User talk:Rich Farmbrough

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From SignPost

Approximately 3% of editors account for 85% of contributions to the project, according to the statistician, and participation among this group has declined "even more sharply" than the active registered userbase in toto.

Funny that. Rich Farmbrough, 16:22, 9 September 2011 (UTC).

Unchallengeable take downs?

Rich, On the talk page for the proposed terms of use, you mention a takedown that is unchallengeable. While it's possible, I think it's more likely that it's a symptom of our bad communication about it or something (for which I would take responsibility). I don't think we have any that are unchallengeable right now. So, I want to write to ask if there's something I can clarify, or whether I'm missing something on my list? Philippe Beaudette, Wikimedia Foundation (talk) 01:14, 11 September 2011 (UTC)

Yes, the matter has come up a couple of times, both on the Talk:Texas_Instruments_signing_key_controversy talk page of the article in question, and in the commentary to a recent (July) SignPost. The issue is that there only people who can issue a counter notice are the anonymous editors who originally posted the material. On most websites another person could post the material, wait for a challenge and respond to that. Here, since take-down has been implemented as an office action no one can repost the material without going against the office action (and in fact, even if they did, it would be removed by editors in support of the office action) therefore the material, which is freely published elsewhere, since the DMCA was challenged and the challenge not responded to, cannot be posted on Wikipedia. Effectively this makes Wikipedia the most censored forum for this information. Rich Farmbrough, 01:32, 11 September 2011 (UTC).

Interesting. My understanding from the legal team is that a DMCA takedown must be challenged by a party with legal standing, which would mean that it has to be someone who had posted the content. If we were to then suggest or passively allow someone else to post it, we would not be in full compliance. However, I'll confirm that. If that's the case, then we're in compliance with the regulations and others arguably are not. If it's an issue of interpretation, I'll find out why we're not more broad, but since Mr. Godwin structured those originally, I tend to think we're at the broadest level that he (and then Mr Brigham) felt was legally possible. But I'll get an answer and try to report back. Thanks for clarifying. Philippe Beaudette, Wikimedia Foundation (talk) 05:10, 11 September 2011 (UTC)

Signpost and hlist

• Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-11-21/Technology report#Horizontal lists have got class

fyi... Alarbus (talk) 12:05, 20 November 2011 (UTC)

• • Thanks. Rich Farmbrough, 21:48, 21 November 2011 (UTC).
    

• • • You're welcome. Hope you can whack a lot of these a bot or script. fyi, Edokter added some cell padding, so the inline padding and div-tricks should all be simply cut, too. Alarbus (talk) 06:03, 22 November 2011 (UTC)

Modern English Biography

In the discussion around the DNB, digitisation, and how money could usefully be spent: I have only just become aware of Frederic Boase and his MEB (see Talk:Frederic Boase/Temp for my new draft, given that the current page has copyvio-blight, but right now the history has facts like he was the brother of DNB author George Clement Boase). Anyway the MEB has a very low profile online, but is PD given that the final volume was 1921. Apparently much was close paraphrase of the DNB, but where it isn't, it grubbed up facts that were otherwise hard to get.

All in all, a worthy candidate for "where next" in the DNB direction. Charles Matthews (talk) 17:32, 15 February 2012 (UTC)

Interesting. Rich Farmbrough, 21:12, 15 February 2012 (UTC).

a better citation footnote template

• Template talk:Ref web#Proposal

User:CharlesGillingham's, not mine. I think it would be great if you, Gadget850, Thumperward, and Plastikspork all participated and got this going with all nits resolved. Alarbus (talk) 01:56, 29 February 2012 (UTC)

Your opinion is needed

Hello Rich,

Sorry to be a nuisance I know you are very busy. If you have time, would you kindly check the following articles (below) to see whether the tags placed on them are still justifiable and if so how to improve them. I have re-edited the articles per the objections raised but the editor who put the tags has not contributed to English Wikipedia as a signed-in editor (going by their contribution history) for over a month. I am very close to the article because I originally created them so another opinion would be immensely appreciated. Thank you.

• The Battle of Fandane-Thiouthioune
• Maat Sine Kumba Ndoffene Famak Joof
• Serer history (medieval era to present)

Regards

Tamsier (talk) 21:17, 8 March 2012 (UTC)

Data extraction & insertion

Let's say I have the wikicode file "Outline of Stamford" saved on my computer, and I want a program that goes through the outline, finds the first bulleted entry lacking an annotation, pulls the article from Wikipedia for the subject in the entry, extracts the first two sentences of the lead paragraph, then inserts those two sentences as the annotation for that entry, then repeats for the next missing entry, until the all the entries have annotations.

This would be very helpful, as it would save tons of manual cutting and pasting.

How would you go about doing that with perl?

