active, so I'd be reluctant to block unless the account becomes active again. The IPs also look stale. If you spot any new socks, though, report them at the SPI. I'll be keeping an eye on it. — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 00:47, 23 February 2015 (UTC)

more 195.147.25.84 Frietjes (talk) 23:02, 24 February 2015 (UTC)

I've range-blocked 195.147.24.0/21. — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 23:25, 24 February 2015 (UTC)

Lyon Hackathon

Latest comment: 9 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion

Hi Mr. Stradivarius, have you considered coming to the Lyon Hackathon ? I realize that, if I'm not mistaken, you are in Japan, which is quite a bit away from France, but you are a very prolific template and Lua author and I'd personally would love to see you there. Perhaps a grant can be arranged or something, IEG or from one of the foundations or chapters. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 19:42, 26 February 2015 (UTC)

@TheDJ: I'd love to come and hack in France. :) I'd only be able to afford it with a grant, though, as it's not exactly round the corner from my home in Sapporo. Plane fares from Japan are expensive, as well - last time I paid about 160,000 yen for a return trip to the UK, and that was the cheapest ticket. I should hopefully be able to wrangle the time off work, though, so I don't anticipate that being a big problem. — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 00:44, 27 February 2015 (UTC)

More Lua

Latest comment: 9 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

Hey, I saw the message that Andy posted to mailing list about a template that you've (just) created. I've spoken to the head editors of the Signpost and there is interest in doing some technical things involving something similar. Can you hop on to #wikisignpost ^connect to discuss? I'll be on all day. ResMar 15:12, 27 February 2015 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

Latest comment: 9 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

(barnstar archived)

Thank you! That isn't even the complete list - Module:Article history isn't on there yet, for example, and that's pretty mammoth. :) I should get round to updating the list some time... — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 15:51, 3 March 2015 (UTC)

Urvashi rautela content

Latest comment: 9 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

Hi Stardivarius, This is prashant manager of urvashi rautela who handle her all online activities and promotion. The few content was wrong and mention for un necessary reason. The ref video was upload as youtube ref. Her official website is under progress. The Rautela was subsequently dethroned is unwanted news. My email id is prashant.biz@gmail.com and Urvashi Rautela <rautelaurvashi@gmail.com> is the actual id of urvashi if you want cross verify you can mail her directly. ImUrvashiRautela i am trying to recorrect and update unwanted news. You can suggest how to improvise and avoid unwanted content that affect urvashi as a women who is growing public figure in India. You can check Mar 2, 2015, 12.00AM IST TNN content in leading paper http://m.timesofindia.com/life-style/food/food-reviews/Ahmedabad-celebrates-the-best-of-food/articleshow/46419915.cms

{ Ahmedabad's most eagerly awaited annual event, the Times Food Awards 2015, just got bigger and better this year! On a pleasant evening, all roads led to the Courtyard by Marriott, Ahmedabad, the hospitality partner for the event. Bollywood heartthrob Ali Fazal and the gorgeous Urvashi Rautela, actress and Miss Universe India 2012, were the chief guests for the evening. } if she was dethroned in 2012 times of india wont mention in march 2 2015 as Urvashi Rautela, actress and Miss Universe India 2012.

So humble request please dont put back dethroned words again which affect somebody public figure career.

Regards Prashant — Preceding unsigned comment added by ImUrvashiRautela (talk • contribs) 21:12, 3 March 2015 (UTC)

For the List of Countries with Internet speeds please make it a admin only edit

Latest comment: 9 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

Please try to ask the other party to reach a consensus and try to resolve it.... I'll be waiting for their reply — Preceding unsigned comment added by Carbonoatom (talk • contribs) 03:18, 8 March 2015 (UTC)

Please end protection at 2012 Delhi gang rape

Latest comment: 9 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion

The premise of protecting this article was that there was consensus against naming the woman who was killed [1], but I see 6 to 1 for inclusion at Talk:2012_Delhi_gang_rape#Survey. While I think it is outright consensus to include the name, even if there is a "no consensus" condition, there is no existing Wikipedia policy against inclusion; specifically, WP:BLP does not apply to someone murdered in 2012. Wnt (talk) 23:47, 9 March 2015 (UTC)

@Wnt: I think this decision has a fair chance of being contested, so I'd prefer to wait for a formal close of the RfC before lifting the pending changes. It's only been open for four days as well, so a close might be premature at the moment. — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 00:01, 10 March 2015 (UTC)

Article submission

Latest comment: 9 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion

Hi Mr. Stradivarius,

A friend of mine gave me your info and said you were the person who can help me get my wiki article submitted/approved. I have the article ready to upload in three different formats, wiki, html and regular Word file. This has been a long, exciting project for me as I wrote as a gift to a friend. How can I submit this to you for approval? Can you guide me as to how to submit it to wiki afterward?

Grateful,

FeliciaFeliciamedina78 (talk) 19:16, 10 March 2015 (UTC)

Hi Felicia, and welcome to Wikipedia! It sounds like you're looking for articles for creation. Submit it there, and then leave me another message here and I'll take a look at it. Best — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 01:49, 11 March 2015 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

Latest comment: 9 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

(barnstar archived)

You're welcome. :) — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 09:45, 12 March 2015 (UTC)

Topic ban for User:Oddexit?

Latest comment: 9 years ago10 comments4 people in discussion

Oddexit continues to post stuff like this, which is doing nothing but drag down and negate useful discussion of improvement to the article. I notice that you have already notified this user of the discretionary sanctions related to living people, and am wondering if you would be willing to review this editor's recent edits and unhealthily focused history as a whole to see if a topic ban from all things Debito Arudou is warranted. If you feel your previous posts to the article talk page make you too involved, is WP:AN the proper escalation path? Thanks! VQuakr (talk) 07:24, 13 March 2015 (UTC)

I've been notified that you're talking about me here. It seems that civil and collaborative discussion is no longer allowed on the talk page, either, @VQuakr:? Please show me where that's a policy violation now? As for voicing an opinion on the talk page that we're skirting dangerously close to original research every time we have to get cues from the subject on what is truth instead of just looking at the reliable sources, what is there to apologize for? I'm shocked that you consider that to be "drag[ing] down" the discussion for the improvement of the article. Why not just look at reliable sources by independent third parties as we are supposed to be doing and have a discussion on the talk page? What is so wrong with that? I have been nothing but civil and collaborative in looking at policy and the preponderance of reliable sources, and it's offensive that you want to run off to admins on this issue. Oddexit (talk) 07:53, 13 March 2015 (UTC)

@VQuakr: I find the "Boy Who Cried Wolf" remark concerning, yes. Although it is perhaps not an out-and-out personal attack, it is certainly uncivil, and isn't helping to improve the article. However, unless the discussion degenerates further into incivility and personal attacks, etc., then I don't think sanctions are warranted at this time. Note that it isn't a violation of policy to be interested in a narrow subject area, to debate proposed changes to an article, or even to have a point of view about a subject (we all have points of view); sanctionable behaviour would be things like consistent incivility, other forms of disruptive editing, or non-neutral editing. (By the way, the venue you were looking for is WP:AE, not WP:AN.) I also don't think that Debito is blameless here. @Debito: speculating on the identity of other editors here is against Wikipedia's outing policy and is liable to get you blocked, so please don't do it. While I can appreciate that you are trying to defend the integrity of your biography, trying to out other editors is not the way to go about it. @Oddexit: having said that, Debito is right that this is not a two-way street. There have been many cases in which a person's Wikipedia biography has been demonstrated to have adversely affected their real life. For example, I remember a recent story in which someone was detained at airport security because their Wikipedia biography was briefly vandalised saying that they were a terrorist. It is very easy to do someone real harm by editing their Wikipedia biography, and a lot harder to do an anonymous editor harm by posting on Wikipedia talk pages. This is why WP:BLP exists, and it is why we have a responsibility to get Debito's article right. — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 13:15, 13 March 2015 (UTC)

