User talk:Para

Talk on: Meta — Wikimedia Commons — English Wikipedia

Archives: —2008-08-08

WT:GEO

You may want to add to WT:GEO#Conclusion. -- User:Docu

I'm a bit late to that discussion, but if people prefer a single template now over a single template with easier parameters later, and they don't mind the bot work on so many articles, then I say let them. In the meantime we can still work on the later better solution. --Para (talk) 17:34, 18 September 2008 (UTC)

Loss of semantic mark-up

Your edit here, reverting mine for the second time, removed the hCard microformat "label" property for each entry; and your edit summary falsely calmed that there was "zero semantic value" in that. Please stop removing such mark-up, especially as it seems that you do not understand its worth. As I have said to you more than once recently, there is consensus on WP to use microformats; and that includes the "label" property of hCard, to which only you seem to object. If you wish to challenge or change that consensus, this is not the way to do so. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 21:05, 22 September 2008 (UTC)

If you wish to introduce massive amounts of HTML into article wikitext and expect "anyone" to still be able to edit it, you'll need to seek consensus for it. Despite your numerous claims, nobody has supported such a format for wikitext. What you have done with microformats so far is edit hundreds of templates with similar HTML and haven't had significant complaints. That's fine, since template syntax is esoteric already, most editors don't need to edit templates and those who do most likely know their way around odd bits of html. Wikitext in articles that anyone should be able to edit however needs to stay clean. If this was the "Semantic Wikipedia" and there was a clean way for prose markup, municipalities would certainly be marked descriptively to help the editor understand their relation. With that goal, "label" fails completely. Please take your microformat crusade elsewhere. --Para (talk) 21:26, 22 September 2008 (UTC)

Guidance Barnstar

		The Guidance Barnstar
		This barnstar is awarded to Para for their excellent and continued assistance on Template talk:GeoTemplate. Thank you! Odessaukrain (talk) 13:39, 19 October 2008 (UTC)

North Sea

Hello there. You seem to answer some queries in response to the GeoGroupTemplate Do you know if this question Usage of geogroup template on one page, listing on separate page can be achieved. The North Sea article is undergoing GA review, and a map of North Sea geographical underwater and surface topography would be cool on the North Sea article.SriMesh | talk 00:42, 6 December 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for the note, I answered there. I'll have to start pruning my watchlist a bit to better notice pages I've been involved on, but that's as boring as reviewing the changes on the list! --Para (talk) 01:02, 6 December 2008 (UTC)

Wow!

		The Wise Owl Award
		Great job for your improvements to the GeoGroupTemplate‎. It works excellently on the North Sea article!!! SriMesh | talk 05:01, 7 December 2008 (UTC)

http://toolserver.org/~para/cgi-bin/kmlexport?article= broken

I don't know if this transitory or old news, but I've never had a problem before with {{GeoGroupTemplate}}'s link. Right now it gives a 500 error for the test I was conducting:

 Internal Server Error
 The page you requested could not be served. This could happen for a variety of reasons, including:

    * A CGI script failed to produce any output.
    * The server is incorrectly configured.
    * The server encountered a critical error. 

 There may be more information about this error in the server's error logs.

 If you have any queries about this error, please e-mail ts-admins@wikimedia.org. 

I hope I am correctly concluding that you are the same para as the toolserver username. Thanks, —EncMstr (talk) 19:14, 2 January 2009 (UTC)

That's me yes. The toolserver went through some maintenance at the turn of the year and some services are still down. One of them is the database cluster with the English Wikipedia, so most enwp tools that use the database are more or less broken at the moment. I should probably add some error message instead of just letting the tool's attempts time out, but like you noticed, this doesn't happen often. --Para (talk) 19:53, 2 January 2009 (UTC)

Works again![1] You can follow the decreasing replication lag at http://toolserver.org/~bryan/stats/replag/#s1-weekly. --Para (talk) 10:35, 5 January 2009 (UTC)

Harry Stott

Thanks for removing the vandalism of this article yesterday. It's a shame these can slip past me while I'm busy with something else. I'm still trying to look for an easy way to monitor a set of articles I've written or significantly contributed to. If you have any ideas... - Mgm|^(talk) 11:13, 23 January 2009 (UTC)

I found it by going through revisions that got past RC patrollers, in this case last revisions by anons, at least 30 minutes old. There's many just like that all the time, but hopefully with flagged revs they won't be as much of an issue anymore. Meanwhile, you can make a user subpage of the part of your watchlist that you really care about, and then look at the "Related changes" of that page. It'll be like a separate watchlist, except that it can provide an RSS feed of the diffs as well, since the page is public. Special:RecentChangesLinked/User:MacGyverMagic/Articles for example is probably quite a bit lighter than your normal watchlist! --Para (talk) 11:53, 23 January 2009 (UTC)

I know this may be a tiresome subject but...

