User talk:Wbm1058

For discussion of RMCD bot edits, see User talk:RMCD bot. For Merge bot edits, see User talk:Merge bot.

Disambiguation link notifications

As these are generated by a bot, and I occasionally check or patrol the status of these, I moved them to a special archive: /Disambiguation link notifications. Wbm1058 (talk) 13:11, 18 July 2014 (UTC)

My content creator's to-do list has items so old they've grown mold

...so I moved them to the /Content to-do items subpage. Someday maybe I'll get to these... Wbm1058 (talk) 03:00, 7 October 2015 (UTC)

Wikipedia "Merge" like WP:RM or WP:AFD

There are a lot of tumbleweeds rolling over at Wikipedia:Proposed mergers... the last edit added a {{backlog}} template. Now that I'm an administrator, I've decided to focus on clearing the Wikipedia:WikiProject History Merge and Category:Possible cut-and-paste moves backlogs first. If Proposed mergers were busier, I'd make this a higher priority.

• Older discussions are at /Automating proposed mergers. Wbm1058 (talk) 03:40, 21 November 2015 (UTC)

Adding permalinks to block log entries for 3RR

Discussions are consolidated at /Adding permalinks to block log entries. – Wbm1058 (talk) 14:44, 2 October 2014 (UTC)

Deep gratitude

A big thank you for your help to clear Category:Cross-namespace redirects into its subcats. Really can't thank you enough! Joys! – Paine Ellsworth ^CLIMAX! 03:17, 24 December 2013 (UTC)

You're welcome. One final push to clear most of the rest, and then it will be time to take a break. Wbm1058 (talk) 03:30, 24 December 2013 (UTC)

Break? Whassat?! – Paine Ellsworth ^CLIMAX! 05:06, 24 December 2013 (UTC)

• Just a note that Category:Redirects to user namespace is significantly underpopulated. I was working off the list at User:Largoplazo/WP Redirects to further populate it, and worked my way through the A's. It's on my patrol list, so I may get to it eventually. Wbm1058 (talk) 02:42, 2 October 2014 (UTC)

  I finally used AWB to populate Category:Redirects to user namespace; it now has over 900 members. My technique was to Make list from source Special page: All Redirects in namespace Wikipedia: – the category hasn't yet been fully populated for other namespaces. I think all of the cross-namespace redirect categories can and should eventually be populated by bots... AWB may be able to do that with a sufficiently sophisticated configuration. – wbm1058 (talk) 16:53, 25 May 2016 (UTC)

  See HERE for the regex find & replace used for this. I manually monitored this and had to skip some that were already rcat templated; also may have missed some. wbm1058 (talk) 17:09, 25 May 2016 (UTC)

  Or the database query method used to generate User:Largoplazo/WP Redirects may be a more efficient method than my AWB special page walk-through. I need to figure out how to do that myself. @Paine Ellsworth: FYI. – wbm1058 (talk) 17:31, 25 May 2016 (UTC)

Thank you for the ping, Wbm1058! That's pretty cool stuff you're doing – and waay outside my full comprehension. Please keep up the great work!  OUR Wikipedia (not "mine")! Paine  15:26, 26 May 2016 (UTC)

VisualEditor

Numbers

Hi Wbm1058,

You asked a while ago about how many editors were using VisualEditor each month, rather than the each-day stats that are given on the dashboard. It appears that the most recent answer is that a bit under 1800 editors here at the English Wikipedia saved an edit with VisualEditor during the month of June. This represents about 5% of the people who have (ever) opted in to VisualEditor (most of whom are not currently active editors) and almost 1.5% of all registered editors who made any edit at all last month.

@Risker:, you might be interested in these numbers, too. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 23:11, 2 July 2014 (UTC)

Invitation

Thank you for using VisualEditor and sharing your ideas with the developers.

Hello, Wbm1058,

The Editing team is asking for your help with VisualEditor. I am contacting you because you posted to a feedback page for VisualEditor. Please tell them what they need to change to make VisualEditor work well for you. The team has a list of top-priority problems, but they also want to hear about small problems. These problems may make editing less fun, take too much of your time, or be as annoying as a paper cut. The Editing team wants to hear about and try to fix these small things, too. 