@Mr. Stradivarius:, thank you for the kind words and I appreciate your fairness. While we're on the subject of "getting a BLP right," I follow religiously the BLP Noticeboard and other BLPs to see how they handle controversial figures. For about three years, I've been following with particular interest the case of G. Edward Griffin. There seems to be a ~~legitimate~~ concerted effort to misapply WP:BLP policy by some editors who argue "getting it right" means the full sanitization of an article. All sources (journalistic or academic) that question Griffin must be removed, they argue, even if they're by publications with independent editorial control. Their efforts don't seem to last long because the preponderance of reliable sources are clearly critical of Griffin's work and are added back (rightly, in my view). I should say we're not talking about someone adding poorly sourced or non-sourced accusations of terrorism. We're very much talking about the preponderance of reliable sources that some editors want santized by simply crying BLP. If an encyclopedia is a tertiary source that documents what the secondary sources have to say on the subject, it's difficult to see how that's not getting it right. What I would sincerely like to know, and perhaps this is a question best suited for the No original research noticeboard: What happens if the subject of an article starts to attack the reliable sources written by independent third parties, arguing that the journalist or academic or whoever is just wrong?[2] Who gets to decide on Wikipedia what is truth -- do we document what the reliable sources say on the subject or do we rely on what the subject says about himself on the talk page after the fact? To be honest, I can understand Nihonjoe's frustration, and why more editors don't want to participate in editing the Debito Arudou article.[3] In any case, thank you for your time. Oddexit (talk) 17:06, 13 March 2015 (UTC)

Thank you all for your discussion of this topic. However, I think the record further shows bad-faith editing on the part of Oddexit, especially odd in light of Oddexit's argument of "Why not just look at reliable sources by independent third parties as we are supposed to be doing?" An example from two days ago: Another topic related to my activism, Kyōgaku no Gaijin Hanzai Ura File – Gaijin Hanzai Hakusho 2007, was edited with surgical precision by Oddexit to remove mention of me because, Oddexit alleges, it was sourced from a blog. Yet a Bloomberg newspaper article sourced elsewhere more than once in the Gaijin Hanzai entry also mentioned me and my activism, and despite being cited near-verbatim in the Gaijin Hanzai entry, Oddexit thus excised it without rigorous checking of sources. I have reverted the edit, and as Mr Stradivarius has mentioned elsewhere, cuts to entries without proper attribution can only be reinstated with proper attribution, I have changed the source to Bloomberg.

My point is that Oddexit is on a mission to sanitize Wikipedia of my activism (if not portray it negatively by misinterpreting the articles sourced), furthermore in this case even if it is reliably sourced (Oddexit could have just changed the source to Bloomberg -- but, indicatively, did not). Therefore I cannot assume good faith in this editor, and history shows that Oddexit's biased editing is interfering with the mission of Wikipedia. Please do not let Oddexit edit the BLP on me (or, as demonstrated two days ago, all things Debito Arudou) anymore. Dr. ARUDOU, Debito (Talk) 18:50, 13 March 2015 (UTC)

As I said in my edit summary, I was removing the blog source to the assertion because that was the source. It wasn't much more complicated than that. I didn't notice the other article mentioned you or I would have added it (I didn't delete your electronic journal article, Debito, so why did I delete one and not the other?). In any case, you added back a reliable source mentioning you and your blog in that article. Whether that was the right course, or if you should have just brought it up on the talk page for someone else to have decided, I'll leave for others to discuss. I don't want to get involved in that mess. Oddexit (talk) 19:20, 13 March 2015 (UTC)

@Mr. Stradivarius: thank you for reviewing the situation. I apologize for bringing teh dramaz to your talk page. Our SPA essay references this Arbcom decision, which I think Oddexit has violated. I see where Oddexit has accused the subject of attempted outing, but I do not see where Debito has actually done so recently enough to warrant a warning. As I would imagine you are aware, there verifiably is a concerted effort, canvassed off-wiki, to increase negative content in this BLP so a degree of defensiveness from the subject is understandable. @Oddexit: I've been notified that you're talking about me here. Yes, because I notified you - as is appropriate when talking about someone. There is no pleasant way to say "I think this editor is a detriment to the article," but I made no attempt to do so behind your back. "Cry BLP" is an essay so don't expect it to convince anyone of much. By contrast, our actual policy instructs Debito to post suggestions on the talk page. I urge you to review your edits before hitting save to verify whether each one complies with the Foundation Resolution that the subjects of our articles "be treated with patience, kindness, and respect." VQuakr (talk) 01:29, 14 March 2015 (UTC)

I see where Oddexit has accused the subject of attempted outing, but I do not see where Debito has actually done so recently enough to warrant a warning. The attempted outing and speculation about me is in the very essay that he keeps posting to the talk page, encouraging editors to read, and continually threatening to post again and again. In the past two weeks alone, he has posted and linked to it five times. I'm not inclined to count how many times he's posted and linked to it in total because it's high, or the number of times he strangely uses the personal pronoun "she" to refer to me. I would like to avoid that hassle unless he does it again. As I'm sure you're aware, "Attempted outing is grounds for an immediate block. Threats to out an editor will be treated as a personal attack and dealt with accordingly." Oddexit (talk) 07:08, 14 March 2015 (UTC)

You are interpreting links to the BLPN archive as repeated attempts at outing? That is quite novel - if it exists on en.wiki, it should be safe to internally link. Glancing over the post I see lots of quite valid complaints about your editing, and a bit of speculation that violates (or attempts to violate) WP:OUTING. Presumably, Debito posted that part out of ignorance of the policy against speculating on other editors' real-world identity. Probably it would make sense to redact the portions of that post are related to attempted outing, since it seems quite reasonable for Debito to want to continue to make others aware of your egregious editing history. I also note that you replied to the BLPN post back in 2014 when it was new; why didn't you object at the time? VQuakr (talk) 08:22, 14 March 2015 (UTC)

Up until recently I've focused strictly on the content of the article and not responded to Arudoudebito's constant hounding because WP:BLPSOURCES, WP:V, and WP:ATT all instruct us to add reliably sourced content to Wikipedia articles while assuming good faith. Also, policy states quite clearly to ignore personal attacks that should be initially considered an isolated incident. This is not an isolated incident. It's constant. I've also hoped that he would eventually get the hint by focusing on content, and not on contributors per policy. For whatever reason, as he says above, he refuses to have good faith. I won't endorse that attitude, or entertain this further. You know his speculation is inappropriate. If you want to encourage him to continually post speculation about me, or encourage him to flog a dead horse over and over again, that's your choice. Personally, I don't recommend it. Oddexit (talk) 10:12, 14 March 2015 (UTC)

Signpost index (2)

Latest comment: 9 years ago12 comments2 people in discussion

One of the most immediate uses of your index function would be to allow us to catalog past publications categorically without having to keep the lists updated manually, a pain that no one ever takes on. This worked very well for the opinion desk; poorly for the special desk, which occasionally smorgasbords names; and exceptionally well at the interview desk, picking up interviews conducting in related columns we didn't publish under the "Interview" header. I've gone and replaced all our indexes in this manner. There are some interesting false positives involving non-existent pages in the op-eds. Still working on the story tags index. Can you run the script again once I'm done? ResMar 23:33, 12 March 2015 (UTC)

@Resident Mario: I'll tweak the script to detect non-existent pages before I run it again. At the moment there's nothing to stop it from picking up non-existent pages or redirects, which we don't really want. Just let me know when you've finished working on the tags, and I'll set things in motion. Also, not sure if you noticed, but I changed the keywords to be regular expressions rather than simple string matches. That way we can use things like "\berror", which will match " error" but not "terror". (The \b flag represents a word boundary.) — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 00:16, 13 March 2015 (UTC)

Yeah, I saw, awesome stuff. :) ResMar 00:19, 13 March 2015 (UTC)

Done! Finally! Yay! My eyes, ah. Ok, next steps.

Run the script again. Bask in its glory!
Immediately possible: Work on integrating this script into the currently-used series templates. For instance: the scripted list of "Hoaxes" articles lists...a sizable chunk more than our template does, at least four or five.
Find people who can assist with data storage and/or supporting user scripts and/or supporting bots. For instance, maybe presenting it as a project on Wikidata? This sort of data-aggregation seems up their alley. Come up with a proposal for what sort of UI we want, and who'll write it.

