User talk:AManWithNoPlan

Hello, welcome to my talk page!

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Attention: I prefer to keep discussions unfragmented. If you leave a comment for me here, I will most likely respond to it on this same page—my talk page—as an effort to keep the entire conversation in one place. By the same token, if I leave a comment on your talk page, please respond to it there. Remember, we can use our watchlist to keep track of when responses are made. At the same time, feel free to send an alert to me on this page about a comment you have left elsewhere.

Thank you!

Thanks

... for fixing those DOIs. It's a vital maintenance task that is not normally listed or tracked, but makes a very important contribution to Wikipedia's linkage to other resources! JFW | T@lk 19:31, 27 July 2010 (UTC)

I have also been submitting hundreds of ones that should work to www.doi.org. Many of then are already fixed. Yippee. AManWithNoPlan (talk) 17:50, 29 July 2010 (UTC)

My thanks also (noticed this fix). If you have experience in submitting DOIs to dx.doi.org does that mean it would be possible to get doi:10.1001/archinte.142.10.1816 to point here again by updating their record? Thanks Rjwilmsi 18:57, 8 January 2011 (UTC)

Thanks

Thanks for this. That had been confusing the hell out of me! How did you know they were there? SmartSE (talk) 16:32, 29 March 2012 (UTC)

I work hard to fix bad DOI's and Handles in General. So, I have just developed a sense of what can be wrong with a DOI. AManWithNoPlan (talk)

Thanks!

Hi AManWithNoPlan,

Just wanted to drop a quick note and say thanks for all the doi fixes you've been doing. I'm still working on the carbon cycle page plus the new pages I'm writing for the section and I sure appreciate any help I can get - especially on such things as citations, which I'm not the best at. Thanks again!

Daniel Lee (talk) 20:56, 11 June 2012 (UTC)

Thanks

Thank you for cleaning up my citation with the template at Negative temperature. RJFJR (talk) 14:35, 9 January 2013 (UTC)

Lightning Man

Thanks for your help with Khin Sok - that was super fast - too fast for me
All the bestWikirictor (talk) 16:31, 12 May 2015 (UTC)

