User talk:Rich Farmbrough/Archive/2008 November

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SmackBot making unnecessary edits

SmackBot seems to be making edits solely to capitalize the first letter of the template name ({{fact|date=Nov...}} to {{Fact|date=Nov...}}, as seen here. Seems a waste to me. --Sable232 (talk) 02:18, 1 November 2008 (UTC)

See my User:Rich_Farmbrough/FAQ#SmackBot_capitalised_a_tag.2C_and_made_no_other_changes._Why.3F FAQ, in this case reason 4.3 applies - the article was in Category:Articles_with_invalid_date_parameter_in_template as Category:Articles with unsourced statements since November 2008 was not created until after that run began. Rich Farmbrough, 12:07 1 November 2008 (UTC).

Wikipedia's Expert Peer Review process (or lack of such) for Science related articles

Hi - I posted the section with the same name on my talk page. Could you take part in discussion ? Thanks ARP Apovolot (talk) 22:37, 25 October 2008 (UTC)

User: Shotwell suggested (on my talk page) "I would endorse a WP:EXPERTADVICE page that outlined the wikipedia policies and goals for researchers in a way that enticed them to edit here in an appropriate fashion. Perhaps a well-maintained list of expert editors with institutional affiliation would facilitate this sort of highly informal review process. I don't think anyone would object to a well-maintained list of highly-qualified researchers with institutional affiliation (but then again, everyone seems to object to something)."

We could start with that if you would agree ... - could you help to push his idea through Wikipedia bureaucracy ? Apovolot (talk) 16:25, 1 November 2008 (UTC)

Bot request for the bot expert (you)...

You know more about bots and editing than anyone else I know, so I've got my fingers crossed that you can help me...

Can you use one of your bots, or create one, to pull a piece of data from one set of pages and place it on another set of pages?

What I've got are two items on a bunch of pages that need to be filled in.

One is

"Population: "

And the other is

"Size: "

These need to be filled in on the pages listed at User:The Transhumanist/Country list. The items to be filled in are in the "Geography of x" section (where "x" is the name of the respective country).

A few of them are already filled in. (I hope that doesn't present any problems).

The data is located in the infobox on the corresponding country articles.

Is this something you could do?

If so, it would sure save a lot of man hours. I don't currently have access to a machine upon which I could use macros or learn and apply Python, and I'd really like to avoid having to do these chores manually.

I requested bot approval at Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/Worldbot and was told that these tasks don't need bot approval - we can just go ahead and create and use bots on 'em.

The desired format for the data is presented at Topic outline of Algeria#Geography of Algeria, Topic outline of France#Geography of France and Topic outline of Germany#Geography of Germany.

I look forward to your reply.

The Transhumanist    23:37, 1 November 2008 (UTC)

SmackBot-created page error?

Good evening. In this edit, SmackBot created a redirect. From the edit summary, this was apparently a naming standardization. The redirect was recently proposed for deletion, causing several people to dig into the history. We can't figure out why SmackBot created the page. The target has never been a disambiguation page that I can tell (and I checked a fair number of edits on either side of the creation timestamp. Can you shed any light on why this redirect would have been created? Thanks. Rossami (talk) 03:24, 3 November 2008 (UTC)

Deleting my comments

Hi Rich - any reason why you deleted my comments here? Grutness...wha? 05:30, 3 November 2008 (UTC)

Sorry, mistake. Rich Farmbrough, 12:19 3 November 2008 (UTC).

S'alright. Thought as much. I trust you too much as an editor to think you'd go around doing that sort of thing deliberately - you're one of the good guys :) Grutness...wha? 22:17, 3 November 2008 (UTC)

Expand- smackbot

Do we not use {{Expand|Date=November 2008}} any more? Thanks. --DerRichter (talk) 23:02, 3 November 2008 (UTC)

Bot (mis)correcting HTTP/ to http://?