The Transhumanist 22:05, 4 January 2012 (UTC)

I'm not sure what "un-annotated" means but at a guess you could use something like:

while ($page =~ /\n\*\s*\[\[([^\])]*\]\]\s*\*/s ){
   $bulleted = $1;
   $entry =   get ($bulleted);
   $entry =~ s/.*?'''.*?'''//;
   $entry =~ s/([^\.]*.[^\.]*.).*/$1/;
   $page =~ s/(\n\*\s*\[\[$bulleted\]\]\s*)\*/$1 $entry/;
}

here the handwaving is in the assumption that the Wikipeida articles are well-formed, and not exceptional. Rich Farmbrough, 22:27, 4 January 2012 (UTC).

You would need to get the source of the article. You need a module for that, which comes with examples. MediaWiki::API I think is the name. Rich Farmbrough, 23:33, 4 January 2012 (UTC).

Entries in outlines look like this:

• Architecture – art and science of designing buildings.
• Crafts – activities and hobbies that are related to making things with one's hands and skill.
• Drawing – visual art that makes use of any number of drawing instruments to mark a two-dimensional medium. As a verb, it is the act of making marks on a surface so as to create an image, form or shape. As a noun, it is the image produced, or the visual art form itself.
• Film – also called a movie or motion picture, is a series of still or moving images. It is produced by recording photographic images with cameras, or by creating images using animation techniques or visual effects. The process of filmmaking has developed into an art form and industry.
• Painting – the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a surface (support base) with a brush or other objects. The term describes both the act and the result of the action.
• Photography
• Sculpture –

Concerning list entries, an annotation is a dashed comment.

The entries "Photography" and "Sculpture" above lack annotations. Would the program you wrote above home in on those and add an annotation for each?   The Transhumanist 03:41, 5 January 2012 (UTC)

It would pick up the first, fail on the second for two reasons: it would count the endash as an annotation, and there's no following list item. Rich Farmbrough, 11:13, 5 January 2012 (UTC).

I'm stuck!

(I had to return the programming books to the library).

I don't know what to do to be able to use the while loop you provided above on an outline.

That is, how do you make it read the outline file into the $page variable?

Also, what did you mean by "handwaving"?

Once the annotations are inserted, how do I save the outline back to disk?

When this script becomes fully operational, I expect it will do more than 50% of the work on outlines. Because inserting annotations by hand is tedious as hell, and all of the outlines have entries that need annotations. We're talking tens of thousands of annotation insertions. I can't stress how helpful this tool will be.

How fast do you think it could insert 100 annotations? [

I look forward to your reply. The Transhumanist 23:49, 16 March 2012 (UTC)

• The while loop will run while something is in the $page that consists of a newline followed by a bulleted link with nothing after it on the line.

• So this is done .. wait didn't we do this? Depending on where the file is, by the reading it from disk as we discussed, or by loading it form Wikipedia.

• "Handwaving" means the bit of the argument that is glossed over. Often it is a good idea to simply not worry about some problems until they can be actually met with (like developing the internal combustion engine, without worrying too much about people getting lost in strange towns), but sometimes this can be disastrous (like setting out across the desert without planning your water consumption).

• Once the text is completed you can save with

open FILE, ">:", "somefilename.txt" or die;

print FILE $page;

close FILE;

Rich Farmbrough, 00:39, 27 March 2012 (UTC).

Template:WikiProject category

About this template. It currently categorizes the category into category:x-importance articles, into category:project articles by importance and into category:project articles by quality and importance

For example: see Category:B-Class Education in India articles of Top-importance

Ideally I do not see why it needs to be a subcategory of anything except Category:Education in India articles by quality and importance (x-articles by quality and importance), Category:B-Class Education in India articles(y-class x articles) and Category:Top-importance Education in India articles(z-importance x-articles). I see that the template is used at a lot of places, and hence I'm a little wary about editing it. Maybe you should check how the other projects categorise and fix it accordingly. Thanks and regards.--Siddhartha Ghai (talk) 00:56, 25 March 2012 (UTC)

That's exactly what I did. If you want to change the way it works in "Education in India" categories then you could simply susbt: the template and tweak it. Or change the template, I have no strong opinion on the article assessment sub-category structure (in fact part of me says the whole wiki-project assesment edifice is just to keep certain people out of trouble, at which is it failing ). Good luck whichever route you take. Rich Farmbrough, 01:03, 25 March 2012 (UTC).

User script listing cleanup project

I'm leaving this message for known script authors, recent contributors to Wikipedia:WikiProject User scripts/Scripts, and those who've shown interest in user scripts.

This scripts listing page is in dire need of cleanup. To facilitate this, I've created a new draft listing at Wikipedia:WikiProject User scripts/Scripts cleanup. You're invited to list scripts you know to be currently working and relevant. Eventually this draft page can replace the current scripts listing.