PROXY

Extended content

What does 'proxy' mean? What does 'proxy' mean? BeenAroundAWhile (talk) 06:08, 1 September 2016 (UTC) There are a huge number of worthless URL's on Wikipedia that go through school specific proxy's. I am turning them into world usable URL's. Many of them are links to "tmp" files, which means they are 100% useless. On some articles, I have had to delete all the references! AManWithNoPlan (talk) 13:45, 1 September 2016 (UTC) I don't know what a "proxy" is, except for proxy voting. Is it computerese? Can you be more specific in your Edit summaries? And also explain here. Thanks. BeenAroundAWhile (talk) 04:45, 14 September 2016 (UTC) Wouldn't it be better to simply add an additional link rather than remove the one that is already there? Now I can't get into the source, which I could do before with my library card. What is the purpose of this wholesale revision? BeenAroundAWhile (talk) 04:58, 14 September 2016 (UTC) Per the external links guideline, WP:ELNO#7, links that can only be used by a small number of readers should be avoided. Also by your logic, the list of links could become ridiculously long, arguably including a link to the proxy service of every library with a Proquest subscription. Far better to just link directly to the actual site and let readers figure out how to log in with their library cards. Someguy1221 (talk) 01:07, 15 September 2016 (UTC) So, then, "proxy" means "Proxy server." I know it might seem strange to you, but there must be an untold number of people who don't recognize that term, proxy, as having anything to do with computers. I would suggest making a longer Edit summary to explain what you are doing. Your friend, BeenAroundAWhile (talk) 03:10, 16 September 2016 (UTC) I am now doing that. AManWithNoPlan (talk) 03:13, 16 September 2016 (UTC) September 2016 - Proxy Hello. This is a message to let you know that one or more of your recent contributions, such as the edit you made to Contemporary Christian music, did not appear constructive and have been undone. Please take some time to familiarise yourself with our policies and guidelines. You can find information about these at our welcome page which also provides further information about contributing constructively to this encyclopedia. If you only meant to make test edits, please use the sandbox for that. If you think I made a mistake, or if you have any questions, you may leave a message on my talk page. Bare URLs are not appropriate as they can cause [[[Wikipedia:Link rot|link rot]]. Please stop changing fully formatted references back to bare URLs. Walter Görlitz (talk) 06:23, 8 September 2016 (UTC) yes, but removing titles that are wrong is a useful thing. Also, some one with Oxford music access should put in the correct titles. AManWithNoPlan (talk) 13:27, 8 September 2016 (UTC) cleaning up proxy URL's is my latest project. By removing the proxy, now many of them are world link able. Unfortunately, many require a login and "login" is a silly title AManWithNoPlan (talk) 13:34, 8 September 2016 (UTC) I am now using my library card access to add titles AManWithNoPlan (talk) 15:11, 8 September 2016 (UTC) I don't understand what you mean by "library card access" in your particular case. Can you elucidate? Maybe there should be a WP:Essay somewhere to explain this matter. Yours in Wikidom, BeenAroundAWhile (talk) 03:05, 16 September 2016 (UTC) I try to use the proquest url and it asks me what my library district is, then I type in my library card number and it gives me the information about the link. If my library is paying for that data, then I can also see the full article. AManWithNoPlan (talk) 03:09, 16 September 2016 (UTC) This is cool. Can you write up an WP:Essay on this? I will help if you want. BeenAroundAWhile (talk) 03:17, 16 September 2016 (UTC) Discussion of Proxies There is currently a discussion at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents regarding an issue with which you may have been involved. Thank you. BeenAroundAWhile (talk) 05:05, 14 September 2016 (UTC) Just to let you know, I closed it a moment ago. --Lemongirl942 (talk) 04:12, 15 September 2016 (UTC) thank you AManWithNoPlan (talk) 10:54, 15 September 2016 (UTC) ProxyURL, use AWB Hey! I saw some of your work on the proxy urls: that seems like something that could move a lot quicker with a semi-automated tool, like WP:AWB or a WP:Bots. Have you thought about requesting access to one or both? Sadads (talk) 21:31, 16 September 2016 (UTC) I have, but so far there is so much variety and some proxy URL's can't be fixed. AManWithNoPlan (talk) 22:20, 16 September 2016 (UTC) Proxy? Greetings! I noticed that you've been making some fixes to a series of articles about South Carolina Supreme Court justices that I set up a while back. That's great. I plowed through those people and created baseline entries for each of them, and I was hoping they might attract a little more attention than they have. It looks like a lot of the fixes involve "removing a proxy." I have to admit that I'm really most interested in the underlying content of articles and not all of the background machinery that goes into the coding. But, I'm open to learning. Can I ask for a super simple explanation of what exactly is being changed? If you can explain it to super low brow terms, I'd like to make sure that I am not making the same mistake elsewhere. Kevin ProfReader (talk) 02:21, 20 September 2016 (UTC) some URL's are unique to a specif library's computers. It might be obvious like www.xxxx.com.mylibyary.org should be changed to www.xxxx.com, but some are less obvious like mylibrary.org:1234 should be www.xxxx.org. In the case of proquest.com, by removing the proxy it makes it possible for anyone with a library card can access it ---- although you might just see the title if your library hasn't paid for it. AManWithNoPlan (talk), as a Ph.D. I find working on the nuts and bolts a nice distraction from content AManWithNoPlan (talk) 02:51, 20 September 2016 (UTC) I sent a note to the Los Angeles Public Library to get some help on logging into Proquest with their password, or whatever I need. BeenAroundAWhile (talk) 19:52, 3 October 2016 (UTC) Arizona proxies/Proquest Hello. Thanks for your work on this. I noticed these too yesterday. I checked some of them but found that on occasion they used a citation that was unrelated to the content. I referred it to an administrator here. Karst (talk) 14:00, 30 September 2016 (UTC) This is a bot that is about to run and clean up a bunch of these. The proxys are lame, but the authentication in the title is amazingly lame AManWithNoPlan (talk) 14:14, 30 September 2016 (UTC)

BeenAroundAWhile

I don't appreciate your removing the so-called "proxy" from the Bolton Hall (California) article, not from any of the others which you have "fixed," because now thousands of people with L.A. Public Library cards can't get in to follow the link. I'm sure you didn't think of this, but how are we now to see what the source said? BeenAroundAWhile (talk) 05:16, 18 November 2019 (UTC)

I am very aware of this problem, but Wikipedia has actual policies against proxy urls. People just need to login with a library card. The links before are accessible by a few people who are physically at a library, while the fixed links are accessible to anyone in the world with a library card from most libraries. AManWithNoPlan (talk) 11:54, 18 November 2019 (UTC)

Citation bot

Hey, thanks for another suite of fixes to Citation bot; you'll be delighted to learn that after a very long-awaited free weekend I've finally beaten the issues that had held me back from rolling the bot out to production, so all your hard-written fixes are now live! Yay!