I may have got this wrong, but from what I can see, SmackBot changed HTTP/1.1 to http://1.1 on HTTP_ETag. I'm just letting you know in case that's a bug. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.33.61.156 (talk) 14:33, 4 November 2008 (UTC)

Smackbot edit to Civitan International

With this edit, smackbot changed the publication date of a journal cited in a reference tag. SU Linguist (talk) 21:36, 4 November 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for that. Shows how easy it is to be tripped up, people were dating clean-up tags with seasons, and I put the season to month conversion in the same place as the month spelling errors. Of course it needs to be specific to clean-up tags only. Rich Farmbrough, 23:06 4 November 2008 (UTC).

Bot error?

Hi Rich. What's up with SmackBot changing "a_1" to "a 1" here? Paul August ☎ 22:26, 4 November 2008 (UTC)

It's AWB assuming the the text following a {{ is a template name, and applying some standard rules to it. Hard to fix but I'll drop a note. Rich Farmbrough, 02:51 5 November 2008 (UTC).

Secret Supper

Hey Robot dude, Im happyjord11 and im extremely thankful for your edits on my article on The Secret Supper. Im relatively new to WikiPedia, and creating and editing articles, as I am only 12 years of age. I don't know very much about what the Wiki Jargon means, and I sort of need some help,

Any helpful tips and hints would be much appreciated.

Thanks again,

Happyjord11

(Happyjord11 (talk) 06:35, 6 November 2008 (UTC))

New title for 2008 attack at Beijing Drum Tower during Olympics

• I have set up a poll to vote on the new name of the article. Please go to the talk page. Ohconfucius (talk) 06:56, 6 November 2008 (UTC)

No content in Category:Articles with dead external links since October 2006

Hello, this is a message from an automated bot. A tag has been placed on Category:Articles with dead external links since October 2006, by another Wikipedia user, requesting that it be speedily deleted from Wikipedia. The tag claims that it should be speedily deleted because Category:Articles with dead external links since October 2006 has been empty for at least four days, and its only content has been links to parent categories. (CSD C1).

To contest the tagging and request that administrators wait before possibly deleting Category:Articles with dead external links since October 2006, please affix the template {{hangon}} to the page, and put a note on its talk page. If the article has already been deleted, see the advice and instructions at WP:WMD. Feel free to contact the bot operator if you have any questions about this or any problems with this bot, bearing in mind that this bot is only informing you of the nomination for speedy deletion; it does not perform any nominations or deletions itself. To see the user who deleted the page, click here CSDWarnBot (talk) 07:50, 7 November 2008 (UTC)

cross namespace redirects

You bot got a bit confused; don't know how many more of those there are but it probably isn't the only one -- Gurch (talk) 16:03, 7 November 2008 (UTC)

Hmm indeed. I started checking, and will finish soon. Rich Farmbrough, 04:40 9 November 2008 (UTC).

SmackBot broke encoding

The replacement [1] was wrong: it converted Osmanya codes to codes from the Cyrillic block.--Imz (talk) 18:18, 8 November 2008 (UTC)

SmackBot

In the article Life of Pi, this bot changed a heading "===Tone===" to --> "===Tone = ==". Probably a glitch? WinterSpw (talk) 20:04, 8 November 2008 (UTC)

Thanks fixed. Rich Farmbrough, 04:39 9 November 2008 (UTC).

HTML comments as Category headers

It appears Smackbot is treating HTML comments as article text when moving comments to the bottom, resulting in category "headers" being floated out from between the categories. See Diocese of Quincy diff. I've put a couple of the comments on the same lines to avoid this now, but there are probably some other articles where this situation arises also, and WP:COMMENT doesn't address whether or not to do that. (HTML comments on Wikipedia are mostly used for circumstances that are unusual in the first place, I suppose.) I'm not sure what the fix would be, other than to consider comments between categories (or just before categories) to indicate grouping somehow; but I figure I'd give you a heads-up. --Closeapple (talk) 19:59, 10 November 2008 (UTC)