ResMar 02:41, 13 March 2015 (UTC)

Ok, I'll run the script when I get back to my main computer, and then start work on the different output formats when we have the data together. Thank you for all of your hard work! — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 02:45, 13 March 2015 (UTC)

@Resident Mario: After a lot of time spent tweaking my script, I've finally got the new data uploaded. This time it's sorted by year, from Module:Signpost/index/2005 through to Module:Signpost/index/2015. This is because if we did everything on one page, then after a while we would reach the 2MB page-size limit. (I make that about 20 years, but it can't hurt to be prepared...) The next limit that we will run into is the 50MB Lua memory limit, which applies to all Lua module run on a page. I think we have a good 50-100 years of Signpost issues before we hit that, depending on the page that's being rendered. When we hit it, though, I'm afraid we'll have to think about moving the tags to an actual database. :) I was hoping to add some other output formats to the Lua module today, but it's already pretty late here so that will have to wait. Best — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 13:48, 15 March 2015 (UTC)

Check this out! I went ahead and built a draft of the visual tag home for this effort. So now we need a Lua sub-script that'll return the number of stories tagged a certain tag in a particular year. Old years can be subst'd in, the current one will maintain a running tally that I hope won't be too hard on the hardware. In the meantime I'll write a template for formatting this info—an initial demonstrative list, I think, will be populated manually. Once this hub is ready I'll move it to /Research in the Signpost domain and we'll need someone to write a userscript specifically meant for the maintenance of this page, with facilities for adding or removing tags and changing tag metadata. ResMar 16:23, 15 March 2015 (UTC)

@Resident Mario: That's looking pretty good. :) I can help out with the userscript for updating the Lua module - it makes sense as I've been helping to create the list already. And as I said over at VPT, it will be good practice for my JavaScript. As for outputting the numbers, that should be easy - I'll just make it one of the output formats for the index module. — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 23:46, 15 March 2015 (UTC)

So you can do all of the scripting short of the botting, and maybe the botting too? Awesome! ResMar 23:50, 15 March 2015 (UTC)

I have an iPython notebook open in another tab but on Wikipedia all I know how to do is parser functions, personally. ResMar 23:51, 15 March 2015 (UTC)

@Resident Mario: What botting are you talking about? I don't remember that coming up before. — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 02:15, 16 March 2015 (UTC)

Ah, I may not have told this, then. I'm also passively working on another technical gimmick right now, historical linking. You can see a working demonstration of this in action here: User:Resident Mario/SandBox. I believe that tagging can be done entirely through user scripts interacting with Lua, and won't require bots editing past Signpost articles; but inserting these historical links as well will require it, at least in the way I have it outlined now. Another possibility would be to create a hyper-visor for the purpose on Labs, but I think that would be a significantly less elegant solution than botting all the old pages, as well as one that's not really any less technically challenging. You're right, though, we won't need bots for this one. ResMar 03:05, 16 March 2015 (UTC)

DYK for Takenaga incident

Latest comment: 9 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

On 16 March 2015, Did you know was updated with a fact from the article Takenaga incident, which you recently created or substantially expanded. The fact was ... that when Lieutenant General Hatazō Adachi learned of the Takenaga incident, he shed tears while praying to the emperor? The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/Takenaga incident. You are welcome to check how many page hits the article got while on the front page (here's how, live views, daily totals), and it may be added to the statistics page if the total is over 5,000. Finally, if you know of an interesting fact from another recently created article, then please feel free to suggest it on the Did you know talk page.

— Coffee // have a cup // beans // 12:02, 16 March 2015 (UTC)

Debito sanctions

Latest comment: 9 years ago11 comments3 people in discussion

I'm not quite sure why you sent that to me. Can you please explain? — Preceding unsigned comment added by ChemicalG (talk • contribs) 12:32, 18 March 2015 (UTC)

@ChemicalG: It's a courtesy notice, so that you are aware that biographies of living people are a controversial topic area on Wikipedia in which the Arbitration Committee have given administrators the power to impose things like blocks and topic bans; and that for this reason you need to edit more carefully there than you might in other topics. — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 12:54, 18 March 2015 (UTC)

okay, does this mean I'm doing something wrong, if so - can you please advise? — Preceding unsigned comment added by ChemicalG (talk • contribs) 12:58, 18 March 2015‎ (UTC)

@ChemicalG: I'm concerned because recently there have been a lot of new accounts who only edit Debito-related things, and the page is a known target for off-wiki canvassing. The way things are going I'll probably have to end up blocking some accounts, as the environment is getting quite disruptive there. I'm not going to go into any specifics now, other than to say that you should keep discussions civil, based on Wikipedia policy, and directly related to the article content. You can read what is expected in more detail at the links I gave you. If I do end up issuing blocks or topic bans then I will warn people first on their user talk pages, unless the offence is particularly egregious. — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 13:34, 18 March 2015 (UTC)

Respectfully, I think you've got this wrong - specifically I think you've got myself wrong. ChemicalG (talk) 22:48, 18 March 2015 (UTC)

I also received a 'warning', and I'm not sure why. I'm not 'disparaging' Arudou - that he was blatantly untruthful about his knowledge of Dr Honjo is fact, and that he engaged in sock-puppetry is blindingly obvious. Work on improving his page as to be taken into context of the attempts he is making to have the page say what he wants it to say. And I think my work on his page has absolutely been constructive; heck one of the first things I did on the page was adding links that substantiated his work and academic history, including tracking down the cite for his PhD. Quite frankly, that the 'warning' is coming from an English teacher living in Hokkaido is pretty rich; are you sure you don't have a COI here? — Preceding unsigned comment added by GrandTheftVotto (talk • contribs) 12:39, 19 March 2015 (UTC)

I don't have any COI regarding Debito, no. I went into a bit more detail about that back in November. I didn't leave a warning for ChemicalG, just an alert about the discretionary sanctions, so it's not the same situation at all - every editor at the article needs to know about the discretionary sanctions there. GrandTheftVotto, your warning was because you were making allegations about Dr. Arudou without evidence. (I recommend not trying to provide any, as unless it comes from a reliable source it is likely to be a violation of WP:BLPTALK. Wikipedia is not about doing detective work, it is about summarising what is available in reliable sources.) — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 14:27, 19 March 2015 (UTC)

OK, I haven't seen your November summary, so apologies if you'd already gone over it. As for the allegations without evidence...the evidence is statements from Arudou himself on both his talk page for his article and his own website. I don't know how much more reliable you can get. Look, I understand he has a COI, but I'm (along with others) merely trying to make the page better - and by 'better' we don't mean 'this is how Arudou wants it to look' we mean better as in 'accurate and fair'. I don't know why you'd assume I was only editing only Debito things (and even if that was the case, why would that be wrong?) GrandTheftVotto (talk) 17:21, 19 March 2015 (UTC)

Seriously? You think that was a 'thinly veiled threat at meat-puppetry'? Not only did it even occur to me that it could be construed like that - it makes no sense, given that I've noted his meat-/sock-puppetry' - even after reading your comment....I still can't figure out how you arrived at that meaning. *shrug* I've done more to improve his page than most, and I think the ban is ridiculous - again, coming from an English teacher in Hokkaido I still strongly suspect a COI here - but I don't really give a shit and couldn't be arsed to fight the ban, so I'll leave you to it. I find it hilarious the lengths you guys go to - 'the battles are so fierce, because the stakes are so small'. GrandTheftVotto (talk) 09:56, 20 March 2015 (UTC)

Actually, you know what, the more I think about it the more I think this 'topic ban' is ridiculous, so I am going to appeal it. According to the procedures, the first step is to ask the person imposing the ban to reconsider, so....please reconsider. I will make the following points:

1) The message left for Arudou was in a direct response to his comment directed at me. Rather than leave it on his article talk page, I left it on his user page. If I can't respond on his user page, where in the world am I supposed to respond??