Now that we have a CI setup that I'm confident in (and I'm more confident in how it operates), I'm going to suggest a more positive approach to bug fixes. I don't think we need to make as extensive use of the development branch as we have been, so suggest now that we work directly on the master branch, using a separate pull request for each bug. If each pull request includes a test case that addresses the bug (ideally by modifying an existing test case, to avoid test suite bloat), then when the PR goes green on Travis, I'll merge it directly into master and pull it to the production site so that the fix is available immediately. We can use the development branch for more significant infrastructure-level changes as and when these are necessary (which is hopefully rarely).

Cheers, and thanks again for your help in maintaining the bot. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 07:31, 23 July 2018 (UTC)

Thanks!

Hi, thanks for cleaning up the jstor cites on several pages. I apologize, those were generated automatically by visual editor. I'm curious if the right way to go is to use WP:UCB for all similar references moving forward as I've not been used to doing so on the source editor environment. Verbosmithie (talk) 02:47, 12 May 2019 (UTC)

In your editing preference you turn on "Citation expander: automatically expand and format citations using Citation bot" and then you can use it. As for the "easy" way to use it, I often just put urls or doi's into refercence like <ref>http://www.jstor.org/stable/dsafdfd</ref><ref>10.234132/3241234</ref> and then run the bot. I should note that some jstors do not get recognized, and might require you to explicitly <ref>{{cite journal|jstor=34231234faddfasdfdas}}</ref> AManWithNoPlan (talk) 03:06, 12 May 2019 (UTC)

@AManWithNoPlan Thanks for the great tip.Verbosmithie (talk) 11:02, 13 May 2019 (UTC)

Your edits with the Citation bot removed the italics around the publisher name for newspapers, is this appropriate?

Hello! I generally put the names of newspapers in italics inside a citation for the publisher, (publisher=name here) similar to how they are displayed in Wikipedia article titles: The New York Times. Isn't italics for the name of a newspaper the norm/standard here? I haven't found any policy which states this explicitly, maybe can you point me to one for some clarity? Thanks! ---Avatar317^(talk) 23:35, 27 May 2019 (UTC)

Could you point me to a specific example? AManWithNoPlan (talk) 23:40, 27 May 2019 (UTC)

Are you sure you don’t mean the |work= and its aliases such as |newspaper=? Such as

"title". newspaper. publisher.

AManWithNoPlan (talk) 23:40, 27 May 2019 (UTC)

the publisher is ‘The New York Times Company’, while the newspaper is ‘The New York Times’. AManWithNoPlan (talk) 23:49, 27 May 2019 (UTC)

Sorry, I should have provided a diff for the edits, I had assumed it was happening on many articles. Here: publisher=The San Diego Union-Tribune publisher=Forbes publisher=Salon publisher=San Jose Mercury News ---Avatar317^(talk) 00:23, 28 May 2019 (UTC)

The error is the use of the wrong template parameter. Publishers are not italics. Perhaps I should add a list of things put in publisher= that should be in work/journal/magazine/newspaper= (Which is automatically made italics) and fix them AManWithNoPlan (talk) 00:36, 28 May 2019 (UTC)

Once this is merged in, the bot will start fixing the citations and converting select publishers to the work parameter, which automatically does italics. https://github.com/ms609/citation-bot/pull/1679 AManWithNoPlan (talk) 04:06, 28 May 2019 (UTC)

Ah, that is what I was doing wrong, thank you for explaining that; I'll use those fields properly from now on. It would be good to improve the bot's behavior like that, because I would guess I haven't been the only one who mis-understood how to use those parameters. --Thanks!! ---Avatar317^(talk) 05:09, 28 May 2019 (UTC)

References

Why does Citation bot remove "publisher" and replace it with "work"?

Like with this edit on John Adams? That's about it. Thanks, Shearonink (talk) 12:10, 25 June 2019 (UTC)

the magazine/newspaper/journal/work is the actual thing. The publisher is the corporation. So, for example a special commemorative child’s coloring book might have publisher=NYT, but it certainly does not have work=NYT. For example two, work=Life Magazine but publisher=Time/Life or something similar. Lastly when work=publisher, you don’t include publisher. AManWithNoPlan (talk) 12:38, 25 June 2019 (UTC)

Thanks

for your work on adding new IDs like SemScholar to citation bot. This will be most useful for the broader vision of the WikiCite project. – SJ + 15:26, 20 February 2020 (UTC)

