Tony1

During my years at the Signpost I authored or co-authored 266 articles, including one that the WMF republished on their site. But I recommend no one bother subscribing to it now—the standards are very low.

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• Exercises in weeding out fluff from article text
• Advanced editing exercises
• Spot the ambiguity
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• Using hyphens and dashes
• Copy-editing essentials, part of the Military History Academy

edit

... US or U.S.? In American English, U.S. (with points) is more common as the standard abbreviation for United States, although The Chicago Manual of Style now deprecates the use of the periods (16th ed.). US (without points) is generally accepted in most other national forms of English. Read more ... Add this to your user page by typing in {{Styletips}}

Errors in date style "fixes"

Hi Tony. Can I ask you to be careful when doing date style fixes, not to "fix" date ranges when there are mulltiple date ranges in close proximity to one another. This typically happens with football seasons, for example. Specifically, in this edit, "their five-year winning streak in the championship between 1984–85 and 1988-89" is correct and "between 1984 and 1985 and 1988–89" is wrong; "Steaua managed a six consecutive championship streak between 1992–93 and 1997–98" is right and "between 1992 and 1993 and 1997–98" is wrong; "to make it to the Champions League group stage three years in a row between 1994–95 and 1996–97" is correct and "between 1994 and 1995 and 1996–97" is wrong. Scolaire (talk) 17:28, 17 March 2024 (UTC)

By the way, why do you not link to your talk page archives? It would be useful for me to find out whether this has been brought to your attention before. Scolaire (talk) 17:33, 17 March 2024 (UTC)

Shipwreck lists

Please do not unlink flags in lists of shipwrecks or ship launches. There are hundreds of these lists and established practice is that the flags link. Mjroots (talk) 06:22, 27 March 2024 (UTC)

Noam Bettan

Hello, could you help me give more notoriety to the article Noam Bettan if you have them but they opened this query hastily. Acartonadooopo (talk) 04:42, 6 April 2024 (UTC)

April 19, 2024

Hello, this is Winter. I have noticed that some of your script assisted edits have not followed the documentation stated by infobox company. You are spamming these edits without properly reviewing what they are doing. Please take the time to review your edits. If you have a complaint, please move it to the company infobox talk page. ^Wiinter_U 14:30, 19 April 2024 (UTC)

Can you give me some examples please? Tony (talk) 22:56, 19 April 2024 (UTC)

On Paramount Global, you changed many of the perimeters to be delinked and also changed [[Public company|Public]] to Public company, even though the documentation stated that it has to be the original. On Princess Pictures, you changed [[Privately held company|Private]] to Privately held company. This has already been revised, that is why the perimeter is "Company type" and not "Type" anymore. ^Wiinter_U 23:10, 19 April 2024 (UTC)

There was recently a discussion (but where?) on this point, with consensus that "Public" and "Private" are sufficient. By "perimeter", do you mean "field"? I don't follow your logic: if the perimeter is "Company type", why repeat the word "company"? Tony (talk) 01:37, 20 April 2024 (UTC)

Shripad Amrit Dange

I did not insert links. Somebody else did and you removed them. Can you justify their removal? Do you take my point about the lakhs? Can you justify any of the other changes? Spinney Hill (talk) 08:50, 23 April 2024 (UTC)

The problem with lakhs is that no one else (non-Indian second-language speakers included) understands them. You need to insert conversions at the very least. en.WP rations links to the most likely to be followed by readers. Most of those links were common terms: we do not want a sea of blue, which disrupts the reader. This was decided a decade and a half ago; also, please read WP:OVERLINK. Tony (talk) 08:52, 23 April 2024 (UTC)

I agree about conversions. There are certain Americanisms in other articles which non-Americans do not understand (or which mean something else in British English e.g. "braces") which I have pointed out -not the spellings or the simple words that appear in US films like "faucet,"

I'll have a look at the blue links when I get the chance. Can you justify the word changes you have made.? Spinney Hill (talk) 09:02, 23 April 2024 (UTC)

In order to? Never use it. Amongst? No. Same for whilst. These are pretentious old-fashioned glutinous forms. Tony (talk) 09:08, 23 April 2024 (UTC)

I strongly agree! —Finell 02:03, 25 April 2024 (UTC)

(talk page watcher) @Spinney Hill On lakhs, please see MOS:LAKH and MOS:COMMONALITY. On links, MOS:OVERLINK sets out that major geographical entities (countries etc), among other things, should not be linked to. Thanks. PamD 13:34, 23 April 2024 (UTC)

Spinney, if you need a quick run-through of another article you've worked on, please ask and I'll try (unless my workload is high at the time). Tony (talk) 13:39, 23 April 2024 (UTC)

Hi Tony1

I am happy to see that you are still very active and, I hope, well. Have you ever considered publishing your excellent guidance on writing to a broader public than those who discover it on your User and Talk pages? Have you already done so? —Finell 02:16, 25 April 2024 (UTC)

Finell, it's available to the public already; all that's needed is to promote it outside WP. It desperately needs renovation, which will have to wait untill I finish a big job (should be in a few months). Thanks for your kind words. Tony (talk) 02:20, 25 April 2024 (UTC)

Script error in downcasing?