You can share your thoughts by clicking this link. You may respond to this quick, simple, anonymous survey in your own language. If you take the survey, then you agree your responses may be used in accordance with these terms. This survey is powered by Qualtrics and their use of your information is governed by their privacy policy.

More information (including a translateable list of the questions) is posted on wiki at mw:VisualEditor/Survey 2015. If you have questions, or prefer to respond on-wiki, then please leave a message on the survey's talk page.

Unsubscribe from this list • Sign up for VisualEditor's multilingual newsletter • Translate the user guide

Thank you, Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 15:56, 26 March 2015 (UTC)

Setting magic words

I've done some analysis of VisualEditor's setting of behavior switches, see the archived discussion. I intend to follow up on this. Wbm1058 (talk) 18:03, 16 January 2016 (UTC)

Duplicate template parameters

• File:Haut-Brion 1931 chateau card.JPG
• File:Petrus 1931 chateau card.JPG
• File:Margaux 1931 chateau card.JPG
• File:Cantemerle 1931 chateau card.JPG

Your edits reverted my fix to remove duplicate parameters and these files will soon be placed in Category:Pages using duplicate arguments in template calls. I'm not watching them, nor am I watching this page, so I leave it to you to fix the issues. --  Gadget850 ^talk 22:08, 31 October 2014 (UTC)

@Gadget850: Right, already taken care of. See Template talk:Non-free use rationale logo#Override fields. Wbm1058 (talk) 22:14, 31 October 2014 (UTC)

To do: possible merge of {{Non-free use rationale}} and {{Non-free use rationale 2}}

For that matter, {{Non-free use rationale 2}} and {{Non-free use rationale logo}} are also somewhat redundant, as show by the usage of both here. Wbm1058 (talk) 01:31, 10 September 2015 (UTC)

Headings of Requested move

Why including headings as part of a template? There is already a subject/headline box. --George Ho (talk) 08:55, 12 December 2014 (UTC)

For editor convenience. See the discussion Here. This ensures that section headers are unique, i.e., so there will not be two sections on the same talk page both titled "Requested move". The {{Requested move}} documentation explains how customized section headers can still be used, see Template:Requested move § Custom header. Wbm1058 (talk) 13:23, 12 December 2014 (UTC)

I've found (err, a beta version of my bot has found) three open RM's which are malformed, e.g., this one. The bot is not picking up the section links for these. It doesn't work when there are comments inserted between the section header and the RM template. Having the template write the section header, at least initially ensures that doesn't happen. Wbm1058 (talk) 18:48, 12 December 2014 (UTC)

• I just noticed this comment, which was posted a few days later, which I overlooked before: "It's nice that there is a default header with such precision, but if the editor proposes the change using the "new section" button and has to leave the section header blank, it's unfortunate that we end up having a new requested move section with no edit summary; there's no quick way for editors with the page on their watchlists to figure out that a move was requested. Would there be a way to check for the bot to check for new move requests that have no edit summaries and add some sort of dummy edit to notify editors that a move discussion is what was added to the page?" I'm chewing on what the best way to do this is. The contested technical requests set up by {{RMassist}} automatically populate the edit summary, but that only works when clicking on a link. Sure would be nice if there was a way to populate edit summaries by just using a template. But a followup bot edit is a good idea too. – Wbm1058 (talk) 11:49, 1 May 2015 (UTC)

See also: Related discussion HERE. – Wbm1058 (talk) 04:23, 21 November 2015 (UTC)

...and below. Wbm1058 (talk) 04:41, 21 November 2015 (UTC)

Module documentation and test cases

There's really no point to having test cases for data modules, since there's no code to test. Also, doc pages that contain a #invoke of the module itself exist so that TemplateSandbox can be used to preview changes of the module. It's fine to add "real" documentation, but the #invoke must not be disabled or removed when doing so. Jackmcbarn (talk) 20:47, 15 January 2015 (UTC)

Module:Syrian Civil War map is in Category:Pages where template include size is exceeded.

I edited Module:Syrian Civil War map/doc, and created Module:Syrian Civil War map/testcases.

Cities and towns during the Syrian Civil War used to transclude {{Syrian Civil War detailed map}}, until substituted.

Template:Syrian Civil War detailed map loads Module:Syrian Civil War detailed map.