2) I think you've simply mis-construed a statement - it should be obvious from context that that I was merely saying that given how upset he seems to be at everyone that works on his article, he should be happy I've been working on it, because....

3) ......if you look at the work I've done on his page, you will find I've added and updated content that any neutral party would agree was 'favorable' to Arudou, including tracking down a link to the JPRI 'recommended' link, updating links to some of his events, adding info on his work in Hawaii (tried to add it; the cite I added was deemed not reliable, although the content remains) and added info that he had been awarded a PhD and found & added the cite for it. I don't think anyone would view this as 'battleground behaviour'.

4) I think the topic ban was unwarranted, and respectfully request that you reconsider.GrandTheftVotto (talk) 17:29, 20 March 2015 (UTC)

@GrandTheftVotto: Sorry if I misconstrued the last sentence of your comment. If that was the only thing that I was concerned about, then I agree that a topic ban would be overly harsh. However, I'm also concerned about the battleground mentality displayed elsewhere in the comment (asking the article subject to "own up to [his] own actions" and talking about his "constant complaints"), and the fact that this battleground mentality was still present after I warned you about it the previous day. There are other examples in the history (e.g. [4]). I think that this is sufficient to warrant a topic ban, however you are of course welcome to ask other administrators to review my decision using the link I provided in your topic ban notification. — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 14:28, 21 March 2015 (UTC)

Hello

Latest comment: 9 years ago5 comments2 people in discussion

Hello Stradivarius, are you active in the Japanese Wiki? I wanted some Georgia-related articles to be translated in JapWiki so maybe you could help? Thank you. Jaqeli 14:26, 22 March 2015 (UTC)

@Jaqeli: No, I'm not active on jawiki, so I'm afraid I can't help you with translations into Japanese, and I'm better at Japanese->English translations than English->Japanese translations anyway. You might have better luck at ja:Wikipedia:Help for Non-Japanese Speakers. Best — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 16:31, 22 March 2015 (UTC)

Thanks. By chance, do you happen to know any native Japanese here on English wiki who is active and translates articles from English to Japanese? Jaqeli 17:00, 22 March 2015 (UTC)

@Jaqeli: There's Oda Mari, but I don't know if she does translation. Apart from that, Japanese Wikipedia is probably going to be your best bet. — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 22:03, 23 March 2015 (UTC)

Thanks again. Jaqeli 06:48, 24 March 2015 (UTC)

Intel AMT 2.0 web page - memory.jpg

Latest comment: 9 years ago4 comments2 people in discussion

Hello, MS. What's up?

I think I need a bit of help with File:Intel AMT 2.0 web page - memory.jpg. I thought I'd be best (WP:NFCC-wise) if I cropped away its Internet Explorer portion and uploaded its purely textual part. But the current resolution is too small. Upload log shows a higher resolution revision was uploaded on 12 July 2007, which was deleted on 24 August 2011 (but not in "hide" mode). Could you please see if it is possible to undelete that revision?

Best regards,
Codename Lisa (talk) 10:17, 24 March 2015 (UTC)

@Codename Lisa: Sounds reasonable to me - done. — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 10:46, 24 March 2015 (UTC)

Thanks. I am done. You can hide the old revisions any time you fancy. Always a pleasure working with you. Best regards, Codename Lisa (talk) 13:54, 24 March 2015 (UTC)

The DASHBot revision is also non-free and needs to be hidden. Thanks. Codename Lisa (talk) 16:30, 24 March 2015 (UTC)

Notif count, 6

Latest comment: 9 years ago8 comments3 people in discussion

On the one hand is seems all my module uses have been reverted by someone, on the other hand it sounds like you've finished writing it :). What are the new params? ResMar 12:36, 24 March 2015 (UTC)

@Resident Mario: The module's still buggy, so you'll have to wait a little bit... (I did say not to use it yet ;) — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 12:43, 24 March 2015 (UTC)

Roger. ResMar 13:03, 24 March 2015 (UTC)

@Resident Mario: Ok, it seems to basically be working - have a look at Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Templates/Article list. Now you can make your own article list templates. :) Let me know if you spot any bugs, or anything generally strange, or if you have any feature requests. There are probably things that the module should do that I haven't thought of, so don't be afraid to ask. (As for the count of articles matching a given set of filter parameters, I'll add that tomorrow.) Also, let me know what you think of the parameter names - those can be easily changed, but when the module is actually used on other pages it will be a lot more difficult. — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 15:28, 24 March 2015 (UTC)

Thank you very much, Stradivarius! OOC (and this is entirely out of the blue from someone with no knowledge of these things), is it possible to add templates to old articles that would omit them from the automatically generated lists? Say, for example, that a false positive shows up on the opinion list. Is it possible to code something such that I could place {{Signpost omit|opinion}} on the offending article and omit it from that specific list? Ed ^{[talk] [majestic titan]} 16:09, 24 March 2015 (UTC)

@The ed17: The way it works Ed (afaik!) is that a robot comes in and scrapes the Signpost articles off the web and creates a database of stories and their associated tags. Stradivarius then copy-pastes that into the data modules (2012 example). The Lua script itself doesn't interact with the pages, only with the pre-built database. Adding the ability to explicitly include or ignore tags will be a matter of adding that parsing functionality in the scraper Python script, so that it will for instance be able to understand {{Signpost tags|include=|omit=}} (since we're going to want this to work both ways).

The remaining to-do for the script is (1) a time-period based counting option; then (2) writing in this selective parsing into the Python script.

After that the next task will be to write a user-script that'll allow for maintaining (in particular, adding to) the Index, Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Index, which we must now populate. ResMar 19:43, 24 March 2015 (UTC)

Then the second stage will begin: the community tagging drive. ResMar 20:18, 24 March 2015 (UTC)

For now I'll look into creating a new series template which will use this new feature for its functionality. I will not convert the old series template, as I suspect that would be simply too complex a task. ResMar 20:23, 24 March 2015 (UTC)

Module:Protection banner

Latest comment: 9 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion

I tried redoing your edit but I get an error and the /doc goes away. Is your code implementing <indocator> ready to go? -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 18:25, 26 March 2015 (UTC)

@Edokter: Yes, it's ready - the error was because you didn't switch over Module:Protection banner/config at the same time. I changed the name of one of the config tables from "padlockPositions" to "padlockIndicatorNames", and the module expects the config table to be present. — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 23:42, 26 March 2015 (UTC)

Zayn

Latest comment: 9 years ago6 comments4 people in discussion

One Direction (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views)

put zayns name back to members

hi. i just want to ask you if you could transfer zayn malik's name from former band members to members coz many people want it thatbway. we wouldnt want anyone to change that. it actually hurts seeing that and u wouldnt want to hurt many people right. we know he's not a part of the band because he left. but in our hearts he always will be. please put it back even in ur little way make directioners happy please i beg u to put it back.thats all i need to see his name in members.thanks for ur kind comsideration

yours truly,

cx — Preceding unsigned comment added by 112.198.77.61 (talk) 12:46, 26 March 2015 (UTC)

Hi there. Sorry, but we can only list Zayn as a member if he is actually currently in the band. Wikipedia has to reflect reality, not the other way around. It may hurt, but I'm afraid you will have to get used to him not being a member any more. Best — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 15:08, 26 March 2015 (UTC)

CHANGE ONE DIRECTIONS WIKI PAGE BACK PLS

Hello, can you change one directions wiki page back and make zayn not a past member ♥ — Preceding unsigned comment added by Jess loves zayn 1D (talk • contribs) 13:26, 26 March 2015 (UTC)

See my answer in the section above. Best — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 15:08, 26 March 2015 (UTC)

zayn leaving 1D

Hello !