I have been observing the coord microformats drama from the sidelines, and um, I can sympathize in a number of respects but I really shouldn't get into that. Could you let me know what extension or tool I should use to get Google or Yahoo maps to work with pages with coord? Using the current Firefox Operator extension, it tells me invalid data (missing latitude I think) either in the default mode where it puts the google map etc. buttons on the extension bar, or if it is in the other mode where you can get debug info. Honest question. I'm not taking sides or anything- I am just wondering if I should be using some other extension besides Operator or script or something. -J JMesserly (talk) 22:13, 3 February 2009 (UTC)

No worries, it's nice to work with collaborative people, though I'm not a big fan of microformats myself. Operator is the tool people have been using to test the microformat functionality of the coord template, so it would be surprising if there were any new problems in the template itself, but anything's possible of course. I can't find the error message you mention from the tool's source code, but there's a section "if (!isFinite(latitude) || (latitude > 360) || (latitude < -360)) { throw("Invalid latitude"); }", which sounds like what you're seeing. Is there any specific article you're having trouble with? Maybe it has coordinates with an invisible character for example? --Para (talk) 23:22, 3 February 2009 (UTC)

Using Operator in the default actions mode I get "Invalid- select for more info" for all items under google or yahoo map buttons for the coords on the template talk:coord page. Pulling up the more info dialog, the error message was "No latitude specified", but looking at the source tab, it looked reasonable to me at first glance. I have done some templates emitting microformat location data {{address}}, but never could get geo stuff to be recognized by google. Maybe I don't have the right scripts. The operator version is 0.9.3, and I just downloaded the package from firefox as is. So you don't get any invalid- messages? What's your rev # and if you have different scripts, can you direct me to a copy? -J JMesserly (talk) 00:16, 4 February 2009 (UTC)

I don't get any messages at all, it just works. I have the same version installed as you, from addons.mozilla.org, with only the "show hidden microformats" wonkery activated and no additional scripts or anything else. The action mode or Yahoo map button doesn't seem to be there in the default install though, so you may have some conflicting scripts or remnants from previous installs or something. Maybe to start clean you should try editing prefs.js and delete all lines that mention the extension, since it seems it doesn't clean after itself when uninstalling. --Para (talk) 00:42, 4 February 2009 (UTC)

Right you are. I am such a numbskull not to have checked this. I have had various versions of operator on my development machine for quite a while, and this should have occurred to me. Checked another machine and was just fine. Sorry to bother you, and thanks. I know you are getting a lot of um help on microformats, but if I can be of any assistance on that or especially esoteric template tricks, let me know. I mostly am hanging out at commons these days. -J JMesserly (talk) 03:15, 4 February 2009 (UTC)

Request for a tool

Is there any chance you would produce a ~para/coordmissing/ for {{orphan}}? I'd be very grateful. I'm having some issues with Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Orphanage‎ over its use; but generally think they might enjoy having such a thing. thanks either way - the current coordmissing version is excellent. --Tagishsimon (talk) 07:23, 26 February 2009 (UTC)

I couldn't resist helping the poor little orphans. I have a feeling that this kind of monitoring will be wanted in every maintenance related project once the possibility becomes better known, though. That's still doable, but it would be useful for category monitoring as well, a project the toolserver wouldn't scale for. Sounds like a bugzilla moment for a MediaWiki feature request (and it's probably been requested already too!). Anyway, I'll set up the queries for that template and will let you know once something interesting is visible, in a week maybe. --Para (talk) 13:04, 26 February 2009 (UTC)