March 2020

Extended content

You have been blocked from editing for a period of 24 hours for making personal attacks towards other editors. Once the block has expired, you are welcome to make useful contributions. If you think there are good reasons for being unblocked, please read the guide to appealing blocks, then add the following text below the block notice on your talk page: {{unblock|reason=Your reason here ~~~~}}.  Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 12:28, 28 March 2020 (UTC) This user's unblock request has been reviewed by an administrator, who declined the request. Other administrators may also review this block, but should not override the decision without good reason (see the blocking policy). AManWithNoPlan (block log • active blocks • global blocks • contribs • deleted contribs • filter log • creation log • change block settings • unblock • checkuser (log)) Request reason: People lied about me and I pointed it out, so the liars got upset and me pointing it out Decline reason: WP:GAB will help you understand how to craft an acceptable unblock request. Yamla (talk) 13:22, 28 March 2020 (UTC) If you want to make any further unblock requests, please read the guide to appealing blocks first, then use the {{unblock}} template again. If you make too many unconvincing or disruptive unblock requests, you may be prevented from editing this page until your block has expired. Do not remove this unblock review while you are blocked. As you are continuing with the same accusations here, I have revoked your ability to edit this talk page for the duration of the block. These are difficult times, and we need to make extra efforts to assume good faith. That includes responding constructively to feedback and to criticism, rather than escalating by responding with angry personal attacks. As I said at ANI, if you continue the same way when this block expires, you will be blocked for longer. I have fixed your unblock request for you. Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 12:33, 28 March 2020 (UTC) I have just received your email (and I will reply shortly). Thank you for that, it shows exactly the kind of understanding I had hoped for. In the light of it, I have restored your ability to edit this talk page. If you make a new unblock request along the same lines as your email, I'll be happy to unblock (or to agree if anyone else does so first). I'll leave it to you to decide if you want that, as you might prefer to sit it out and spend the day elsewhere. Again, thank you for your understanding. Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 13:25, 28 March 2020 (UTC) for the curious. The email was a discussion of how the words “liar” and “lies” imply bad faith on Wikipedia-and elsewhere too. That was news to me. So, going forward I will work on phrases like “I think you misinterpreted such and such” or similar. I will enjoy the day long break. I rarely edit on Wikipedia and mostly work on fixing Bot bugs anyway. AManWithNoPlan (talk) 13:45, 28 March 2020 (UTC) AMWNP, I have now posted at the ANI my understanding of why you may have thought I was "lying";[1] do you have pings disabled? Did you not receive the pings in edit summary? SandyGeorgia (Talk) 14:33, 28 March 2020 (UTC) I can’t post elsewhere until unblocked. I don’t think I have pings blocked (I might be wrong). The original problem that made me annoyed was being told I had been warned before when I had not been. When dealing with bots The Who/how/what is very confusing, but I assumed bad faith on your part, when there was none. As for the sandbox, once the bot started, editing that file does nothing since it caches the file. As for the bot reverting things, that was my web browser requesting the bot again without me knowing it, so it started the run over-major wasting of the bots and people’s time. I do not know this for sure, but that’s the only explanation I can come up with for why the bot would run over a page twice. AManWithNoPlan (talk) 14:47, 28 March 2020 (UTC) I had pinged you multiple times; at any rate, I understand our misunderstanding around the "lying" accusation, and we should put that aside. You may not have received the pings is good enough for me. In the longer run, if we can't solve the underlying issue with the bot, I am still hoping to find a way to be able to edit out certain topics from your sandbox before the bot starts on them. The suites of articles I edit (autism, Tourette syndrome, dementia, etc) all have a common citation style. Will wait to see if the underlying issues can be resolved. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 14:57, 28 March 2020 (UTC) I did update the bot and the updates were accepted so that it only removes the URLs if there is a PMC also, so that the title stays linked. AManWithNoPlan (talk) 15:02, 28 March 2020 (UTC) That is wonderful news. The answers given on the citation bot talk thread were written in bot-speak and I don't speak that language, so I was unsure if the change had been made. I so appreciate it! A very frustrating aspect of this, for me, is that for more than ten years, I had a manual citation style (no templates) at FA Tourette syndrome and all of Template:Tourette syndrome articles. I switched them over to citation templates only a month ago, thinking the bot issues that had caused me to use manual citations over a decade ago were resolved. If they were NOT resolved, I would have to switch all of these articles back to manual citation method, so that citation consistency is not subject to the vagaries of a bot ! An FA must have consistent citations, and should serve our readers first. I am sorry you ended up blocked over this. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:05, 28 March 2020 (UTC) IF the bot is working correctly, adding a comment to the URL should stop the bot from removing it. I have worked hard to make sure comment imply DON’T TOUCH THIS Mr Bot. There are a few exceptions, but they are far and few. I should note that access-dates are not when someone checked to see if the reference was saying what it claims to to say, but when the url was still alive. That’s why DOI, ProQuest and such don’t have access dates. AManWithNoPlan (talk) 15:12, 28 March 2020 (UTC) Do you mean, add an inline comment? When you are unblocked, could you edit one of my templates to demonstrate what you mean? Boing! said Zebedee, is it time yet to consider an unblock here? Are there still unresolved issues? (I have not followed the access-date issue, which is different than the problem I had.) AManWithNoPlan, I pinged you at 15:11 UTC from the ANI; did you receive that ping? SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:16, 28 March 2020 (UTC) Nobody said anything about access-dates, and I don't know why you're talking about access-dates. NinjaRobotPirate (talk) 15:20, 28 March 2020 (UTC)]] there was a side discussion at some point about that a while back AManWithNoPlan (talk) 15:21, 28 March 2020 (UTC) AMWNP, did you get my 15:11 UTC ping? SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:26, 28 March 2020 (UTC) I think I got the ping. Just lost my edit to a conflict. Inline comment in the url parameter should block the bot from deleting that entity. If not, that’s a huge bug. For years the bot claimed to do that and it often did not, so I submitted lots of patches to the operator and got it working AManWithNoPlan (talk) 15:28, 28 March 2020 (UTC) OK, thanks so much; I understand now. I will watch to see if it happens again, and if it does, I will use inline comments to stop it. I do suggest you take up Boing's offer now to request an unblock, as an "early release" will look more favorable on your block log. Regards, SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:35, 28 March 2020 (UTC) SandyGeorgia I suggested above that I'm happy to unblock, but as AManWithNoPlan said he'd "enjoy the day long break" I thought it better to leave the decision with him. I'm happy to unblock on request, or for anyone else to unblock. Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 15:30, 28 March 2020 (UTC) This user's unblock request has been reviewed by an administrator, who accepted the request. AManWithNoPlan (block log • active blocks • global blocks • contribs • deleted contribs • filter log • creation log • change block settings • unblock • checkuser (log)) Request reason: resolved issues with word choices that implies bad faith in others that was not meant to be implied Accept reason: Welcome back. Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 15:52, 28 March 2020 (UTC) I'm also sorry to see you were blocked over this, and I feel a bit guilty as I was the one who started this particular rabbit running. On the upside, I'm really happy that you fixed the "minor edit" problem that concerned me, and I'll be delighted if Sandy and Andy's concerns are now settled as well. As I spend much of my time these days working on maintaining tools that bring Wikidata into infoboxes, I empathise with your desire to keep complaints and bug reports in a single place, but Wikipedia isn't neat and tidy like that. I'm even more glad that you've engaged in discourse with the editors who have had problems – it really does make a difference to the editor's experience when they raise an issue (even in the "Wrong Place™") if they get a response from a real person and they can see that they are taken seriously. One of the consequential issues is that I think we need to be clearer as a community about our expectations of responsibility. You'll find that most editors, if asked, will insist that there has to be person to "blame" for erroneous edits, whether they are made by an editor manually, or using a simple script or AWB, by a bot. I doubt that there would be many dissenting from the view that the editor who activates the bot should be the responsible person. The benefit of bots is that we get a lot of routine edits done rapidly and efficiently – we need to acknowledge that – but the disadvantage is that it is near impossible for whoever runs the bot to check all of the edits for errors – and we have to accept that as well. The flipside of that coin is that whoever triggers a bot has to pay extra attention to issues as they arise, mainly because it's the right thing to do, but also because you're likely to get it in the neck if you don't . I hope you've made some new wiki-friends (after all, we all want the same thing: to improve the encyclopedia), and I hope that Andy, Sandy, et al will feel that they can come to you if they run into Citation Bot issues in the future. Cheers --RexxS (talk) 23:01, 28 March 2020 (UTC) Cheers to you all too. It has been a hard road for all of us. But, thankfully no real trolls showed up. AManWithNoPlan (talk) 11:22, 31 March 2020 (UTC)