I see that you changed the members on the One Direction subject. I am a directioner and all the directioners are having a hard time right now because Zayn left the band. So i wanted to ask you if you could unlock this one direction page so we can get Zayn Malik back to the members. You see, he is still in One Direction for us, so we would really appreicate it if you would change it or if you would unlock the page for us, so that we can change it. I'm sorry for my English. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Directionersenne (talk • contribs) 17:36, 26 March 2015 (UTC)

No. He's not in the band anymore, so that's what we must say on Wikipedia. — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 23:44, 26 March 2015 (UTC)

Reliable and independent source for Nim programming language

Latest comment: 9 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion

Hi Mr. Stradivarius,

I've found a reliable and independent source for the Nim programming language: http://www.infoworld.com/article/2606823/application-development/146094-Ten-useful-programming-languages-you-might-not-know-about.html#slide9

I've left a comment about this new source in your thread on the [AfD page for Nim programming language]. Is this new evidence sufficient for you to change your vote from "Delete" back to "Keep"?

I apologise if it's considered inappropriate to message other editors directly about AfD discussions -- I'm new to participating in AfD discussions. (All of my previous Wikipedia edits over the years have just been anonymous correction of vandalism or broken markup.) I couldn't find any advice against messaging other AfD discussion participants in the [AfD guidelines]. (For all I know, it might be expected that you message other discussion participants if new evidence comes to light.)

Thanks, jb — Preceding unsigned comment added by Jboyme (talk • contribs) 16:02, 26 March 2015 (UTC)

Ok, keep your hat on! I'll comment at the discussion when I have a spare moment. :) (Also, normally we don't leave messages for every new update in an AfD debate - that's what the watchlist is for.) — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 23:47, 26 March 2015 (UTC)

A little reminder

Latest comment: 9 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion

Hi Mr. Stradivarius,

I don't intend to be annoying, but did you ever get the chance to look over my contributions? If you're busy, feel free to take your time, but I was just wondering. Thanks, --Biblioworm 23:40, 29 March 2015 (UTC)

Whoops, sorry, I completely forgot about that... I'll try and get round to it later on today. — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 04:36, 31 March 2015 (UTC)

Archive integrity

Latest comment: 9 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion

Hi.

Have you ever considered that one might vandalize your talk page archives and you might not notice?

Best regards,
Codename Lisa (talk) 19:14, 5 April 2015 (UTC)

@Codename Lisa: Are you talking about this subtle vandalism? ;) Funnily enough, I just added all my future archives up to number 50 to my watchlist the other day, so I'll probably notice if anyone does something silly. And by the time I get to archive 50, hopefully we will have Flow and I won't have to worry about posts being edited by other people. — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 03:23, 6 April 2015 (UTC)

My God, your little joke hurts! But now that I think, I edit archives a lot, when I move a file. I've had no reverts so far and have been thanked a dozen times. And I distinctly remember that at least once, I couldn't unlink a backlink because it was in an edit-protected admin's archive. I even remember visiting a wiki, in which a User:ArchiveBot had the archive-bot right that enabled it to create pages, edit-protect them and archive messages in them. (I fancy autoconfirmed users can't edit these pages.)

But I am remembering these just now; when I posted my original message, it was just a concern that suddenly gripped me.

Best regards,

Codename Lisa (talk) 08:10, 6 April 2015 (UTC)

Nomination for merging of Template:Edit template-protected

Latest comment: 9 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

Template:Edit template-protected has been nominated for merging with Template:Edit protected. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the template's entry on the Templates for discussion page. Thank you. —capmo (talk) 12:45, 6 April 2015 (UTC)

Nomination for deletion of Template:Comment from uninvolved editor

Latest comment: 9 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

Template:Comment from uninvolved editor has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the template's entry on the Templates for discussion page. Steel1943 (talk) 23:41, 7 April 2015 (UTC)

General Sanctions: Electronic Cigarettes.

Latest comment: 9 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion

Please read this notification carefully:
A community discussion has authorised the use of general sanctions for pages related to electronic cigarettes.
The details of these sanctions are described here.

General sanctions is a system of conduct regulation designed to minimise disruption in controversial topic areas. This means uninvolved administrators can impose sanctions for edits relating to these topics that do not adhere to the purpose of Wikipedia, our standards of behaviour, or relevant policies. Administrators may impose sanctions such as editing restrictions, bans, or blocks. An editor can only be sanctioned after he or she has been made aware that general sanctions are in effect. This notification is meant to inform you that sanctions are authorised in these topic areas, which you have been editing. It is only effective if it is logged here. Before continuing to edit pages in these topic areas, please familiarise yourself with the general sanctions system. Don't hesitate to contact me or another editor if you have any questions.

This message is informational only and does not imply misconduct regarding your contributions to date.

I'm aware you don't need informing of these sanctions, given that you instated them, I was just going through by rote every editor who popped up as editing a page affected by them since the sanctions came into force. Didn't spot I'd gone past you. No offence is intended. SPACKlick (talk) 11:32, 10 April 2015 (UTC)

Don't worry, no offence taken - although I will admit to getting a little chuckle out of it. :) — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 12:59, 10 April 2015 (UTC)

Lumia930uploader

Latest comment: 9 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion

Hi.

I have a concern that I do not want act directly about it. So, I was wondering you could help.

A user called "Lumia930uploader" has recently registered on Wikipedia. Looks like a bona fide user but his username is certainly in violation of WP:PRODNAME; see Microsoft Lumia. But he is now in that phase that gets reverted left and right. (Ah, the memories! I was there too. I made friends. ) And I am the one doing some of them. I think if a user he had never seen before told him, he'd feel less offended.

What do you say?

Best regards,
Codename Lisa (talk) 20:08, 12 April 2015 (UTC)

@Codename Lisa: I'm not actually so sure that their username is a violation of PRODNAME. I took it as saying that they upload stuff with the Lumia 930, not that they represent Microsoft or Nokia. Compare with a user like Shinkansen Fan - just having a username that says you are a fan or a user of something doesn't make it a username violation, I would say. Although feel free to ask others for their opinions - I don't have that much experience with WP:UAA, etc. — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 11:00, 13 April 2015 (UTC)

User Box WP Japan

Latest comment: 9 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

Hi. I have a discussion up at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Japan#Membership Roll? which concerns users who display {{User WikiProject Japan}} on their user page.

If I can get consensus, I would like to list you all under Category:WikiProject Japan participants. As of now, you will not be listed unless you switch to the other User box {{User WP Japan}}.

And if you really do not want to get listed, would you still mind switching to the other User box and use the feature that suppresses listing?
If you don't want to be listed, replace {{User WikiProject Japan}} with {{User WP Japan|nocat=true}}, or on your {{Babel}} replacing your |WikiProject Japan| with |special-boxes={{User WP Japan|nocat=true}}|
Thanks. --Kiyoweap (talk) 11:00, 13 April 2015 (UTC)

Signpost (4)

Latest comment: 9 years ago18 comments2 people in discussion

Hey, how's it coming along with the tag-by-year thing? Anyway, just wanted to ask if you could on the side implement a module for Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Templates/Tag series. It's meant to serve as a replacement for Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Templates/Series (whoo! no more manually gathering fourteen stories at a time! or having to update them!), but has two issues:

formatdate doesn't seem to work on Lua output, so I can't format the date to the format we use for instance here.
More seriously, the series template implements breakpoints below which stories are hidden for brevity. Otherwise the template gets to be way too long and messes up formatting on old articles. I can't do it the really complicated way I did it in the series template because the script outputs the info in a single block, but I'm sure you can do it from your end.