If you'd like to comment or collaborate on this proposal, see the discussion I started here: Wikipedia talk:WikiProject User scripts#Scripts listing cleanup project. Thanks! Equazcion ^(talk) 04:32, 25 Mar 2012 (UTC)

Cool. Rich Farmbrough, 04:37, 25 March 2012 (UTC).

Thank you very much

Thank you very much by your unselfish cooperation in Article "Biodiversity of New Caledonia". Muchas gracias por tu colaboración desinteresada en el articulo "Biodiversidad de Nueva Caledonia". 85.251.99.49 (talk) 23:10, 25 March 2012 (UTC)

You are most welcome. Rich Farmbrough, 23:52, 25 March 2012 (UTC).

"Retracted paper"?

Hi. I see that your edit summary here states "tag retracted paper". May I ask what you mean by a "retracted paper"? I suspect that it is not the meaning used by the publishing houses. Axl ¤ [Talk] 23:25, 25 March 2012 (UTC)

Yes it is a paper where there is a published retraction. If you follow the pub-med link and select "publicaiton type" at the bottom it will say "retracted publication". There were 138 pages which cited retracted publications by PMID as of 7th March 2012, three have had the cites removed, 134 have been tagged and one (retraction) has been left alone for now. Full details on WikiProject Medicine talk page. Rich Farmbrough, 23:50, 25 March 2012 (UTC).

You seem to be playing around with your talk page text. Anyway, the reference that you edited doesn't have a PubMed link. Axl ¤ [Talk] 01:06, 26 March 2012 (UTC)

Yes it does, search the author, you will see the pmid link in the references. Rich Farmbrough, 03:12, 26 March 2012 (UTC).

ISBN proposal

Hi Rich, I just wanted to let you know that I went ahead and submitted a proposal at Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)#Proposal to improve Wikipedia's ISBN Magic. Thanks for all your help with this. --Robert.Allen (talk) 19:27, 26 March 2012 (UTC)

Excellent! Rich Farmbrough, 21:10, 26 March 2012 (UTC).

Quote

User:Kotinski - for whom I have always had respect.

...find something more productive to do with my life than continually trying to present rational argument to people who aren't interested, in an environment where only the drama-mongers and edit-warriors are rewarded. ... I'm feeling a great sense of relief that I won't be spending tomorrow or the next day arguing with morons about trivia.

I know exactly what he means. The "real life" equivalent to how I feel, I suppose, would be an engineer who is working on various jobs and is constantly interrupted by a couple of guys with Home Depot tool-belts (and probably propeller caps) telling him the advantage of triangular slotted screws over hex drive, and occasionally emptying his boxes of screws in the gutter, replacing random screws with the preferred variety, and calling the police, saying "someone is vandalising safety structures with dodgy screws"... And the police believing them.

Rich Farmbrough, 22:55, 26 March 2012 (UTC).

A beer for you!

Thanks for your contribution to WP:BOTREQ! Chrisrus (talk) 04:36, 28 March 2012 (UTC)

More Expand language thoughts....

Hi Rich! Thanks for all your help with the bot! I've been thinking more about all the expand language templates, and it might make sense to combine them all into one master template with an article parameter and a language parameter, rather than having ~100 separate templates that need to be individually maintained. Would you be able/willing (I'm confident you are able to do this!) to code a bot to convert {{Expand French|articletitle}} to {{Translate|French|article=articletitle}} for all articles currently tagged? (First I would need to get permission to repurpose {{Translate}}, which is currently a redirect.) Hopefully, this would be a one-time task. I had always wanted to keep the template super simple for users, and now instead of having to specify the articletitle parameter (which they can now just ignore), they'd just have to specify the language parameter. Any thoughts about this? The only thing that is currently inconsistent in any significant way across the templates is the use of different topic categories for different languages, but I think this could be easily managed using a switch parameter in the master template. Calliopejen1 (talk) 16:55, 28 March 2012 (UTC)

Yes, this is a Good Idea. Rich Farmbrough, 09:51, 29 March 2012 (UTC).

I think I've figured out the necessary template code here. What do you think? Calliopejen1 (talk) 18:57, 30 March 2012 (UTC)

Yeah it would save a lot of edits every time the template needs to be revised at least... But it would require several thousand edits to fix of course.. ♦ Dr. Blofeld 19:03, 30 March 2012 (UTC)

A bot could just convert all the existing uses - that would be pretty simple. Calliopejen1 (talk) 19:19, 30 March 2012 (UTC)

Yes, trivial even. I'll try to look at the template, but, as usual, problems are occurring with those who see noticeboards as a forum for vengeance. This does rather dampen my enthusiasm. Rich Farmbrough, 19:51, 30 March 2012 (UTC).