Thank you for your bot work

Your hard work has not gone unnoticed. Thank you. Viriditas (talk) 07:31, 1 April 2020 (UTC)

Further mass cleanup

Hello, are you done with your large runs for now? (I ask because when you're done I want to refresh the OAbot queue.) From quarry:query/31224 I still see the usual ~44k articles: many are not fixable by citation bot (unstructured citations and such), but from a small sample I think the bot would make a successful edit on some 10-20 % of them. Nemo 13:18, 7 April 2020 (UTC)

my runs are all done for now. AManWithNoPlan (talk) 13:42, 7 April 2020 (UTC)

Alright, thanks. Nemo 13:54, 7 April 2020 (UTC)

Me again

AMWNP, there is a similar issue occurring to the last time we spoke, with free full text links being removed at coprolalia [2] and dementia with Lewy bodies. Last time, I didn't fully understand where to raise the issue, or what was causing it, but I recall that you or someone told me to add a comment in the URL field so it would not continue to be removed. Will these fixes at DLB work to prevent those URLs from being removed again, or do I need to inquire somewhere else? Regards, SandyGeorgia (Talk) 13:36, 6 June 2020 (UTC)

Also at another featured article, dengue fever.[3] SandyGeorgia (Talk) 13:50, 6 June 2020 (UTC)

S2 actually has asked for the parameter to be added and for the urls to be converted. The comments should block to url to ID conversion. AManWithNoPlan (talk) 13:54, 6 June 2020 (UTC)

Thanks for responding, AMWNP, but I don't understand any of your answer. Could you try rephrasing? For citation consistency, when free full text is available, it should blue link the title in the citation. Best, SandyGeorgia (Talk) 14:11, 6 June 2020 (UTC)

semanticscholar has explicitly asked that semanticscholar urls be converted to the s2cid parameter (in fact, they pushed to have the parameter added). If you do put the link back (post-conversion), I suggest you leave the s2cid parameter in place.  AManWithNoPlan (talk) 14:28, 6 June 2020 (UTC)

there is strong talk of making doi-access=free and such automatically add the blue links you love. I hope that gets done. AManWithNoPlan (talk) 14:53, 6 June 2020 (UTC)

OK, I think I am following you to be saying:

1. An independent organization has requested that we link directly to them. Why do we give them that authority? We will now have up to five links to the same information, which is clutter. Where should I ask this question, or do you happen to know the answer?
2. I should review my edits to make sure I didn't remove any s2cids, depending on answer to 1.
3. By adding a comment to the URL field, the URLs I add (which go directly to the PDF, which is not where the DOIs or S2cids always go) will not be removed by bot?

SandyGeorgia (Talk) 16:39, 6 June 2020 (UTC)

the owner of the website linked to, requested that we link to the ID instead of URLs. As for PDF vs landing page, most editors prefer a landing page since they generally are much less likley to atop working: a lot of scemanticschlor pdf links that i found when testing the conversion code no longer worked and redirected to the landing page. The second reason is that landing pages are geneally much quicker to load and much more handicapped accesible. Many people find downloading ANY file to be evil and will not do it. I personaly, usually read just the abstract. AManWithNoPlan (talk) 16:57, 6 June 2020 (UTC)

June 2020

Your replies to my concerns about your disruptive editing in unlinking citation titles against common consensus lead me to believe that you intend to continue. I am therefore blocking you until you are prepared to give assurances that such disruption will not recur. --RexxS (talk) 22:00, 7 June 2020 (UTC)

You have been blocked indefinitely from editing for persistently making disruptive edits.

If you think there are good reasons for being unblocked, please read the guide to appealing blocks, then add the following text below the block notice on your talk page: {{unblock|reason=Your reason here ~~~~}}.  RexxS (talk) 22:00, 7 June 2020 (UTC)

This user's unblock request has been reviewed by an administrator, who declined the request. Other administrators may also review this block, but should not override the decision without good reason (see the blocking policy).

AManWithNoPlan (block log • active blocks • global blocks • contribs • deleted contribs • filter log • creation log • change block settings • unblock • checkuser (log))

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Request reason:

I am not editing anything. There is a bot that is editing pages. I am not an operator of the bot either. I cannot take part in discussions without being unblocked.  AManWithNoPlan (talk) 22:07, 7 June 2020 (UTC)

Decline reason:

Procedural decline. No longer blocked, and the block is at ANI for community review anyway. It is clear that the state of a block will rest on the shoulders of ANI, not this unblock request. CaptainEek ^{Edits Ho Cap'n!}⚓ 05:52, 8 June 2020 (UTC)

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If you want to make any further unblock requests, please read the guide to appealing blocks first, then use the {{unblock}} template again. If you make too many unconvincing or disruptive unblock requests, you may be prevented from editing this page until your block has expired. Do not remove this unblock review while you are blocked.