Names of Finnish municipalities

Hi Rich, I didn't quite understand this move. Has the MoS been changed recently? As far as I can see, most other Finnish names are spelled properly with their ä's and ö's on the English Wikipedia. In Finnish, ä and ö are independent letters, and in some cases you may get a completely different meaning if you omit the dots. --Silvonen (talk) 07:00, 11 November 2008 (UTC)

Date in infobox templates

Hi,

Did you get anywhere with the conversion of release/ foundation/ start dates in infoboxes, to use {{Start date}} (see also my earlier note)? If you're not able to oblige, please let me know, so that I can reissue my bot request, Thank you. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 13:44, 11 November 2008 (UTC)

SmackBot and the HTTP keyword

SmackBot created an URL of the text "HTTP/1.1" in Virtual hosting. This results in a meaningless URL, "http://1.1", which is not the intent of the original text. See also the diff, line 11: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Virtual_hosting&diff=249417729&oldid=248024179 ; Allsvartr (talk) 20:08, 11 November 2008 (UTC)

Re-request for help

You know more about bots and editing than anyone else I know, so I've got my fingers crossed that you can help me. If you don't have time, I completely understand. Perhaps you can at least point me in the right direction.

Can you use one of your bots, or create one, to pull a piece of data from one set of pages and place it on another set of pages?

What I've got are two items on a bunch of pages that need to be filled in.

One is

"Population: "

And the other is

"Size: "

These need to be filled in on the pages listed at User:The Transhumanist/Country list. The items to be filled in are in the "Geography of x" section (where "x" is the name of the respective country).

A few of them are already filled in. (I hope that doesn't present any problems).

The data is located in the infobox on the corresponding country articles.

Is this something you could do?

If so, it would sure save a lot of man hours. I don't currently have access to a machine upon which I could use macros or learn and apply Python, and I'd really like to avoid having to do these chores manually.

I requested bot approval at Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/Worldbot and was told that these tasks don't need bot approval - we can just go ahead and create and use bots on 'em.

The desired format for the data is presented at Topic outline of Algeria#Geography of Algeria, Topic outline of France#Geography of France and Topic outline of Germany#Geography of Germany.

I look forward to your reply.

The Transhumanist    23:38, 11 November 2008 (UTC)

I have looked at this before, a few months back.

Extracting the data is easy but inserting it into the articles is less so. I'll review again soon.

Rich Farmbrough, 19:20 12 November 2008 (UTC). 19:20, 12 November 2008 (UTC)

Thank you.

I look forward to seeing you in action. Once it's done, I'll be particularly interested in learning how you did it.  :)

The Transhumanist    23:12, 12 November 2008 (UTC)

SmackBot

Thanks for looking at that problem. Your suggested change would have helped in this case, but URLs these days generated by content management systems and databases produce such weird URL results that it is hard to figure out what character combinations you will find in them. In this case the full page URL was http://siris-thesauri.si.edu/ipac20/ipac.jsp?session=120981572FNL8.17&profile=planes&uri=link=3100020~!50828~!3100001~!3100002&aspect=subtab13&menu=search&ri=2&source=~!sithesauri&term=Schweizer+SGU+1+1+SGP+1+1&index=, which is a bizarre URL. I create webpages by hand and give them simple names and short URLs. This actual URL is cited in several other articles, so thanks for at least fixing the =link= problem! - Ahunt (talk) 15:14, 13 November 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for your note and for setting the bot to miss URLs - I think that will help avoid breaking links in refs! - Ahunt (talk) 16:20, 13 November 2008 (UTC)

Hi

Thanks, Rich Farmborough. You're a big help

Thankyou for contributing the way you do.

(Happyjord11 (talk) 06:02, 15 November 2008 (UTC))

Centuries

Hi. May I ask why you're changing "14th century" to "fourteenth century", etc? This seems to go against Wikipedia:Manual of Style (dates and numbers)#Numbers as figures or words. Thanks. Epbr123 (talk) 22:17, 15 November 2008 (UTC)

Category help?

I saw that you (Smackbot) edited my page the other day - no complaint - I added categories today, and see that "Peter Fox (artist)" shows up in the Contemporary Painters list under "P" rather than under "F". Can you fix this? I have no idea how to do it myself or I wouldn't bother you with it ...