Template:Syrian Civil War map (created 21 February 2015‎) . . . Wbm1058 (talk) 03:02, 27 June 2015 (UTC)

Emergency repair needed for Template:Rfd2, if you can do it...

Hey Wbm1058, I was doing some edits on Template:Rfd2 that I realized broke the template, but then realized that the fix might be something similar to what you did with Template:RMassist to forward the editor to the subpage in the event that they are on Wikipedia:Requested moves when they click on the link in Wikipedia:Requested moves/Technical requests. When I performed this edit, I essentially broke the edit notices if the links are clicked on Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion since {{FULLPAGENAME}} pulls the name of the page it was clicked, even if it is clicked from a transcluded page (which I didn't realize until now.) Is there a way that you might know to have {{FULLPAGENAME}} pull/return the name of the subpage (the page which the link is actually located) in the event the link is present on a page transclusion (such as Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion)? Thanks in advance for any help you can provide. Steel1943 (talk) 19:42, 8 April 2015 (UTC)

@Steel1943:

{{{|safesubst:}}}#ifeq:{{ {{{|safesubst:}}}FULLPAGENAME }} | Wikipedia:Requested moves/Technical requests | <we're on the subpage, do this> | <we're NOT on the subpage, do this>

since in your application, I believe that the subpage name changes when it's relisted:

{{{|safesubst:}}}#ifeq:{{ {{{|safesubst:}}}FULLPAGENAME }} | Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion | <we're on the main page, do this> | <we're on another page (likely a subpage), do this>

Hope that helps. I'm not that familiar with the internal workings of Rfd, so would need to study it more to give you a more specific suggestion. Maybe you can play with it in the template sandbox. Wbm1058 (talk) 22:02, 8 April 2015 (UTC)

I vaguely understand what has to be done, but not sure if I am capable of implementing it without breaking something more. I guess the way to resolve this the best is if there is a magic word or parser function that runs a check if the page is a subpage or not. Then, that magic word or parser function (I get all of these terms mixed up sometimes) would replace the text "Wikipedia:Requested moves/Technical requests" in your first example. Steel1943 (talk) 02:05, 9 April 2015 (UTC)

@Steel1943: OK, I have a test version in the sandbox. Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2015 April 9 has my "mechanical hardware" test. It is transcluding the "keep/retarget/delete" links as desired. The main page Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion shows "[ Closure: (@subpage) ]" instead. With requested moves, the subpage is always the same so RMassist just hardcodes the link to that. Here the link changes every day, so the trick is to figure out the name of the subpage that's transcluded on that section of the main page. I'm not clear on what the problem is that you're trying to solve. Wbm1058 (talk) 04:48, 9 April 2015 (UTC)

Wbm1058, if your sandbox does what I think it does, it solves the problem. The problem I am trying to solve is: After my edits, those "keep/retarget/delete" links produced an innacurrate link when clicked on their transclusion listed on Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion. Since {{FULLPAGENAME}} returns the page name that the reader is viewing, if the reader is viewing Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion, if the link is clicked, then the edit notice generated will appear as "Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion#PAGENAME closed as ..." instead of "Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/YYYY MMMM DD closed as ..." (which is how the edit notice will appear if the link is clicked on the subpage/page that is being transcluded), which break links in the generated edit notices. So, yeah, if what you did to the sandbox does what I think it does, you just fixed the problem, and much thanks! Steel1943 (talk) 07:31, 9 April 2015 (UTC)

OK, thanks. I thought that the re-listings were kept on the same page. I see how that could make the page grow too large, and indeed recall it bumping into the transclusion limit sometimes. So, it makes sense to move re-listings to the relist date, and then transcluding prevents the need for manually updating those edit-summary links. However, now it's a little harder to get to the subpages without those direct links to them. Wbm1058 (talk) 19:29, 9 April 2015 (UTC)

Accuracy

Your comments about the state of accuracy in the world on Jimbo's talk page are very interesting. I would like to explore this topic further. I'm particularly fond of your statement, "Society as a whole perhaps doesn't value accuracy as much as it should, and indeed Wikipedia editors should strive for a higher level of accuracy." Heck, I think some kind of variation on this should be our guiding principle. You've really nailed something here, and I think it's worth pursuing. One counterargument to pursuing accuracy, however, might attempt to appeal to the blind men and an elephant analogy. How would you respond to this? Viriditas (talk) 08:49, 18 April 2015 (UTC)

