User talk:Rich Farmbrough

Note I will be away a lot over the next few weeks and months

de:Benutzer Diskussion:DaB./Archiv 2006

The Wishing Well

Note: I will generally answer on your talk page (and usually copy here), and look for your responses here. If you see my answer here and it's not on your talk page, I'm either not happy with it (haven't finished writing it), or I forgot to copy it over. However I can't watch your talk page (sorry), so reply here. R.F.

FAQ

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Please feel free to read my FAQ. R.F.

Full ArQuive

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Alternatively browse my Talk Archive Index. R.F.

SmackBot

Resolved

to bob burn drummer, come back to lafayette,la see you c.k. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 199.80.110.195 (talk) 23:45, August 29, 2007 (UTC)

US

I'm unsure of the history of whatever MOS used to say about how to format this item, but since I started hanging around MOS, it hasn't prescribed one set of usages and proscribed others. There are a few issues:

• Why is one country privileged over others by having one particular formatting practice enforced (or even mentioned) in MOS? There's no equivalent section saying "No dots in UK". There's no dictum that you must write "People's Republic of China" rather than "China", or to refer to Taiwan or Tibet by the names the Chinese regime would prefer.
• In most varieties of English outside North America, the dots are not used except in upper-case text, where the abbreviation would be the same as the personal pronoun "us". The rule about spelling out "the United States" when in the same sentence as the names of other countries is a nuance that Chicago, is it, recommends, but this is not practised consistently by Americans and is an unknown rule outside North America. Many Wikipedians might resent being told, or even urged, to "toe the line" with respect to an American practice that goes against what they are used to in real-life, and that has no logic to it. Many people are sensitive to American behaviour on the world stage, particularly over the past seven years, so this is not a good time to be enforcing the whims of a particular American practice against the practices of other English-speakers.
• On a purely linguistic level, you dot es dot goes against what is now an almost universal practice of losing the dots in abbreviations, in all varieties of English. To many people, it looks cumbersome against that practice, whereas a few decades ago, people were so used to dotted abbreviations that it wasn't an issue.

Thus, I suggest that MOS remain silent on the issue, so that WPians may dot or not, and abbreviate or spell out regardless of the presence of the names of other countries in the sentence, provided consistency is maintained within each article. Tony (talk) 11:08, 5 October 2007 (UTC)

Richard, I'm sorry to have been appearing to be heavy-handed over this dotting thing. In retrospect, I wish I'd first attempted to persuade you towards my view that loosening up a little about the dotting guidelines is realistic and linguistically desirable. I still want to persuade you. So are you totally pissed with me? If so, I'm sorry, and hope to make amends by engaging with your opinion. Tony (talk) 03:15, 7 October 2007 (UTC)

It's partly a "variety of English" issue, so I don't know how we can escape having both options. Many Americans will object to being told not to dot it (despite whatever diadvantages others might assert about their choice), and many other English-speakers will object to being told to dot it, when their variety of English uses the undotted version. As much as I'd much prefer to enforce the undotted, I accept that this is not acceptable to too many WPians. As long as each supplementary manual is consistent in its use of "US" or "U.S.", I don't see a problem. Same for articles. No one wants a huge back-compatibility problem.

The undotted versions of "am" and "pm" are widespread, especially outside the US. Again, it's partly a variety of English issue. Allowing the undotted option was agreed to by consensus some months ago; but there was no agreement to allow caps, whether dotted or undotted, and no agreement to allow them to be unspaced (12:30pm).

MOS is always going to experience push-and-pull WRT options. Sometimes it comes down on one side; sometimes it allows more than one option (consistently within an article). The lack of cohesion might be slightly apparent when you consult groups of related articles that have chosen a different option. But people can live with that, can't they, just as they might live with "Economics" in AmEng, and "Economic history" in BrEng (I'm just guessing for the sake of the example). MOS is, I think, about to generate consensus to allow either italics or quotation marks for "words as words". I have no wish to patrol what are probably more than half of WP's articles in which the "wrong" option is currently used. Again, internal consistency is what matters more, because it affects the reading experience very directly. Tony (talk) 11:00, 7 October 2007 (UTC)

Help me make a good article

Hello, my name is Isucheme and I am writing an article on the Churchill-Bernstein Equation for convection heat transfer. I would appreciate any feedback you could give to me. This article is in the rough draft stage.

Isucheme 01:35, 8 October 2007 (UTC)

Have copy-edited. Rich Farmbrough, 12:53 9 October 2007 (GMT).

SmackBot

Hey, I had to revert SmackBot's edits to this chart as it messed it up, I'm not sure exactly how the bot works but whatever it is, it made the chart not work. Regards. Epson291 08:35, 8 October 2007 (UTC)

Thanks. Have made the desired change, suppressing the rest. Will see if a bug needs to be filed for WP:AWB. Rich Farmbrough, 11:04 9 October 2007 (GMT).