Thanks so much!

Peterfoxny (talk) 06:27, 16 November 2008 (UTC)

Wm. Cushing

Updated and cited story about the phantom Chief Justice. Tell me what you think! Foofighter20x (talk) 19:58, 18 November 2008 (UTC)

WikiJob

Could you take a look at - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikijob#Blacklist - you commented way back on the domain being blacklisted - it's still blacklisted and no one has helped :( can you help? :) 86.0.221.59 (talk) 01:20, 19 November 2008 (UTC)

Are you who i think you are?

You're not the person i used to know as Bilbo, at Orwell Park? Or who hit a child during his driving test? (Astonishing what we remember of past conversations.)

I've tried to find a way to contact you less publicly but can't - sorry if i'm doing this wrong, i'm a sad beginner. ;0) Mandmaybe (talk) 15:52, 19 November 2008 (UTC)

Yes I am, and no I'm not. Sounds like a slight misrememberence! Rich Farmbrough, 02:42 20 November 2008 (UTC).

Well, half right will do for me. Hi Rich {waving}... Who the hell was the driving test conversation, i wonder. 80) Mandmaybe (talk) 15:15, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

User subpage

Hi Rich. Your name is mentioned on the user subpage here. Wasn't sure what to make of it. -- Suntag ☼ 18:29, 19 November 2008 (UTC)

Old junk. The guy had an issue with the picture of twins being used to illustrate a vandal detail page. We changed the picture, but this should probably go under BLP. Rich Farmbrough, 03:20 20 November 2008 (UTC).

Unexplained Smackbot edit

Hi,

smackbot recently changed

{{DEFAULTSORT:Smith, Juana María de los Dolores de León}}

to

{{DEFAULTSORT:Smith, Juana Maria de los Dolores de Leon}}

(i.e. it removed the accented letters in favour of unaccented ones.) Now I only have very limited understanding of that particular construct, and the clause wasn't even inserted by me in the first place, so from my POV this may or may not make sense. But it certainly is not obvious from Smackbot's page that it would do things like that. Could you verify this edit made sense?

To whoever left the above message: Accented characters shouldn't be used with DEFAULTSORT. That may be why the change was made. I'm not sure why though.--Rockfang (talk) 06:55, 21 November 2008 (UTC)

Could SmackBot update these

I'm a lazy editor, and quite like it how Smackbot adds the date to all my "fact" tags and so on. I have now created {{BLPunsourced}} and the redirect {{unsourcedBLP}}, which has dated subcategories like Category:Unreferenced BLPs from April 2007. Would it be possible to add these templates to SmackBot so that they are automatically dated (and thus added to the cats?). If I should have asked elsewhere, just give me a nudge in the right dierction... Fram (talk) 13:27, 19 November 2008 (UTC)

Yes no problem. Rich Farmbrough, 10:25 21 November 2008 (UTC).

Thanks! Fram (talk) 10:34, 21 November 2008 (UTC)

SmackBot

Richard, what needs to be done to remove "copyright infringement" from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Terranova ?

I have e-mails approving my post and coming from the original source but I didn’t want to post them here as it can be publicly accessed

I simply was trying to create a link from Joe Terranova listed under fast money CNBC http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_Money_(CNBC) (look under Panelists)

I would like to get this resolved as soon as possible as there are no copy right issues… Your help is greatly appreciated —Preceding unsigned comment added by Bizpress33 (talk • contribs) 15:54, 21 November 2008 (UTC)

SmackBot and blank lines

Hi, I've noticed that SmackBot removes extra blank lines, which is normally fine. But, according to WP:Layout, "It is usually desirable to leave two blank lines between the first stub template and whatever precedes it." Could SmackBot keep two blank lines there when it finds them? As a matter of fact, it would be great if SmackBot would actually add blank lines there when it encounters situations where they're missing, during the course of its other maintenance duties. MANdARAX • XAЯAbИAM 20:59, 21 November 2008 (UTC)

Hi, thanks for your message, SmackBot makes a number of changes that are available to all WP:AWB bots - in general these provide a number of non-controversial minor improvements.