The best we can do is report the truth as best as we know it, and be open-minded to new information that can give us a better vision of the truth. As more "parts of the elephant" become known to us, the more accurate our "truth" becomes. Wbm1058 (talk) 14:28, 18 April 2015 (UTC)

Proposed Mergers

Since you run MergeBot and RMCDBot, I was wondering, if it were possible to create an auto generated list like WP:RM has but for WP:PM, that links to the centralized discussion area, and lists the topics to be merged (from/to/with) ? As the current MergeBot already generates arrows indicated from/to/with, it would seem a modification of template:requested move/dated/multi would do to handle such an automated listing based on a standardized talk section header.

-- 65.94.43.89 (talk) 04:42, 12 May 2015 (UTC)

See § Wikipedia "Merge" like WP:RM or WP:AFD above. Still on my back-burner. Wbm1058 (talk) 16:37, 21 May 2015 (UTC)

Whisperback

Hello. You have a new message at Kudpung's talk page. 17:10, 9 July 2015 (UTC)

• Wikipedia talk:XTools
• The xTools Archives
• wikitech:Help:Tool Labs
• How to log in to my account via SSH using PuTTY
• User:Σ tools on labs
  • Article revision statistics
• WikiHistory
  • https://tools.wmflabs.org/wikihistory/ (original German version)
  • https://tools.wmflabs.org/xtools/wikihistory/ (xTools English port)

So many things needing fixed, so little time time get to more than a fraction of them, sigh. Wbm1058 (talk) 15:06, 20 November 2015 (UTC)

Garry Newman

You're correct; Garry Newman redirected to Facepunch Studios. However, Garry newman (note the capitalisation) redirected to Garry's Mod, at least until I altered it to be consistent with the former a few minutes ago.

This was technically a mistake on my part, but IMHO understandable as names normally use upper case and it's confusing and error-prone to have two different capitalisations of the same name redirect to different places. Not really your fault or my fault, rather that it would have been better if there had only been one redirect in the first place!

All the best, Ubcule (talk) 14:28, 17 September 2015 (UTC)

Ubcule, right, that was flagged by Category:Articles with redirect hatnotes needing review, which I patrol. I try to catch those, but when you process so many, it's easy to miss one. Perhaps the module that populates this category can be enhanced to check for that; I also sometimes look at Inconsistent similar redirects, which presumably would flag this situation too. Wbm1058 (talk) 16:54, 17 September 2015 (UTC)

No problem- like I said, not your fault, perhaps slightly mine, and was just explaining why I made a minor mistake. :-) Thanks for keeping an eye on this type of thing. All the best, Ubcule (talk) 21:42, 17 September 2015 (UTC)

New interface for Special:MovePage

We seem to have lost the permalinks when moves are performed at WP:RMTR. When you hit the 'move' button a new-looking interface is presented, though the questions are familiar. Perhaps MediaWiki has just been updated? If so there ought to be an announcement somewhere. There is no recent change in RMAssist. And the MovePage command is populating the old and new title fields correctly, just not the reason field. That's where the permalink would normally be entered. EdJohnston (talk) 19:32, 24 September 2015 (UTC)

It's in the "latest tech news":

• The page move tool has been switched over to the new standard look for forms. [1]

Jenks24 has already filed a report: "you lose whatever you've previously written in the "reason" field. This didn't use to happen."

Sigh. Can these guys change anything without breaking stuff? I see the two-notifications is back, and the "Your messages" notification still says I have one unread message, even though I've obviously already read your message. They should back off this breaking change until they address this problem. Wbm1058 (talk) 20:04, 24 September 2015 (UTC)

If you can add to my report there, please do. I'm not as tech-savvy as you, so you might be able to better explain what broke (and perhaps why?). I largely agree with your other comments here as well, though I've tried to be less openly critical on places like VPT as of late because the whole developer system is so opaque – I never know if the person(s) I'm criticising is some poor volunteer doing their best with limited resources, a peon in the WMF's ever-expanding bureaucracy, or the head tech honcho. It's so hard to know who comments or complaints should be addressed to and where.