Hooray for SmackBot

I just saw SmackBot doing an replacement of "[[Linear_classifier|linear classifiers]]" to "[[linear classifier]]s". I'd only seen him dating maintenance tags before, he's obviously a more complex piece of code than I had given him credit for. Good work! --_{tiny plastic} Grey Knight ⊖ 12:50, 9 October 2007 (UTC)

Thanks, SB runs mainly on the WP:AWB platform, which has many basic fixes built in. Rich Farmbrough, 12:52 9 October 2007 (GMT).

SmackBot

I was glad to see SmackBot. I don't know much about Wikipedia or how to go about adding citations. Could you please add these citations to the article Neil Papiano. The other information in the article is correct, I just don't have a way to cite them at the moment.

Citation for Ida Cotton Children's Play Park - lazoo.org/pressroomarticle. Citation for Ruth Giolman Scholarship - socwk.utah.edu/students/financialaidscholarships.asp. Citation for Winifred Dyer Sholarship - http://elp.ed.utah.edu/financial.htm. Citation for Stanford Football & Baseball - Stanford University Athletics Department/Athletics Scholarships.

User talk:3rdEast 9 October 2007 —Preceding signed but undated comment was added at 16:56, 9 October 2007 (UTC)

I want to ask you two things

Hello I'm really not familiar with Wikipedia and I wanted to ask you something. On an article I wrote about the harpist Şirin Pancaroğlu, you said a reliable reference is needed. First of all I don't know how to add referances :), and secondly I took the biography from the harpist herself, isn't it reliable? This is the only English biography of her that exsists as her web site is under construction right now.

I also want to tell you something which is probably none of your concern but I feel I need to tell this to someone, someone working for wikipedia and is more familiar with such things. My actual intention was to put her biography on the Turkish Wikipedia, as I was suprised to see it wasn't already there; because she is a very valuable person and the primary harpist in Turkey. So I put it there, again it was the only proper biography of her in Turkish that exists, writen by her, she sends it to everyone that needs it to be put up on a website so the same thing is on a few other websites such as her record label's.

I was really confused when i saw it had disappeared a few minutes later, I put it again, yet it kept disappearing. It took me a few more minutes to realise there was an admin who kept deleting it. I spent some time to figure out how to write them, and told them I have permission from the artist to put up her biography on here, there is no reason to delete it. The reply I got was very rude and arrogant and really annoyed me. I wrote them back saying this is not the way to speak to a lady and still they ignored it...

They were telling me the biography is copyrighted and I can't put it there eventhough I have the permission of the person who wrote it. The thing is not copyrighted or anything, it really isn't. The only reason they were doing this is because they are given the power to do so, and probably find it amusing. This experiance has totally discouraged me from contuributing to the Turkish Wikipedia and even using it.

I just wanted to ask someone who knows these things better than I; "am I wrong?"

Thank you for spending your time reading this,

Öykü

1. SmackBot merely dates templates: the one in question was added buy User:Denizz here.
2. Copyright. Wikipedia:Copyrights explains this in more detail than I can. You will see that explicit permission is needed to upload copyright works - all works not in the public domain.
3. References. If there is a reliable third party source (such as newspaper reviews of performances, orchestra webs sites, interviews) then these are preferable to the artist's own text, which can be a little biased. However if that is all there is cite that. See WP:CITE for more detail.

Rich Farmbrough, 14:49 10 October 2007 (GMT).

SmackBot and DefaultSort

I just saw an edit where SmackBot moved the {{DEFAULTSORT}} magic word, but didn't remove any of the identical manual sorts. Here is the diff. This is opportunity for improvement. GRBerry 14:00, 10 October 2007 (UTC)

How curious. I will investigate. Rich Farmbrough, 14:52 10 October 2007 (GMT).

Ah this makes sense, although as you say it could be improved. Rich Farmbrough, 14:53 10 October 2007 (GMT).

Feature requuested from WP:AWB devs. Rich Farmbrough, 08:14 12 October 2007 (GMT).

Regex assistance needed

Hi Rich,

I recognized your name from a list of users who are regular expression programmers and was hoping that you can help me. What I want to do is to use the find and replace function in AWB to remove commas (or spaces) in numbers within parameters of an infobox template. For example, if the parameter |area= has a value entered of 102,003. I want to have AWB replace it with 102003. That way, calculations can be done on that raw formated number. Can you assist in creating a regular expression to do this? Thanks, —MJCdetroit 14:07, 10 October 2007 (UTC)

(\d),(\d\d\d) replace with $1$2 for one comma, probably get multiples as well, if not just repeat. Rich Farmbrough, 14:13 10 October 2007 (GMT).

Based on what you gave me and what little I know about regex, I came up with something like this for the AWB:Find: (some_parameter_name[\s\=\s|\=\s|\s\=|\=])(\d),(\d\d\d\.\d) Replace with$1$2$3. There are multiple variations of the "\d groups" to include 5 digit numbers with or without the decimal place, so on and so forth. In the one page that I did test it with, it did seem to work well. Thanks, —MJCdetroit 20:37, 10 October 2007 (UTC)

Unless there are "," after the decimal point you could probably simplify with something like

(\s|\|)(paramtername1|parametername2|...)(\s*)=(\s*)(\d+)(,\d\d\d)+ => $1$2$3=$4$5$6

(Where the ... is not literal!)