Violating editing restriction

Per Wikipedia:Editing restrictions, "Rich Farmbrough is indefinitely prohibited from mass creating pages in any namespace, unless prior community approval for the specific mass creation task is documented." You have however created hundreds of categories in a short time, many of them of very limited or debatable use, e.g. dozens of categories for test templates like Category:Immediate children/Test-44 and Category:Immediate children/Test-16.

Much worse is your creation of all missing "Category:Suspected Wikipedia sockpuppets of ..." categories. These are often years old, only contain one editor or IP address (who may have gone on to completely different people), and are based on sometimes flimsy or dubious evidence. You have e.g. created Category:Suspected Wikipedia sockpuppets of Ghirlandajo, based on a tag from 2007, and where the discussion at Wikipedia:Suspected sock puppets/Ghirlandajo concluded that there wasn't enough evidence at all to link the two. However, thanks to your creation now, five years after the fact, this has been "officialized" for no good reason at all. I'll start a discussion at AN again to see how to deal with this umpteenth violation of your editing restrictions, which were imposed to avoid these kind of problems... Fram (talk) 07:24, 30 March 2012 (UTC)

Discussion is at WP:AN#Mindless creation of "suspected sockpuppet" categories from years old, with resulting problems. Fram (talk) 07:33, 30 March 2012 (UTC)

In that case the tag needs to be removed and the cat deleted. Rich Farmbrough, 09:58, 30 March 2012 (UTC).

Ultimate Spider-Woman:

Ultimate Comics Enemy, Ultimate Mystery, Ultimate Comics Doom -ComicVine.--Shawnee Smith (talk) 10:06, 30 March 2012 (UTC)

Yes, I think the IP that added the tags (not Helpful Pixe Bot) was asking for issue numbers. Comicvine is an open wiki, and, as such, not a reliable source. Rich Farmbrough, 10:12, 30 March 2012 (UTC).

• I'm sorry I just wanted to add a little bit of information, but the Ultimate Spider Woman my favorite character, only please do not remove information!--Shawnee Smith (talk) 10:18, 30 March 2012 (UTC)

  I hope it won't be removed (if its correct!) - I certainly won't remove it. There is a lot of information on Wikipedia which would benefit from references, we don't necessarily remove it, unless there's a deeper problem. Keep up the good work! Rich Farmbrough, 10:22, 30 March 2012 (UTC).
  

• Well, sorry for the question, to be honest I would like to ask how you can replace a picture of Spider-Woman in a frame and a picture of Ultimate Spider-Woman, well that without inscriptions was just in the photo without the signatures.--Shawnee Smith (talk) 10:36, 30 March 2012 (UTC)
  • Maybe Talk:Spider-Woman (Jessica Drew) is the place to ask that? (Since I haven't a clue about that article.) Rich Farmbrough, 10:49, 30 March 2012 (UTC).
    

• Clearly thank you!--90.155.142.140 (talk) 10:51, 30 March 2012 (UTC)

  My pleasure. Rich Farmbrough, 23:57, 30 March 2012 (UTC).
  

Help us develop better software!

Thanks to all of you for commenting on the NOINDEX RfC :). It's always great to be able to field questions like these to the community; it's genuinely the highlight of my work! The NOINDEX idea sprung from our New Page Triage discussion; we're developing a new patrolling interface for new articles, and we want your input like never before :). So if you haven't already seen it, please go there, take a look at the screenshots and mockups and ideas, and add any comments or suggestions you might have to the talkpage. Thanks! Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 16:45, 30 March 2012 (UTC)

Of course I would love to, but some maroon.... Rich Farmbrough, 23:56, 30 March 2012 (UTC).

Blocked

I have blocked you for a period of one month. Period is probably moot - the talk at AN is of opening a request for arbitration. If this happens, I expect you will be unblocked to participate.

The automated sockpuppet category creation is a truly monstrous failure of end-user (ie the community) testing. The community neither needs nor wants those categories - mostly if it needed them, it created them as it went along. You have succeeded in badging editors as socks/masters who were actually cleared, and you are connecting IPs with sockmasters, which is in breach of the privacy policy...not to mention that since the cases are older than Noah, the IPs are almost certainly being used by some poor innocent by now. --Elen of the Roads (talk) 23:34, 30 March 2012 (UTC)

That is a severe case of bollocks. The user pages are in the categories regardless of whether text sits at the user page. If the sock-tagging community is lackadasical in removing sock-tags, then that great big enormous huge carbuncle on their user page is the thing that is connecting the IPs with putative sockmasters in breach of hows-your-father. Good grief Charlie Brown! Rich Farmbrough, 23:45, 30 March 2012 (UTC).

Britball cannot in Wikipedia

	The Britball of persistence against all odds
	And some of them are very odd. Rich Farmbrough, 02:12, 31 March 2012 (UTC). 02:12, 31 March 2012 (UTC)