Thanks! ResMar 16:01, 27 March 2015 (UTC)

I'll be busy for a couple of days so I won't be able to code anything up right now, but there's already a fix in place for the date formatting. You can't use parser functions with the rowformat parameter, as they are all expanded before they enter Lua. The fix is to use a special row template, as described at Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Templates/Article list maker#Row templates. Best — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 05:50, 28 March 2015 (UTC)

Done See Template:Signpost series. ResMar 18:50, 28 March 2015 (UTC)

See also: Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Index#To-do. ResMar 16:17, 29 March 2015 (UTC)

Would it be too bad to have you to run the script again? I'm doing research for a sister projects report and realized I'd forgotten half of them. Whoops... ResMar 18:37, 7 April 2015 (UTC)

@Resident Mario: Sure, I've just started it running now. By the way, I've been working on a user script for updating the tags, and when it's deployed we'll have to stop using the python script if we don't want people's tags to be obliterated. So if there are any other tags you've missed, now's your chance. :) — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 19:01, 7 April 2015 (UTC)

Hmm. The trouble is that there's always more to be added! For instance, I could go with stripping a list of all of the chapters and throwing it in there. A list of all countries, too. Are you saying that after the script is deployed it will no longer be possible to have the script sniff up and index past articles? ResMar 19:08, 7 April 2015 (UTC)

@Resident Mario: That's right. The python script isn't clever enough to know what was added by a human and what was added by filtering keywords. It just makes a new list every time and overwrites the old one. Trying to update it to separate human and robot edits would be very hard - it's probably better to just make a final decision about what keywords to use and then fine-tune the tags with the tagger gadget. — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 19:43, 7 April 2015 (UTC)

Hmm, you are right. In the end it'll require manual tagging anyway but there's no reason that we can't knock out the biggest missing tags now. ResMar 19:53, 7 April 2015 (UTC)

I saw the new user-script. Wonderful! Ok, so, a small modification in the way the Lua script works: when you generate a link to an article, can you add #tagname to the end of the tag? By combining that with anchors it'll allow us to pretty seamlessly link directly to particular articles about a topic. See, for instance, {{Ib}}.

This will be really easy to implement going forward. Just wire it up as an issue compilation operation.

Doing this in archival issues may be more difficult. ResMar 01:19, 13 April 2015 (UTC)

@Resident Mario: What if an article has more than one tag? How do we decide which one to use in the page link? As for the gadget, there are still a few things that I want to check/test, particularly security-related things. I want to be sure that there are no problems with things like cross-site scripting before people start using it. Also, before people start using it we will need to finalise the list of tag keywords, and run the python script again. So you've got one final chance to make the list as good as possible - no pressure. ;) And finally, are there any other features you'd like to see in the tagger gadget? I'm thinking it might be nice to autodetect some tags based on the subpage name when a tag subpage is first created. So when you write a new "News and notes" article, the script would see that the subpage name was "News and notes" and automatically add the "newsandnotes" tag to the tag edit box. But if you have any other suggestions, I'd love to hear them. — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 11:18, 13 April 2015 (UTC)

I need to format this, which will take a little bit, but it looks like this. The first call-string in the list will be unspaced. This is because when throwing the tag at preloadparams, a_b is read differently from a b, the latter of which just breaks—it's read as a, because of the space. So, in order for that to work consistently the first alias in this list of them has to be un-spaced. This is also true of section-links: a link in the form #A B will send you to #A. However, if we consistently use un-spaced invocation names as the first element of the list and then section-link using that when calling a particular tag, it can be made to work in both cases: by calling that first tag manually with preloadparams, and by making that the parameter of choice when making section links. So for instance if Story matches a tag, and the first item in that tag's list is suegardner, the list mechanism will return Story#suegardner and the equivalent preloadparams invocation will be preloadparams[]=suegardner.

The actual linking will be handled by anchors. Placing them going forward will be easy, it's just an operation for the writers and editors to perform. Doing it backwards though might be more tricky: it'll require the introduction of the templates I'm working on at the moment, easy enough, and then the writing-in of the tags, much harder. Since it's basically regex, I guess that AWB can we be used for this task? So it becomes a two-step process:

Replace section headers with the appropriate anchored templates, and fill out those templates' tags.
Use the script to save those tags to the Lua hit-list.

Then invoking the module will report back the #link already coded into the anchoring template, and readers will be bounced to the correct section on load.

I'll work on the tags list.

I pinged you on your own talk page. Ha! ResMar 13:37, 13 April 2015 (UTC)

(edit conflict) Also, about pages that are tagged with duplicate tags like "edit filter" and "editfilter" - I don't think that's such a good idea, as it is going to make the tag list harder to maintain. Instead, how about just automatically removing spaces and punctuation from tags? We could remove them when people save them with the gadget, and then when people search for the tag "edit filter", we could silently correct it so that they are searching for "editfilter". — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 13:42, 13 April 2015 (UTC)

@Resident Mario: The module now adds tags as a section name when you use the new fullpage parameter. Take a look at the updated documentation at Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Templates/Article list maker#Parameters. I've also updated the module, the python script and the gadget to automatically remove all spaces and punctuation from tags. Note that this is mainly for ease of maintenance of the tag data - you can actually have section names with spaces in, as long as you encode them properly. With this, I think everything is pretty much ready to go - just have one last look over the tag data and I'll run the python script one last time before we start manual tagging. — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 18:58, 13 April 2015 (UTC)

Silently formatting input sounds like a very, very good idea, and I'm happy to see you implement it. One more thing: can you write a capacity (perhaps a different script?) to return the number of instances of a tag within a certain time period? Also, on full-page, I...can't figure out how it works :) ResMar 00:58, 14 April 2015 (UTC)

Oh, and also: hold off on finality until I can go through the tags and punch them into better shape. Before we can go gold, so to speak, the tags and their meta-information has to be in order. I've worked up a modified tabulated structure for the index page in my sandbox: User:Resident Mario/sandbox. Advantages: sort-ability. Disadvantages: no obvious place to place additional visual meta-data. (time? place? sectionality?). I think I'll run with this, once I water down the colors. Additional data can be displayed via a more detailed invoke template. ResMar 03:23, 14 April 2015 (UTC)

Last time for today, I promise: new tag invocation interface. ResMar 04:08, 14 April 2015 (UTC)

@Resident Mario: I've added a counting feature to the module, and you can access it at Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Templates/Article count. As for how to use fullpage, just use it as a row format parameter or a row template parameter. For example, try

{{Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Templates/Article list maker|rowformat=* [[${fullpage}]]|rowseparator=newline|tags=semi-protection, pending changes}}

. — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 06:32, 14 April 2015 (UTC)

Nancy Ganz

Latest comment: 9 years ago7 comments3 people in discussion

Hi Mr. Stradivarius,

I submitted the article recently. This wikipedia world is so fascinating and scary for me, because I don't know what the heck I'm doing. I submitted the page and followed the directions and now have no idea where it floated off to. I hope you can find it. I can't even find my own user page. Geez. The name of the article is Nancy Ganz. Unfortunately, I did not copy the link because again I don't have a clue where to begin or end. I hope you can help. Feliciamedina78 (talk) 19:06, 16 March 2015 (UTC) ?

@Feliciamedina78: Hi Felicia! Your article is at Draft:Nancy Ganz. I found that by looking through your contributions to the site - you can do that too by clicking on the "contributions" link at the very top-right. I know that Wikipedia can be a little overwhelming at first, so try Wikipedia:Tutorial for a good place to start. I'll take a look at the article later when I'm feeling a little more awake. — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 23:23, 16 March 2015 (UTC)

It looks rudely ready for publication, I did a few small fixes. Never pulled the trigger on an AFC before, however. ResMar 02:36, 17 March 2015 (UTC)

@Resident Mario: If you think it's ready, go ahead! I would prune some of the promotional wording, though, e.g. I would change "entrepreneur and leader" to just "entrepreneur". And don't forget to check for copyvio. You can turn the AfC script on in your preferences, but you will also need to add yourself to the list of users if you haven't already. — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 02:43, 17 March 2015 (UTC)

@mr.stradivarius :: aha! I found you. Okay still trying hard to navigate around all this. I'll remove promotional wording and appreciate your advice so much! Feliciamedina78 (talk) 21:25, 10 April 2015 (UTC)

Hi Mr. Stradivarius,

I made changes to the page [[5]] as you mentioned. Could you tell me if it meets your approval? Thanks again. Feeling a little more comfortable in wiki world. Feliciamedina78 (talk) 03:37, 14 April 2015 (UTC)

@Feliciamedina78: I've gone through and removed most of the promotional wording (I don't think your edit went nearly far enough). Let me know if you have any questions about my edit. — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 08:57, 14 April 2015 (UTC)

Mail

Latest comment: 9 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

Hello, Mr. Stradivarius. Please check your email; you've got mail!
It may take a few minutes from the time the email is sent for it to show up in your inbox. You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{You've got mail}} or {{ygm}} template.