You're very kind; thank you. And yes, I agree that a more general purpose implementation of the tool would be well worthwhile. I take my hat off to you for being able to do this kind of stuff. --Tagishsimon (talk) 17:26, 26 February 2009 (UTC)

There we go, tools:~para/orphans shows a week's worth of data now. Looks like the orphanage is quite stable, but I'm not sure what conclusions can be drawn. --Para (talk) 21:28, 5 March 2009 (UTC)

Many thanks. Me neither, but it does illuminate their efforts. --Tagishsimon (talk) 00:43, 16 March 2009 (UTC)

Request for consideration

I've noticed you work on {{coord}} and I've posed a comment at Template talk:Coord#Magic words that I hope you will consider. --DRoll (talk) 04:31, 9 March 2009 (UTC)

Google Earth Wiki layer

Hi Para. Could you describe procedure of wiki layer updating? How often it happens? What should I do to enforce it? --Дмитро Григорович (talk) 18:51, 6 April 2009 (UTC)

Sure, but I'm afraid there's not much we can do to speed it up. In addition to Google's About the Google Earth Geographic Web Layer page, I know that they download Wikimedia provided database dumps of the major Wikipedia languages, and then use interwiki links to find coordinates and articles in the user interface language. They used to update the layer about once a month or so when new database dumps were available, but Wikimedia has during the last year failed to provide sufficiently up-to-date database dumps and this simple approach doesn't work too well for fresh data anymore. If you're very much technically oriented, you may be able to help Tomasz in the database dump project; see wikitech:Data dump redesign and wikitech-l for more information. --Para (talk) 20:19, 6 April 2009 (UTC)

Peter Sunde

Hi. Since you understand the Swedish language, could you translate "Än idag är Peter Sunde inte svensk medborgare – däremot både norsk och finsk" into English, just so I could get an idea of what you referenced on my talk page. Thanks, Rms125a@hotmail.com (talk) 01:38, 18 April 2009 (UTC)

I would translate it as "Even today Peter Sunde is not a Swedish citizen – on the contrary both Norwegian and Finnish." Good of you to not trust Google Translate; it thinks "svensk" means American. :) --Para (talk) 01:56, 18 April 2009 (UTC)

thanks

I just had to say thanks for pointing out the recursive mode. That is absolutely perfect! tedder (talk) 04:35, 26 April 2009 (UTC)

Geonotice idea

Hi Para. I've just had a variation on the geonotice idea; let me know if this makes sense to you. I've been collecting Category:New York Public Library IP addresses, and I wonder if it might be possible to target people at the library specifically.--Pharos (talk) 01:25, 20 August 2009 (UTC)

It's certainly possible, and that's a fine idea for requests to join or contribute with something specific, but the community would probably like to have a say on how this type of behind-the-scenes appeals would be used. Someone might for example get an idea to use it for Wikipedia:WikiProject Resource Exchange/Resource Request and target very specific notices to institutions with potential new contributors, which I think would give a somewhat desperate image of Wikipedia. Or, linked to resource requests associated with a specific article and the knowledge that the viewer has access to the source, a technically advanced one? The image placeholder debate might be related, although they were implemented by changing article content and not with a software solution.

Anyway, technically it could be done on the user side, similar to geonotices with an additional request (lots of computers with net access don't know their external IP). Getting it to MediaWiki shouldn't be too difficult either, since it doesn't depend on anything external. If directed to all Wikipedia readers, the volume might be a problem though. On server side, I imagine an IP range based notice might fit in mw:Extension:CentralNotice (meta:Special:CentralNotice). It would probably work with large organizations that aren't using an external access provider and masking behind it, so that IPs can be matched against an IP range. You can find the NYPL one from ARIN here and here.