On a related note, I've tried to get somewhat involved with phabricator lately and have no idea what I'm doing. Check out this simple request (or I thought it was simple) that I made over a month ago. I have no idea if there is some sort of system for someone to ever get around to it, and if there is a system I have no idea where my request is in the queue. I'm beginning to think I should have just made the hack here on en as I'd first thought and bugger the other projects. Jenks24 (talk) 20:27, 24 September 2015 (UTC)

I'll try to take a closer look at that later. I never did completely figure out bugzilla, and haven't used phabricator much yet either. Just looked at the new "move form". So, it seems to be just a cosmetic change? Where's the improved functionality? Why are they wasting time on something that's not broken? I don't really see the point. Wbm1058 (talk) 21:05, 24 September 2015 (UTC)

Hello, Wbm1058 and Jenks24. I'm glad Jenks added a note to the Phabricator report. It's possible there is more that is broken. A person could take the expansion of the RMAssist template, click it, and show that a move request form opens up with the reason information missing. I almost had a working test case and could complete it if it is likely to be helpful. In terms of who to talk to, the author of this Gerrit about MovePage: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/185591/ is User:Matma Rex, who we had discussions with in early 2014. Someone could probably write to him directly, since he gives his email on his user page. EdJohnston (talk) 21:13, 24 September 2015 (UTC)

Ah, I see, the guy who gave us permalinks to diffs, that is a very useful feature which I use all the time. Wbm1058 (talk) 21:40, 24 September 2015 (UTC)

@EdJohnston, Wbm1058, and Jenks24: Sorry folks, I indeed broke that with this patch, and I've only noticed the comments on the original task today. It's now being handled at phab:T113718, we'll try to get the fix deployed today (if possible; it's Friday and Friday deployments are generally frowned upon) or on Monday. Please watch that task for updates. (It also appeared on VPT, not sure if you've seen: Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical)#File_renaming.) Matma Rex talk 12:58, 25 September 2015 (UTC)

Follow-up on the related note

@Jenks24: Sorry, I forgot about this, so now just getting back to take a look. Turns out your phab:T109323 of August 17 was redundant to the earlier phab:T85650 (Special:MergeHistory success message should include redirect=no on the previous title, January 1, 2015). Here are the code changes which were committed Sep 29 2015 (5 days after you asked me about this), description of the solution is: "Removes mergehistory-success message and introduce mergehistory-done so that fullurl doesn't have to be added to each translation message." Does that fix it as you wanted? I need to get back to doing some hist-merges myself to check this out; I guess I'm just too used to 'following redirects then clicking again to see the source' for this to have bothered me much. Nice to see how they hardcode default messages which individual wikis can override by editing their local MediaWiki message. I hadn't really seen how that works before. So, yeah, my experience is that once you enter a bugphabzillerarata it just sits forever [like an {{indef}}] until someday someone decides it's something they want to work on, and then one day, out of the blue, you hear that someone fixed it and it went live! Yeah! But, per Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2015-11-04/Op-ed, it seems they are now getting more serious about "surfacing and prioritizing technical needs from the community". So maybe there's hope for better follow-up in the future. BTW, I entered a request HERE. Which would help address the issue discussed ABOVE. Hoping that nobody trouts me for canvassing ;) Matma Rex, I see that you are on the Editing team. Any chance you might be able to take a break from your Multimedia work and do some "(purely maintenance)" work on the basic MediaWiki default wikitext editor inside EditPage.php? It seems to be dealing with section editing and section edit summaries in this part of the code. I was told that this is crufty code that most people would be reluctant to mess with but here I see that it's still being modified fairly often. – Wbm1058 (talk) 20:05, 21 November 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for the ping. Yes, I have seen the change (and used it since). It works just as I'd wanted so a big thanks to Glaisher who I think was the one who made the fix. (Incidentally, the little thumbs up at phab:T85650 is from me, I was hoping it worked similarly to the thanks notification feature here but have no idea if it does.) And I do think the WMF has made a serious effort try and increase engagement between "regular" editors and the developers, so perhaps I should stop whinging about them so much. Still, it would be nice if there was some sort of indication for when a bug you file is likely to be fixed, if any developers have looked at it and decided not to pursue it for whatever reason (not important, too hard, not something they're interested in), and whether the WMF-employed devs are ever planning on having a go at it – if it really is just waiting for a nice volunteer developer to see your bug and decide it's something they want fixed too, then I probably need to start making friends with some devs so I can annoy them about fixing the bugs I care about. And no worries about canvassing . I've already seen the community wishlist survey and have commented on one or two. I thought about adding a couple of proposals myself, but decided they were probably too niche. But while we're pinging devs, I'll plug them here in the hope that might precipitate some movement. phab:T12814 (note my clumsy attempts to poke someone into working on it there) would make my life a lot easier. The amount of times I have to open another tab to check whether a talk page redirect has more than one edit in its history and if so delete it so the move goes through cleanly (or forget and then have to move the talk page as a separate move) is a little ridiculous. The other one I'd love to see fixed is phab:T20104 (see User talk:Graham87/Archive 33#Unable to delete certain revision for background), but considering there has been no movement since 2010 and changing the whole schema for deleted edits sounds difficult even to a layman like me, I'm not holding my breath on it. Jenks24 (talk) 10:09, 22 November 2015 (UTC)