The issue you raise is related to these, it is an issue known to the developers of WP:AWB.

:Regards, Rich Farmbrough, 22:02 21 November 2008 (UTC).

Signpost updated for November 17, 2008 and before.

Because the Signpost hasn't been sent in a while, to save space, I've condensed all seven issues that were not sent into this archive. Only the three issues from November are below.

The Wikipedia Signpost Weekly Delivery

Volume 4, Issue 42	8 November 2008	About the Signpost

From the editor
News and notes: The Price is Right, milestones	Dispatches: Halloween Main Page contest generates new article content
Features and admins	Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News
The Report on Lengthy Litigation

Volume 4, Issue 43	10 November 2008	About the Signpost

Fundraiser opens: Over $500,000 raised in first week	ArbCom elections: Nominations open
Book review: How Wikipedia Works	MediaWiki search engine improved
Four Board resolutions, including financials, approved	News and notes: Vietnamese Wiki Day
Dispatches: Historic election proves groundbreaking on the Main Page	Features and admins
Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News	The Report on Lengthy Litigation

Volume 4, Issue 44	17 November 2008	About the Signpost

Lawsuit briefly shuts down Wikipedia.de	GFDL 1.3 released, will allow Wikimedia migration to Creative Commons license
Wikimedia Events Roundup	News and notes: Fundraiser, List Summary Service, milestones
Features and admins	Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News
The Report on Lengthy Litigation

You are receiving this message because you have signed up for the Signpost spamlist. If you wish to stop receiving these messages, simply remove your name from the list. Ralbot (talk) 10:37, 23 November 2008 (UTC)

SmackBot tag "general fixes"

Hey Rich, I'm the developer of the JavaScript tool Friendly that helps editors put maintenance tags on pages. One of the users of the script brought to my attention that SmackBot is performing fixes to tags left by Friendly that amount to capitalizing the first letter of the tag. For instance, tags were add by an editor using Friendly here and SmackBot came around and capitalized the first letter of the tags here (along with a couple of other tag fixes). I was under the impression that on Wikipedia, not using a capital first letter was not a problem because the software automatically understands it as a capital letter for you. I know that leaving lots of maintenance tags using redirected templates instead of the actual names is considered bad form, but is the lowercase first letter as well? Ioeth _{(talk contribs friendly)} 14:27, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

Why does SmackBot replace HTML entities?

Rich, why does your SmackBot replace HTML entities with characters from a random character set? The HTML entities have understood definitions that should be respected by any web browser, regardless of character set, and are much easier to use when editing content. Can you direct me to the Wikipedia convention that says that HTML entities should not be used? Thanks. —TedPavlic | (talk) 14:12, 21 November 2008 (UTC)

I haven't seen a response to this. To be more specific, Smackbot is replacing things like the MARKUP — (which would get replaced by the browser with the symbol —) with the explicit symbol —. I'm not sure this is an improvement. I think the markup is much nicer (from an editing point of view) in the source. —TedPavlic | (talk) 14:18, 27 November 2008 (UTC)

Replied on user page. Rich Farmbrough, 14:18, 27 November 2008 (UTC)

SmackBot

SmackBot is currently responsible for ~0.6% of all edits ever made to Wikipedia, and ~1.0% of all edits to articles. Just wow. Dragons flight (talk) 08:44, 27 November 2008 (UTC)

Goodness. Rich Farmbrough, 09:25 28 November 2008 (UTC).

Smackbot bug - changed title for Mergeto 2600 Hz

Hello! Can you take a quick look at this diff. I think smackbot may have picked up part of the page to merge to (2600 hertz) as the year, and so changed that instead of adding a date. Thanks for the amazing bot --h2g2bob (talk) 01:59, 28 November 2008 (UTC)

Ty. Rich Farmbrough, 03:35 28 November 2008 (UTC).

Fixed Rich Farmbrough, 03:11 29 November 2008 (UTC).