It would be great if a better geoip database existed, so that we could just draw rectangles around the library's locations, instead of trying to match net ranges. Google provides one but people would probably not appreciate the "Wikipedia wants to know your location" prompt on page views that aren't obviously about a location related service. --Para (talk) 12:35, 20 August 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for all the helpful feedback. For the context on our NYPL project, see meta:Wikimedia New York City#Wikipedia at the Library. BTW, with what you know about their IPs, are there any NYPL IP pages on-wiki that I missed putting in the category?--Pharos (talk) 12:09, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

Ok I can't see anything anyone could have against targeted notices for a project like that. To find IPs from those ranges used on Wikipedia, activate the CIDR range gadget from Preferences, and Special:Contributions/67.99.185.*, Special:Contributions/65.88.88.* and Special:Contributions/65.88.89.* will show 100+ more IPs than you have so far. Many don't have talk pages, but they must have been interested enough since they noticed that anyone can edit. Anyhoo... rereading my own comment, I think the volume problem actually makes this idea pretty hard to implement. :( Geonotices work on the watchlist page only, but that's tiny compared to all page views.[2][3]. I don't know how many unique visitors the site gets, but The Problem with Wikipedia would have to be pretty big to bring those needed user IP requests down to a level a single web server could handle. Then again, one could have a separate web server just to return the IP or the X-Forwarded-For bit much quicker. I think you need to ask someone else on the feasibility of all this. :) --Para (talk) 20:02, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

kmlexport colors

Hi, is there a way to set multiple colors for this script? This should need of course a new parameter for template coord, like color (why not icon parameter to extend the idea)...

My aim is to put on the same google map current tram stations and future stations, but with distinct colors...

Gonioul (talk) 23:35, 2 September 2009 (UTC)

I answered at Template talk:GeoGroupTemplate#Colors. Sorry for being a bit techie :) but maybe others will voice in too. --Para (talk) 17:04, 3 September 2009 (UTC)

Couple of Geonotice questions

Hi Para. A couple of quick questions...

When you click "hide" under the notice on the watchlist, that just disables that particular geonotice for that particular user, right? I.e. they would still be able to receive future geonotices, I would hope.

Also, I've just put in two combined rectangles to cover a somewhat irregular shape around Philadelphia. Is there an optimal way to code for something like this, you think?

Thanks!--Pharos (talk) 23:26, 20 September 2009 (UTC)

It hides geonotices with that id for the next 100 days. That can indeed lead to trouble if simple ids like 'NY' are used. Fixes could be to add an end date so the cookie expiration can take its time from there, and/or have the script add month and dayofmonth to the id to make sure the same id won't come up again. Changing the ids in the middle of many notices being up is problematic, as those who have dismissed some would then get the notices again. But Wikimedia sometimes logs people out anyway, so any problems with the change could be blamed on that anomaly. :)

For the area, the code is now using an array of two arrays. It could instead use an array of one or more arrays of two arrays, and the code change wouldn't be more than a few lines. On the people side, even though in the common case it's just two more brackets, the change might be more dramatic since the area would then have to be given in that format every time. It's a pain when the admin interface is to write Javascript data structures... --Para (talk) 09:54, 21 September 2009 (UTC)

GeoGroupTemplate sections

It looks like the kmlexport tool recognizes and reports the sections of an article, at least what I see from this. How hard would it be to limit the report to only one article section to support an enhanced {{GeoGroupTemplate}} which allows per-section uses with something like {{GeoGroupTemplate|section=Section name}}? The question is posed here. —EncMstr (talk) 04:49, 16 October 2009 (UTC)

Not hard at all. Here you go, the tool now has a &section parameter that takes an urlencoded section name. I haven't modified the template yet, but if the multi-level urlencoding in the template is too troublesome, I can do that too if you like. --Para (talk) 08:30, 16 October 2009 (UTC)

Thanks. And thanks for fixing the template. Any idea how to avoid the necessity of writing underscores for blanks in the template's section= parameter? —EncMstr (talk) 23:22, 16 October 2009 (UTC)

Glad you took care of the curly bracket nightmare. :) The underscores were needed when the parameter was urlencoded only once, because Google urldecodes and then the section names are no longer part of the tool url. The addition yesterday fixed that and it should be working now. --Para (talk) 09:35, 17 October 2009 (UTC)

Unreferenced BLPs

Hello Para! Thank you for your contributions. I am a bot alerting you that 1 of the articles that you created is tagged as an Unreferenced Biography of a Living Person. The biographies of living persons policy requires that all personal or potentially controversial information be sourced. In addition, to ensure verifiability, all biographies should be based on reliable sources. If you were to bring this article up to standards, it would greatly help us with the current 905 article backlog. Once the article is adequately referenced, please remove the {{unreferencedBLP}} tag. Here is the article:

1. Kaarlo Maaninka - Find sources: Google (books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL

Thanks!--DASHBot (talk) 05:12, 16 January 2010 (UTC)

Coord missing audit tool

Thanks for all your help on coordinates!