Tony, in this edit you changed University of Edinburgh to university of edinburgh. This seems like a bug in the script you're using? Dicklyon (talk) 04:24, 4 May 2024 (UTC)

Thanks, Dick. I've reported this to Ohconfucius. Tony (talk) 04:48, 4 May 2024 (UTC)

i seem to remember having had this discussion before. Isn't it nonsense for someone to have "professor of University of Edinburgh" as an occupation? Are people not aware of the difference between a person's occupation and their job title? It isn't even a subtle difference. The occupation of the subject ought simply to be "educator" or "professor", don't you think? -- Ohc ^{revolution of our times} 21:11, 4 May 2024 (UTC)

Agreed. Tony (talk) 06:36, 5 May 2024 (UTC)

Script-assisted flag fix errors

Hi, thank you for your many script-assisted fixes. I noticed that some of the {{flagg}} fixes don't always render correctly, for example at Special:Diff/1217808882. Also, I'm not sure if it is wise to replace {{flagg|cncie}} with {{flagu}} as a rule, because they aren't necessarily exchangeable, the former uses IOC country code while the latter uses ISO 3166-1 which doesn't always match. If you want to unlink the country name, you can use {{flagg|uncie}} instead. Thanks, --Habst (talk) 15:49, 7 May 2024 (UTC)

St. Michaels Historic District

Tony1 - Thank you for your cleanup of St. Michaels Historic District. It is a busy tourist attraction during the summer. Any idea why the article is rated as Stub-class? TwoScars (talk) 19:06, 10 May 2024 (UTC)

Not anymore! Ed ^{[talk] [OMT]} 21:13, 10 May 2024 (UTC)

Thanks. TwoScars (talk) 15:48, 11 May 2024 (UTC)

Imagicomm Entertainment moved to draftspace

Thanks for your contributions to Imagicomm Entertainment. Unfortunately, I do not think it is ready for publishing at this time because it needs more sources to establish notability. I have converted your article to a draft which you can improve, undisturbed for a while.

Please see more information at Help:Unreviewed new page. When the article is ready for publication, please click on the "Submit your draft for review!" button at the top of the page OR move the page back. Clearfrienda ^💬 23:44, 14 May 2024 (UTC)

Script errors

A couple of errors I've noticed from recent edits:

• [1] – introduced inconsistency with abbreviation of degrees (M.E. vs PhD)
• [2] – Woy Woy is not in Sydney
• [3] – grammatical error introduced ("served" changed to "had")

ITBF (talk) 02:43, 1 June 2024 (UTC)

• Thanks. (i) That inconsistency is built into the script. (2) Not the script: that's my fault. I'll fix it. (3) Again, my manual edit. I find "served as" for wealthy, powerful politicians rather self-serving. Tony (talk) 03:24, 1 June 2024 (UTC)

Redundant commas

Hi Tony! Recently a User made an edit to VH-RMQ, an article on my watchlist. The edit added 25 characters but most of the additions were redundant commas. See the diff.

I checked the User contributions for the User responsible and I could see that most of their edits insert commas where previously there were no commas. The majority are to insert commas at the end of dates that are embedded in sentences. For example, the following: diff 1, diff 2 and diff 3.

Before I write to the User responsible I want to check what resources are available to help Users with the matter of commas, and redundant commas in particular. Are you aware of any Wikipedia guidance that clarifies when commas are desirable, and when they are not?

I see you have some useful guidance on your User pages. Do you have anything devoted to commas that might persuade the User responsible that extra commas don’t necessarily mean extra quality? Thanks for any assistance. Dolphin (t) 13:37, 1 June 2024 (UTC)

Please stop this user from inserting silly commas: they're like road-humps for readers. Unfortunately no "Comma workshop" yet, but perhaps later this year. Tony (talk) 03:32, 2 June 2024 (UTC)

Thanks for your support. I found MOS:DATECOMMA and MOS:DATE. Unfortunately they do not support our preference for economy with commas around dates embedded in sentences.

Perhaps there is an opportunity to challenge this item in MOS. Insisting on a comma after a date looks like a relic from the 1950s. Dolphin (t) 10:51, 2 June 2024 (UTC)

I dislike the addition of a comma to produce the "In 1952, she moved to England." format, which I think might be a "fronted adverbial", something I never came across in an old-fashioned academic education in the UK. But if a date is in the American format with an internal comma, I feel that there does need to be a date after the year too. PamD 11:09, 2 June 2024 (UTC)

I don't see any difference across the Atlantic. It's rather difficult for a manual of style to legislate comma usage: it's complex. But adverbial and prepositional phrases at sentence start are just silly—a habit I fear editors see in others and adopt thinking it's required. BUT, if the initial phrase is medium to long, that sways a bit toward using the comma; and even after a short initial phrase a comma is useful for breaking up numerals; so "In 2011 1032 craters were detected on Mars" would possibly be improved with a comma. Tony (talk) 11:18, 2 June 2024 (UTC)

So many editors are adding those horrible commas after "In 1952" that I'd assumed it was correct, rather than reverting them as clunky prose, just as you say. I should be more assertive in the interests of decent writing. Thanks. PamD 11:39, 2 June 2024 (UTC)

At MOS:DATE there is actually a valuable ruling in the case of dates written as dd month year without an intervening comma. The Table shows that closing the date with a comma is incorrect. Hooray!

I was able to incorporate this in a message to the User in question. See my diff.

If the date is written as month date, year then the Table at MOS:DATE shows that a comma is required after the year, to close the date. Dolphin (t) 11:43, 2 June 2024 (UTC)

• Comma therapy is especially productive when an article goes through the history of the subject, with almost every paragraph starting the same repetitive way. This needs the delete button to smooth things out. Watch for nested phrases, though, like: "In 2011, without hindsight, the troops went on the attack." Tony (talk) 11:47, 2 June 2024 (UTC)

  What do you think of this example? PamD 18:03, 2 June 2024 (UTC)

  I'm OK with that one—such a cluster of linked constituencies and wards. Tony (talk) 05:24, 3 June 2024 (UTC)