• The block is being reviewed at ANI. I think we need to get just a little input on the admin action. Regardless, and without taking sides, I would support ublocking if you pledged to NOT use Citation bot until this is hashed out. Dennis Brown - 2¢ 23:19, 7 June 2020 (UTC)
  • There WAS a general agreement to do this, but times change so I promise not to fire up any more runs, but i should note that I am not the bot operator, I am just a dude who writes code for the bot who on rare occasions requests that it run. AManWithNoPlan (talk) 23:34, 7 June 2020 (UTC)
• (edit conflict) In response to your claim: the edit summary for this edit clearly shows Activated by AManWithNoPlan. You cannot claim that the bot run was not initiated by you, nor that you have no responsibility for the edits made. Nevertheless, I'll happily unblock you myself if you gave the assurance that Dennis Brown suggests. --RexxS (talk) 23:39, 7 June 2020 (UTC)
  • • I think that is fair. AMan* is a known quantity, and if he says he won't, I feel we can take him at his word. If not, blocks are cheap. Dennis Brown - 2¢ 23:43, 7 June 2020 (UTC)
      • I am trying to draw the distinction between me and the bot because if I do not do that, than anyone who requests the bot to run is prone to being blocked. It sets a terrible president. "here, use this tool...you used that tool, you are now blocked!" AManWithNoPlan (talk) 23:48, 7 June 2020 (UTC)
        • • Any edits already requested, I cannot stop, since its a bot, not me. AManWithNoPlan (talk) 23:50, 7 June 2020 (UTC)
            • AMWNP, is the bot not operating on a list that you create in your user space? I know nothing of how this works, but what if you remove the list? SandyGeorgia (Talk) 00:01, 8 June 2020 (UTC)
              • The bot loads a list and stores it. AManWithNoPlan (talk) 00:10, 8 June 2020 (UTC)
                • AMWNP, I am sorry to continue asking so many questions, but your answers are sometimes so cryptic I don't understand them. Do you mean that, even though the list was in your userspace, that the bot already has them in memory and there is nothing you can do to stop it? That seems like a really dumb way for a bot to operate, but I don't speak this language ... in other words, the bot literally can't be stopped unless it is blocked? SandyGeorgia (Talk) 00:16, 8 June 2020 (UTC)
                  • • That's what it means, yes, and it's pretty much the only way the bot could operate without having to check if a page was updated prior to making edits every time which would slow things down quite a bit presumably. You send a list of things to the bot, the bot saves it internally, and off it goes. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 00:23, 8 June 2020 (UTC)
                      • So Headbomb, you are saying that even though AMWNP is blocked, we will continue to see article edits with edit summaries saying the bot was activated by AMWNP, and we will continue to need to repair them? It sounds like the bot needs to be blocked then. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 00:28, 8 June 2020 (UTC)
                        • Butting in here, but yes Sandy. Once you start the bot, the edits continue unless there is a mechanism to stop it (not likely) or you simply block it. This is why we block bots, to stop them from taking the already uploaded list and continuing to function on it. Typically, the real problem isn't the list, it is a bad line of code or instruction in the bot itself that might not have been previously known, causing it to do unwanted things. Blocking a bot obviously has less stigma than blocking a person, and is the only way to actually STOP the actions that are problematic. Blocking the person that uploaded the list to the bot does not change the behavior of the bot. Dennis Brown - 2¢ 10:33, 8 June 2020 (UTC)
                          • Thanks so much, Dennis Brown. A big part of this issue for me has been the difficulty in communication between those who speak bot, and those like me, who don't. Since I converted from manual citations (which I used to avoid these issues for more than a decade) to citation templates, I think this is my third go-round with these citation bot issues, and with your response, I now understand better what to do should it continue to happen. The community needs a centralized place to discuss bot issues like this, so that editors like AMWNP don't get hit with requests they can't do anything about. Sending us to a bot talk page doesn't make sense to me, when there are multiple issues. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:30, 8 June 2020 (UTC)

if the bot is blocked then existing runs should die pretty fast. AManWithNoPlan (talk) 00:31, 8 June 2020 (UTC)

Thank you for recognizing that a bot (and not I was making the edits). AManWithNoPlan (talk) 00:50, 8 June 2020 (UTC)

@SandyGeorgia: The bot is now blocked and AManWithNoPlan is now unblocked as I agree that his assurances should be taken in good faith.

Looking at that reply, AManWithNoPlan, I believe I'll be reblocking you quite soon if you really don't think you have any responsibility for the edits made by the bot that you activated.