Unfortunately, your {{coord missing}} tool is now way out of sync with the current state of missing coordinates. Currently, it reports 182,737 articles with {{coord missing}}, whereas the category itself reports only 172,416 articles in Category:All articles needing coordinates. Most articles where coord missing has been removed after geocoordinates have been provided are being missed by the tool; for example, I've recently geocoded over 800 Japanese railway stations, none of which seem to have shown up on the tool's lists, and I'm sure the same is true of many of other people's edits.

Unfortunately, this gives a discouraging impression that geocoding activities have slowed down significantly. In my bot runs, I see quite the reverse -- more than half of all geocodable articles are already geocoded before my bot can get to them.

Can you do anything to fix this? -- The Anome (talk) 16:25, 24 February 2010 (UTC)

Brown dog

Please don't start trying to remove the map again. It was in the version of the article that was promoted to FA, [4] in the version that was on the main page, and is the only link we have that shows the precise location. When you last did this, I asked at the page you sent me to, and people there said it was fine to add it. I thought I had restored it, and only realized today that I hadn't. SlimVirgin ^{TALK contribs} 19:36, 2 March 2010 (UTC)

Consensus can change. The global consensus on Wikipedia supports map link removal, and the local consensus in that article does, with good reason. Why are you not participating in the discussion there, but instead adding external links that were removed by consensus? --Para (talk) 19:39, 2 March 2010 (UTC)

Please show me where this consensus was reached. On both the talk pages this was discussed before, consensus went against you, and you do seem to be on a bit of a crusade. I'm also concerned that you edit very little these days, and not since Feb 24, yet you were immediately on hand to revert me. Do you have some kind of implant that alerts you to this link being restored? :) SlimVirgin ^{TALK contribs} 19:43, 2 March 2010 (UTC)

Of course I do, though I don't see how that's a concern. Talk:Brown Dog affair#BDA.2C WM .26 COI.3F and WP:ELNO#EL15 clearly show consensus and good justification for it in the preceding talk. But tell you what: I'm not going to bother fighting over a single article anymore. Once external map links from Wikipedia are few and both of us edit less, others will no doubt take care of this one as well. Thanks for your cooperation. --Para (talk) 19:48, 2 March 2010 (UTC)

geoip problems

Hi, I think you are the maintainer of the toolserver tool used for Wikipedia:Geonotice. It was working for me yesterday, but now it is reporting that Australians are in the Netherlands. see Wikipedia_talk:Geonotice#wrong_geoip for more info. John Vandenberg ^(chat) 10:17, 9 June 2011 (UTC)

Inline coordinates are not supported by kmlexport?

Hi para, when trying to generate maps of de:Portal:Freiburg_im_Breisgau/Bilderwünsche I only get the ones having coordiates in the upper right corner like de:Caritas International. Would it be possible (maybe by an optional parameter), to also have the inline coordinates from articles like de:Warenhaus S. Knopf displayed? Best regards and thanks for the great tool, --Flominator (talk) 10:39, 6 September 2011 (UTC)

Proposal to shut down WP Geographic Coordinates & ban coordinates on wikipedia articles

This means you. --Tagishsimon (talk) 11:54, 17 January 2012 (UTC)

Toolserver question

I have a toolserver question: when you add more coordinates to an article that has the "show all the coordinates in a GoogleMap," does it add the coords automatically, and if so, how long does it take for that to happen? FYI, the edits I made were at San Gabriel Pastoral Region, as of this posting, they haven't appeared in the Google map, and I tried resolving this on IRC, but they sent me here pbp 18:28, 18 March 2013 (UTC)

In that case it should show whatever is visible to unregistered Wikipedia users. There's however caching all around, and Template:GeoGroup#Cache delay recommends modifying the url. Google will probably cache that too if you make several edits, in which case you can add some &nonsenseparameter to the end of the toolserver url on Google Maps. Both Google and the Toolserver will then process each unique url request from the beginning. --Para (talk) 18:44, 18 March 2013 (UTC)