"Contributed patches are very welcome and the best way to get this task closer to resolution." Yea, I've found that page before. Seems like a fairly steep learning curve, but one I'm probably capable of climbing if I dedicate my life to it. Continuing ed classes in PHP and regex, if available at my local university, would be helpful. So far, I'm just self-taught in those and muddling through by learning enough to support my bots. I wonder, if I climbed that hill, would the Foundation buy me a cup of coffee? It bugs me that, while they continue to rake in growing piles of cash off volunteer labor, they can't find resources to motivate developers to jump-start tasks like this. No shortage of cash to pay for round-the-world travel though. OK, /soapbox. I hear what you're saying about stopping whinging about them so much. Pinging @Ryan Kaldari (WMF): if he cares to comment. Wbm1058 (talk) 17:32, 22 November 2015 (UTC)

@Wbm1058: I agree that the WMF has neglected the needs of the core community for a long time. Hopefully that is slowly changing due to leadership changes and the completion of large high-priority projects like Echo, Visual Editor, Scribunto, etc. The challenge is that there is a very long tail of technical needs and it's hard to figure out how to prioritize them. If you have a need that you don't think is popular enough for something like the Wishlist Survey, my advice is to write a really detailed Phabricator ticket and if you don't get any traction, try to find out which developers work in that area of the code and ping them on the ticket (using the blame feature in http://git.wikimedia.org/ is useful for figuring out which developers work on which code). And if you're able to write any code yourself, that definitely helps. I know the process can be slow and frustrating, but we're all trying to do our part. Cheers. Ryan Kaldari (WMF) (talk) 22:43, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

Thanks. I this item is up to three endorsements in your survey now. I also merged in a task where someone reported the same issue back in July 2005 – so the "bug" has celebrated its tenth birthday! Wbm1058 (talk) 23:03, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

wikt:whinge. I understood the meaning from context, but that's not generally part of American English. Wbm1058 (talk) 17:57, 22 November 2015 (UTC)

Hah, and here I thought whinging was universal. Jenks24 (talk) 09:45, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