Dear Mr. Stradivarius, Having learned that I must research to be a better addition to Wikipedia, it it with great promise that I give you my word that I'll not edit nor attempt to add any articles until I feel confident enough to do so. I certainly wish to be an asset to this site and not an embarrassment. Thank you for your patience and understanding, which are both greatly appreciated. Sincerest Regard, Lady Sonia Lorraine ... LsL©. — Preceding unsigned comment added by The LadySoniaLorraine (talk • contribs) 16:51, 15 April 2015‎ (UTC)

Broken script

Latest comment: 9 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion

after your change to my script, it no longer works for me in Linux/Firefox. Frietjes (talk) 22:11, 15 April 2015 (UTC)

@Frietjes: D'oh, sorry about that - that was a stupid mistake. It worked when I tested it on User:Mr. Stradivarius/findargdups.js, but I must have done something stupid like forgot to clear my browser cache. (Stupid + stupid = not a good day...) The problem was that the myContent variable wasn't available inside the scope of wpFindDuplicateArgs, because I put it inside the function that ran on $(document).ready. As long as it's available somehow it should work - if you don't like wrapping the whole script with a function, you could pass myContent in as a parameter, or just fetch it using document.getElementsByName again. — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 22:43, 15 April 2015 (UTC)

Signpost (5)

Latest comment: 9 years ago12 comments2 people in discussion

I've begun the process of getting the initial lot of tags into order. This is going to be a long and gradual process. Once it's done I've got to reformat how the Signpost handles tagging in its own templates, then it's community tagging time. I wonder if it'll be finished by the end of this year... ResMar 01:26, 15 April 2015 (UTC)

Oof. Another request ;). Can you add an option to limit the number of characters of a title displayed, creating a "..." after a certain point? See: this output for why. ResMar 20:11, 15 April 2015 (UTC)

@Resident Mario: That shouldn't be too hard - it's going to mean yet another parameter though. How many characters do you think the title should be limited to? — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 20:18, 15 April 2015 (UTC)

The issue is that the visualizations can only be limited to a certain px width. Ok: but then the bar-chart option for Module:Chart does not respect center! Attempting to use the tag shifts the chart off-center. So I cannot define that bounding box using percentages. The output I linked to is configured use float for that reason. Maybe you can investigate the configuration and see if it's something that can be fixed on this end? A more elegant solution would be to break the titles themselves along the spaces and I don't know why it doesn't do that. ResMar 20:43, 15 April 2015 (UTC)

A quick check shows it's a float problem. Damn. ResMar 21:13, 15 April 2015 (UTC)

@Resident Mario: Welcome to the joys of web design. :) You need to set an explicit width on the div that houses the long titles - that will make them wrap. Otherwise, the total width of that div is the total width of the text, and seeing as you are floating the box on the right, if the width of the div on the left plus the width of the box on the right adds up to more than the width of the page, the box on the right will be forced to move underneath. I set the div to 500px for you to show you what it looks like. — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 21:42, 15 April 2015 (UTC)

I considered that, but it's not a great solution—it leaves large screens with a lot of dead room. Can remove some of it using center but...guess that's got to be the work-around. ResMar 22:20, 15 April 2015 (UTC)

I made some adjustments but it should be fine. Re: this edit. It's tough on editors if there's only one precise arrangement of words which links to the series. For instance, someone might try to use {{Signpost series|tag=arbitration committee elections|type=inline}} and be discouraged when nothing comes up—even though, say, {{Signpost series|tag=ace|type=inline}} works fine. It's also a good thing from the taggers' end—you can tag with whichever of the tags comes to mind first, and be reasonably sure that whether you use jimmywales or jimbowales the result will be the same. What's up? ResMar 15:17, 17 April 2015 (UTC)

This is starting to get rather complicated and before I proceed much further I will need to do a technical write-up. But here is yet-another-thing: is it possible for you to write a module which, given a section title, returns the number that that section occupies on a page, or returns an empty space otherwise? This would allow creating section editing links with only the section titles, not their (in the case I am thinking of, arbitrary) position on the page. ResMar 16:58, 18 April 2015 (UTC)

@Resident Mario: It's technically possible to search the entire page text, parse it, and find the section number. But that parsing is expensive and error-prone, and probably isn't the best way to do whatever you're trying to do. Why do you want to create a section editing link that's not the standard one used in MediaWiki? About the duplicate tags, there is a difference between using jimmywales and using jimbowales. If taggers don't tag each matching article with both "jimmywales" and "jimbowales", then a search for "jimmywales" would turn up a different set of articles than a search for "jimbowales". Allowing the duplicates would mean a great deal of effort spent in cross-checking each article's tags to make sure that all the variants are included. It would be better to either just use one tag per subject, or to make some kind of technical fix so that we only have to define the variant tags in one place. (I'll have a think about how/whether that can be done.) — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 17:17, 18 April 2015 (UTC)

I wish to store the descriptions for specific tags as they appear at Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Index at a single separate location; generate links that will allow editing those descriptions on a one-by-one basis; and generate transclusions that can be placed on other pages: the Index description, specifically, and a new "what'sit" in the invocation output. This will greatly increase ease of maintenance.

Taking into account what you've said: it's a big table so if it's an expensive function to execute there's real reason not to execute it. But the section ordering won't change, or shouldn't change! So we'd only need to run the function once, and substitute the answer into the table :).

Here's the idea: I have a new tag idea. I go to the table and put it in there using a "provisional tag" template, leaving the description blank. I hit a "create description" link to create a new section titled with the tag search-string, and input a description there, and save; I'm actually saving to some Descriptions page which acts as a database of these. Another editor, a "tag maintainer", comes along and checks the provisional tag. If they approve it, they substitute in an "approved" template which has a {{subst:#invoke:Module:Find section number by name|tag_name}} in it; when the page is saved that substitution replaces the substitution statement with the numeral indicating that section's position on the descriptions list-page. This, in turn, is used by an edit link:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=DATABASE_PAGE&action=edit&section={{subst:#invoke:Module:Find section number by name|tag_name}} edit description]

, which becomes [https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=DATABASE_PAGE&action=edit&section=69 edit description] after the page is saved. ResMar 19:29, 18 April 2015 (UTC)

I sketched the tech. ResMar 16:01, 19 April 2015 (UTC)

User:Mr. Stradivarius/chessboardfix.js

Latest comment: 9 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion

could you modify the comments in your script so this page isn't in the tracking category? Frietjes (talk) 18:51, 19 April 2015 (UTC)

@Frietjes: That's a good point! Done - thanks for letting me know. — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 19:03, 19 April 2015 (UTC)

Year in other calendars

Latest comment: 9 years ago16 comments2 people in discussion

Module:Year in other calendars (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs)

Hi Stradivarius, thanks for fixing my code. I think, however, that the FRC should stay in the first position, as it displays only in fourteen years, during which it was the most important calendar after the Gregorian. And where you put it now it won't be noticed. Otherwise it would be necessary to add the year manually as I did in 1793. Maybe we should discuss that on the respective discussion page to reach a consensus. In the meantime I will edit the code some more, in order to have a different heading for the Paris Commune.--Hyphantes (talk) 08:34, 18 April 2015 (UTC)

Hi Stradivarius, I've made a lot of progress with my ancient Greek calendar, but ultimately I got stuck (no wonder because I never worked with that language before). Now it runs, but displays the wrong Olympiad and does not display the winners nor the 2nd, 3rd or 4th year. It would be kind if you had a look at it. Currently it is disabled, but you can easily test it by changing the second value in the timeframe. Test it with the years 496 BC or 495/94/93 BC, because that's for the moment the only entry in the data sheet. I'll include the rest of the data as soon as the project is more defined regarding the data format.