I would like to ask AManWithNoPlan what steps he intends to take to restore the links removed by the bot in the run that he activated? --RexxS (talk) 00:54, 8 June 2020 (UTC)

Honestly, I do not have time to look over all the links that were removed. The S2 links were mostly (but obvious not 100%) added by the bot actually. The bot stopped adding the links because people got very angry about that for copyright reasons - so, oddly enough the bot is banned from adding them back. I wish that the citation templates would automatically add a link for doi=free or something like that. I accept a pseudo-responsibility, but not a wikipedia "your account was used" responsibility. I try to keep that distinction, since I don't like people bothering users of the bot, since it historically has lead to bugs not being reported, people being harassed on wikipedia (people running to bot on one page getting hassled), and such. Also, if I am "fully responsible" then the bot would become a tool and not need a bot approval, which I think would be really bad. AManWithNoPlan (talk) 01:06, 8 June 2020 (UTC)

But what about the time of other editors who now either have to accept the loss of the links you caused to be removed en masse or have to manually go through every edit, find the links and restore them? Are you really saying that their time is less valuable than yours? Can't you understand the anger generated when your bot run makes far too many edits to be fixed and you now don't have an answer for sorting that out? --RexxS (talk) 02:18, 8 June 2020 (UTC)

• RexxS, you need to parse your words more carefully. "I believe I'll be reblocking you quite soon if you really don't think you have any responsibility for the edits made by the bot that you activated." was unnecessary on a number of levels. Dennis Brown - 2¢ 10:40, 8 June 2020 (UTC)
  • @Dennis Brown: please feel free to suggest another form of words that conveys my refusal to accept that AManWithNoPlan can start a bot running and then deny all responsibility for the edits then made. I'll happy change my wording if you'd be kind enough to do so. --RexxS (talk) 15:40, 8 June 2020 (UTC)
    • You can stop threatening to block, for starters. Simply let the community handle it since the community has clearly indicated that your block was controversial at best. There comes a time you step back and let others handle it. This is one of those times. As a fellow editor (and I truly mean this in a friendly way), it is my opinion you are a little too close to the fire. AManWithNoPlan is accountable, and there is honest confusion on consensus, so lets slow down and let the COMMUNITY hash it out. Dennis Brown - 2¢ 16:18, 8 June 2020 (UTC)

(edit conflict) AManWithNoPlan, if you were responsible for creating this problem then you definitely need to take responsibility for sorting it out. RexxS, I have no knowledge of the specifics of this case, but in general if someone has made a mess and been blocked for it, then clearing up the mess should be a condition of any unblock, should it not? Justlettersandnumbers (talk) 10:46, 8 June 2020 (UTC)

I lack the skills to undo the actions of an approved bot doing an approved task. I find the request to "clean it up" while still blocked to be odd. A significant enough fraction of the links changes to ID links are copyright infringing copies that all the links would need to be checked by hand before adding, and in good faith I would have not only not add back the offending links but remove S2CID links for those. AManWithNoPlan (talk) 11:14, 8 June 2020 (UTC)

• Then the bot needs to stay blocked until this can all be sorted out. There are legitimate concerns on both sides but at the end of the day we need to find consensus and protect the encyclopedia. Dennis Brown - 2¢ 11:17, 8 June 2020 (UTC)

I see that opinion at ANI is that it would have been preferable to block the bot rather than the user operating it, so the second part of my comment is moot – sorry about that! Yes, I imagine the work would need to be done by hand, and presumably that is the way anyone working on it would have to do it; you have the advantage of a list of the pages you've made the change to. If you'd edited the pages yourself we could just have mass-reverted your edits, but the bot has been run by others too, so that doesn't seem to be an option – unless someone smarter than me can see a way to filter its contributions to show only those doing this task, so that those can be rolled back in bulk? Justlettersandnumbers (talk) 12:01, 8 June 2020 (UTC)

Almost all these links were added by a bot in violation of the WP copyright policies. I wonder who would be willing to undertake adding them back and take ownership of having added them. AManWithNoPlan (talk) 12:59, 8 June 2020 (UTC)

AMWNP, could you please point us to where some discussion of this copyright issue was discussed, and what is involved. For example, I went through all the bot edits to all the articles I follow, and found that many of the URLs removed no longer contained the free full text content, which (???) seems to imply that if there was a copyright issue, that was resolved by removing the full text from the link. On those where there still existed a free full text link, I added it back ... sample. Now I do not know if I am adding a copyright violation, because I don't know what the issue is or where the discussion is.

Separately, I don't believe anyone has answered yet why we are even providing these s2cid links, if that is an organization that violates copyright. Why are we now chunking up citation templates with five links to the same thing? Also, see this example of one of my corrections ... the semantic scholar links no longer contained free full text, but the lancet did, so I readded it. We need a central place to discuss these problem. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:38, 8 June 2020 (UTC)

Please don't use semanticscholar pdf links! Read their licence and the "How do I cite?" Grimes2 (talk) 15:55, 8 June 2020 (UTC)