• "So, yeah, my experience is that once you enter a bugphabzillerarata it just sits forever […] and then one day, out of the blue, you hear that someone fixed it and it went live!" Every month there is about 3500 tasks filed and 2500 closed [2]. It's harder to tell how many of the 2500 and the 3500 are the same tasks, but as of right now 945 of the tasks filed last month are already closed [3], so I guess you're looking at somewhere around 1⁄3 chance of your issue getting fixed within a month. Could be worse, could be better. (Some projects do better, for example I'm proud to report that we're closing more UploadWizard tasks than there are getting filed :) [4])
• "I see that you are on the Editing team. Any chance you might be able to take a break from your Multimedia work and do some "(purely maintenance)" work on the basic MediaWiki default wikitext editor inside EditPage.php?" Mmmmmaybe. EditPage.php really is scary and liable to cause headaches, which may be fatal. But phab:T22307 seems straightforward enough to avoid prolonged exposure ;) One reason why I would be reluctant it is that it's impossible to write a fully correct regex that decides whether some piece of wikitext creates a new section (for example, try to do it with these edits: [5]), and then we'll have people filing umpteen bugs that it doesn't work in specific cases (like it's happening now with Echo mentions). Maybe we can make the parser give us this information – but then, the Parser class is another headache-inducing one…
• @Jenks24: "Incidentally, the little thumbs up at phab:T85650 is from me, I was hoping it worked similarly to the thanks notification feature here but have no idea if it does." Indeed it does, and people get web notifications for it in Phabricator by default, although it's public who gave each token (your name appears when you hover your mouse over it). It's more like Facebook likes (the horror!).
• @Jenks24: "Still, it would be nice if there was some sort of indication for when a bug you file is likely to be fixed" Some teams track tasks they're going to work on soon in "Up next" or "In progress" or similar columns on their team dashboard, which is usually a good indication, same when somebody assigns the task to themselves or triages it as high priority. If none of this happens,
• @Jenks24: "phab:T12814 […] would make my life a lot easier." Hmm, looks easy enough. I'll look into it and see if there's a "catch" explaining why it was never fixed ;) "The other one I'd love to see fixed is phab:T20104" As you note, schema changes are a big deal when you're the size of Wikipedia, and the sole DBA has plenty of work as it is :(
• "Continuing ed classes in PHP and regex, if available at my local university, would be helpful. […] I wonder, if I climbed that hill, would the Foundation buy me a cup of coffee?" "Individual Engagement Grants" are available, although they're usually for bigger tasks. If you do get back to college, Google Summer of Code might be an option; or if you're "diverse" enough, Outreachy (alas, they both also require you to come up with a larger self-contained project). Matma Rex talk 20:24, 22 November 2015 (UTC)
• Also, I was not going to reply to this, but I'll take the bait. "No shortage of cash to pay for round-the-world travel though." I'm not sure if you mean the yearly "All Hands" event in San Francisco (which should really be called "All Employees", as contractors don't get to go :( ) or the European hackathon and Wikimania (most people only get to go to one, especially if either happens to be in a more exotic/expensive-to-travel-to location). I think the first is a great rare opportunity for remote employees (~50% of engineering people) to actually meet each other in the flesh and recognize as actual living humans (and think how much we save by not having to pay everyone the crazy SF rates :P), and the second is a nice perk which might be allowing the Foundation to keep SF people who could otherwise leave for one of the many tech companies around San Francisco with bigger budget than the Foundation. (You can find a lot of information about WMF salaries online, since it's required to disclose those for H-1B visa workers and some more through Form 990.) Matma Rex talk 20:58, 22 November 2015 (UTC)

Matma Rex, Thanks for your detailed reply.

• Looking at the specific project, MediaWiki-Page-editing that my request is classified in, I see "All Time" 1,422 opened tasks and 66 closed tasks. Page-editing is perhaps the most end-user facing project of all that Wikimedia does, so perhaps this contributes to my distorted view of the overall accomplishment rate. Overall, I find the core editing experience to be high quality, so I have trouble wrapping my mind around the idea that there are over 1400 bugs. There aren't really that many things I know of that need fixing, unless Visual Editor is included in this bucket. So, on the relatively rare occasions I do identify a bug or sorely needed feature, I guess I have high expectations that it should be addressed, as from my view, there really aren't that many problems with core editing.
• The errors with template or nowiki syntax inside section headers are there now, and this task shouldn't change that. I'd just ignore the issue, as editors don't do that often that I've seen. Maybe there's another phabricator for that one. The solution, I think is to either treat template and nowiki markup as plain text when it's inside section headers, or throw an error and refuse to save the edit. But that's something for another phab.
• I see that many (most) universities don't teach PHP even though it's so widely used on the web. So, though I have a masters degree, I'm looking at the local community college. I think the tuition's a lot less there too. I see that I'd probably start with a 3-hour HTML course that also taught CSS. There's been times here that knowing CSS would have been helpful, and my last formal training in HTML was in the stone-age of the Internet. The HTML/CSS class is the prerequisite for both a "web database development" class that teaches MySQL and PHP, and a JavaScript course. Classes start in January. I'm thinking about it. Regarding something like Outreachy, I might only qualify under "age diversity". I learned how to program a Programma 101 in seventh grade, and in high school, an IBM 1620. I learned BASIC the same way Bill Gates did, on a Teletype connected by an acoustic coupler to a GE time-sharing system. Re: that scary class, yes the concept of classes is still new to me, I don't have much experience with object-oriented programming.
• Sorry for throwing out the bait. To clarify, I don't have a problem with spending on travel, as long as it's not at the expense of support for the core of the projects. Wbm1058 (talk) 00:23, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