This has the advantage of not matching, say, "pitcharea=" when you want "area=" and maintains the spacing before the edit, people sometimes (and Smack Bot for all the Album pages...) line up the "=" signs. Using a list of parameter names helps, in that changes you make then apply to them all, rather than having to work through a list in AWB's tiny font. Watch out for accidentally having "||" "(|" or "|)", these will match the empty string.

Regards, Rich Farmbrough, 10:13 11 October 2007 (GMT).

Thanks. I didn't think to list of parameternames. I've been burning my eyes out trying to change each separate entry with that tiny print. I'll try that method out and let you know. —MJCdetroit 12:24, 11 October 2007 (UTC)

Update: I moved the comma in between groups 5 and 6 and that seems to have done the trick. It looks like it is working perfectly. Check out my last few AWB contributions. —MJCdetroit 13:23, 11 October 2007 (UTC)

Of course! Needs testing with numbers over 1E6. Rich Farmbrough, 13:48 11 October 2007 (GMT).

SmackBot

Reference(s) and External link(s): Sorry, Rich, but I don't see the necessity of pluralizing headings that have only one entry (see Cape Grysbok)—GRM 20:31, 10 October 2007 (UTC)

This is correct per the external links guidelines. I did block temporarily as I initially believed it was incorrect, but have now unblocked. TigerShark 22:55, 10 October 2007 (UTC)

Very damaging edit by this bot; I've reverted

I pressed the "rollback" button on this edit. Recall your comments concerning the expression x² + y³ versus x² + y³. Obviously the second alternative is very bad. Michael Hardy 21:29, 10 October 2007 (UTC)

I have already raised a feature request, and turned off unicodify on SB's maintenance tag runs. Apologies for this cropping up again, although it looks like there ended up only being squares in that article. Rich Farmbrough, 13:21 11 October 2007 (GMT).

OR in Get (conflict) article

Thanks for the help on how to use tags (and I figure it was your bot that did it so this may be your first exposure to the topic). I'm pretty new to editing, although I've been reading Wikipedia for years. Any suggestions on appropriate steps regarding this User:Sagbliss character? Other editors have started to coach him/her but there's no acknowledgement of the misbehaviour. If I were to guess, he or she is using that article for a personal essay on the legal issues. It may even be one of claimants in a related trial. It's becoming more and more OR, and the dude even lashes out at edits like minor punctuation. Bruno23 16:59, 11 October 2007 (UTC)

Get (conflict)...

Good trimming there. We'll see how it goes since it looks like some reverted Sagbliss' activities before you made your mods so the article was relatively clean by comparison. Bruno23 10:49, 12 October 2007 (UTC)

ETH

You rolled back the reference and toned down the statement in the ETH intro, yet no comment on the talk page (where I had discussed the reason for the change), and you did it (as best as I can tell) logged in as a bot. Please comment. --Psm 17:29, 12 October 2007 (UTC)

No you are misreading the history of the page. Rich Farmbrough, 21:23 12 October 2007 (GMT).

"Unreferenced" template change

Hi Rich, I'm not sure if you monitor template "unreferenced" or not, but there's discussion of changing it a bit, adding a "section" parameter and removing the description field. User:Jeepday said he thought you'd looked into doing some changes on the template, so I thought you might be interested in the topic. (Not necessarily to perform the changes; we're still discussing whether to make a change.)

As a brief summary, people seem to use the description field almost exclusively to add the word "section," and we want to add a section parameter for that explicitly, which will categorize the article differently. The category change would make {{unreferenced|section}} work the same way as {{unreferencedsection}}; kind of silly but that's how people use it!) I'll watch if you reply here, or you can add an opinion at Template_talk:Unreferenced#Section_parameter or Template_talk:Unreferenced#Section_parameter:_specific_proposal. Best regards, -Agyle 00:18, 13 October 2007 (UTC)

Stubs to bottom

Why your bot moves stubs templates to bottom? [1] --Emijrp 10:24, 13 October 2007 (UTC)

This is part of WP:AWB general fixes. The reason is that (a) we want a place we can find the stub templates, and (b) after the categories means the stub cats are listed at the end of the category list.Rich Farmbrough, 11:57 13 October 2007 (GMT).

SmackBot ~ External link -> External links

SmackBot is changing External link to External links on articles that only have 1 link, shouldn't that read just External link still? See Lake Strom Thurmond and Lamar County, Georgia. --Mjrmtg 13:16, 13 October 2007 (UTC)

Yes, this is deliberate per the external links guidelines. Thanks for letting me know. Rich Farmbrough, 15:27 13 October 2007 (GMT).

My mistake, didn't know there was a guideline on "External links" always being plural, seems silly to always be plural. --Mjrmtg 17:03, 13 October 2007 (UTC)

Template:Orphan

Please remove 2 extra } from the template. -- Magioladitis 19:22, 13 October 2007 (UTC)

SmackBot and external links

This is probably minor but if there is only one links, why does SmackBot correct the title to external links? Simply south 22:05, 13 October 2007 (UTC)