A suggestion regarding the box in general: we should use the if function to delimit the timeframe for the display of calendars yielding N/A, for example British regnal year before 1066, similar as I did with the French Revolutionary calendar. That would make the box a lot more "relevant" and as a result people should be less inclined to want it collapsed.--Hyphantes (talk) 14:23, 18 April 2015 (UTC)

@Hyphantes: Thanks for working on the new calendar! I've moved your code to the sandbox for now, because we probably shouldn't test things out on the live module in case it causes script errors, etc. I'll have a look at it now. As for not displaying years instead of N/A, that sounds like a reasonable idea. Could you propose it on Template talk:Year in other calendars so that other editors have a chance to make their opinion known before we do the work to convert the module? Also, the best way to implement it would probably be to alter the calendar object to not display anything if the year was outside a certain range, rather than to use if/then logic in all the individual calendars. Perhaps we could define years with a function rather than just a year number or a year string. That would need a little more thinking about, but we need to make sure there's consensus to make the changes first. Best — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 15:19, 18 April 2015 (UTC)

Also, you're probably right about the position of the French Revolutionary calendar, so I've left it at the top. I don't think we should have two versions of the same calendar displayed at the same time, though, so I've removed the Paris commune one. — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 15:23, 18 April 2015 (UTC)

@Hyphantes: I've edited Module:Ancient Olympiads to fix the stuff that I knew was wrong, and left some comments about the things I didn't understand how to fix. Have a look at the edit summaries and at the comments for my thoughts, and let me know if you still need any tips. Best — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 15:53, 18 April 2015 (UTC)

@Hyphantes: About the ref tags: to understand those properly means learning a bit about how Scribunto and MediaWiki fit together. Scribunto is run halfway through the page parse, so its input is neither standard wikitext, nor HTML. First, the wikitext parser preprocesses the wikitext, expanding templates, {{#if: ...}} statements, etc. What Scribunto sees as input is this expanded wikitext. One of the preprocessing steps that the wikitext parser does is to turn extension tags like <ref>...</ref> and <nowiki>...</nowiki> into a unique string called a strip marker. So, if you use foo <ref>bar</ref> as input to a module, first the "bar" part gets converted to a strip marker. If you then output that same strip marker from the Lua module, then the "bar" reference will show up in the rendered HTML. However, if you just output the string foo <ref>bar</ref> from the module, then the parser won't have done the preprocessing necessary to turn it into a strip marker, so it will just show up as plain text. Hope this helps. :) — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 17:05, 18 April 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for correcting my mess. A lot of stuff was in there because I started from the British Regnal years calendar without understanding what it means. There still seems to be something wrong, because now I get an error in line 68 (now 69) of the Module:Ancient Olympiads. Maybe you cancelled a definition that is needed there?

Regarding the Paris Commune calendar you probably didn't notice that it was limited to a single year: 1871. Since I disactivated that year for the French Revolutionary Calendar there was never a double display of the same calendar. I simply moved the Paris Commune calendar down from second position to letter P. So you actually have it twice in the list, but it displays for different years and with a different headline. You might argue that it is a waste to have a calendar for a single year and then I could reactivate that year in the FRC like it was before. But that would put it back up in second position which is justified for 1793-1805, but not for 1871. So I think my solution was the best.

Regarding the suppression of calendars in N/A years I'll follow your advice and start a discussion. I agree with you that each calendar should better have inherent mechanisms regarding display. But I'm afraid that this is a lot of work. With if then lines it is much easier to implement and to control too. In any case I have learned that we need to specify the range of display in a comment line in order to avoid misunderstandings.

Control is necessary, because I have already found an error in the ab urbe condita calendar. It displays the year 754 BC as O and 755 BC as -1. I don't think that this is correct (it should be -1 and -2) and we should check if other calendars have the same error.--Hyphantes (talk) 21:05, 18 April 2015 (UTC)

@Hyphantes: With the Paris Commune calendar, my issue is that putting code for the same calendar in twice violates the DRY principle. I don't really mind whether we put the calendar at the top or in the middle, but whichever way we do it we should only define the calendar once. If we really need to have a different location for 1871 than for the other years, it would be better to implement some kind of mechanism to reorder calendars based on the current year rather than use the same code twice. The DRY principle is also the issue I have with adding lots of if/then statements to the code. It would mean we would have to write the year calculation twice, when ideally once should be enough. I agree that it is good to have controls for errors, though. As an alternative to if/then, how about exposing the calendar-generating algorithms to other Lua modules, and then writing some test cases? Also, the Paris Commune discussion should probably happen on the template talk page as well - other editors might want a say in the matter of how important the French Revolutionary calendar might be. :) — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 21:27, 18 April 2015 (UTC)

I have started a discussion on display suppressions at the talk page. I understand your professional ethos as a programmer. My simple solutions are a result of my limited competence in the field. Regarding the Paris Commune year I think I can go back to your first line which inclued 1871. But I'll need two more if then functions to change the reading of 1871 to "Paris Commune". So the script amount will be more or less the same. Well, I actually think that my DRY-infraction was on the whole the better solution. Still undecided. The discussion page looks quite deserted, so I doubt that we may get any opinion there on such a limited matter.

No progress with the Olympiads. I've put some questions in the script, but the more important thing would be to get it running again so that I can play around and learn what works and what not.--Hyphantes (talk) 23:18, 18 April 2015 (UTC)

@Hyphantes: I've edited the Olympiads script to be something like what I think you're aiming at. Well, it runs. :) As for the other stuff, if there's a consensus to change the French Revolutionary calendar location depending on the year, then I can work up the code to do it. The back-end could use a little love anyway, so it would be a good opportunity. The actual sorting would probably just be a matter of defining a custom sort function to use with Lua's table.sort function - I shouldn't think it would be too difficult. — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 00:02, 19 April 2015 (UTC)

I'm testing it here: [6]

You need to change the line reading "if year >= -776 and year < -776 then" to something less disenabling like "if year >= -776 and year < -76 then"

Then test with Preview page 496 BC or 495 BC. There it is not running :(

But now it's getting late here in Italy. So I think I'll get back to it tomorrow. Good night and thanks.--Hyphantes (talk) 00:31, 19 April 2015 (UTC)

@Hyphantes: If you're loading Module:Ancient Olympiads from another Lua module, you should use the _main function, not the main function. The whole reason that there are two functions is so that there is a convenient place to access the module from other Lua modules, so you should use it. :) — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 00:44, 19 April 2015 (UTC)

I had seen the debug console, but what I was missing was the fact that I had to press Enter :D.

Now I see that it actually works although it needs some refining.

This is the current result:

3rd Olympiad, held in -768 and won by Androclus of Messenia.

I would like:

3rd Olympiad, (victor )¹

and for the following year - 767:

3rd Olympiad, year 2

accordingly for - 766:

3rd Olympiad, year 3

and for - 765

3rd Olympiad, year 4

But still remains the fact that it's not working in the page.

I guess that is what you're addressing in your last post. So maybe we are close to a solution. I'll stay up another 20 minutes then.--Hyphantes (talk) 00:49, 19 April 2015 (UTC)

Hello Mr. Stradivarius. Thanks to your valuable input I've fixed everything in the module and as far as I can see it runs perfectly for all the years in question with results as posted above. The only problem is that it still doesn't run in the calendar. You said I should use the _main function, not the main function, but I don't know how to do that. Should I write _main instead of p.main or should it be p._main ? And which of the two functions? --Hyphantes (talk) 21:14, 19 April 2015 (UTC)

I've solved the problem and now it displays in the calendar. There is still a problem with the year which is wrong by 2. I don't know why, but I'm almost there. Probably it will be enough to adjust the value in the module. I'll let you know.--Hyphantes (talk) 21:32, 19 April 2015 (UTC)

@Hyphantes: To use the _main function, you need to replace require('Module:Ancient Olympiads').main with require('Module:Ancient Olympiads')._main. When you use require, it gives you the return value of the module you ask for. In our case, Module:Ancient Olympiads has return p right at the end, so when we use require on it, we get a reference to the p table. require('Module:Ancient Olympiads').main gives us the value "main" in the p table, i.e. p.main, and require('Module:Ancient Olympiads')._main would give us the "_main" value in the p table, i.e. p._main. — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 06:53, 20 April 2015 (UTC)