Matma Rex, thank you so much for your reply here, it's brilliant and the stats are quite interesting. I see that you've claimed phab:T12814 and are looking into it – again I'm very grateful. I feel a bit guilty, though, that it's only really happened by pinging you here. I would not feel comfortable just pinging devs for every little bug that I care about, but conversely I'm not sure if there are any "official" channels where I can ask for certain bugs to be looked at if it seems they have been waiting significantly longer than a month? Or is this how things are intended to operate at the moment, we should be reaching out to certain devs if we can think the bug in question is an area they are interested/experienced in? If there is someone else in the WMF who I should direct these questions to, I would be happy to move my questions to their talk page so that you and Wbm can keep discussing computing jargon that flies over my head . Thanks again, Jenks24 (talk) 09:45, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

• Hmm, 1,422 open and 66 closed for MediaWiki-Page-editing is definitely not right. I think the burnup report doesn't consider bugs closed before the Bugzilla→Phabricator migration. If you search for the list of all open/closed tasks, you get 310 open and 1103 closed. I filed phab:T119376 about this issue.
• I don't think Google Summer of Code has a maximum age limit. It seems that in 2014, there was a participant who was 57 years old [6] :)
• @Jenks24: Indeed, there isn't any "official" way to do this :/ WMF engineering operates on quarterly goals and reviews (and why these two pages are on different wikis is beyond me). If you want to affect these, then you could probably send emails to some relevant mailing lists before the beginning of a quarter. Many staff recognize this as not exactly optimal, and there's a lot of work being done "under the table" that doesn't quite match the goals; asking people directly is fine. I don't really know how this system came to be, or who to question about it, but presumably someone higher up than me ;) The mw:Community Tech team and their community wishlist survey is an interesting change and I'm myself curious how it turns out. Matma Rex talk 12:12, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

Timeline of DOS operating systems

I remember that you once intended to take your Timeline of DOS operating systems article to featured status, but did not take time to familiarize yourself with the process. Looking at that article, the only thing that is not compliant with the featured list criteria is the lead section. Basically, the only thing required to promote it to FL status would be to expand the lead section by adding an introduction to DOS operating systems. After that, you are good to go and can nominate it according to the instructions on WP:FLC. (Since this article is a list, the Good Article process does not apply.) Good luck! sst✈ 04:24, 17 October 2015 (UTC)

I see, apparently there is no "good list" equivalent to Good Article, so I can skip that step and go straight to becoming a member of Category:Featured lists, where around a couple dozen featured timelines can be found. Thanks! As I haven't made any significant updates to that since February, I suppose I'm due to get back to it and finish it off soon. Wbm1058 (talk) 11:40, 17 October 2015 (UTC)

New section test

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T22307

What will the edit summary be? Wbm1058 (talk) 22:02, 17 November 2015 (UTC)

See m:2015 Community Wishlist Survey/Editing § Generate automatic summary /* blah */ when I manually add a section heading when editing

Your support for this enhancement / bug fix would be appreciated. Wbm1058 (talk) 16:55, 18 November 2015 (UTC)

@Matma Rex: I was so excited to see you post a fix for this, but now I'm disappointed to see no further movement on the code-review for two weeks. Is there a test wiki where this is installed where I can beat on it as an end-user checking various use cases to see if I can spot any issues? Anything I can do to help move this along the deployment pipeline? Thanks again for all your help. wbm1058 (talk) 16:32, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

Sorry, it's just a personal project for me. I need to work on it some more (see the TODO items at https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/281470/1) and I just didn't feel like it (I've already done all the interesting work and only the boring parts remained :( ). It's not available on any testing wiki.

If you want to try it out, you could try setting up a MediaWiki instance on your computer with a Vagrant virtual machine (mw:MediaWiki-Vagrant#Quick_start), this shouldn't require a lot of technical knowledge (beyond knowing the basics of command line interfaces). System requirements: 64-bit OS (Windows/Linux/Mac, all fine), processor with support for VT-x (almost anything that isn't ten years old should work) a couple gigabytes of disk space for the virtual machine, and a bunch of RAM (I'd say 4 GB or more should be okay, looks like the VM requires at least 1.5 GB). Ping me at #wikimedia-dev ^connect if you're interested and need help :D Matma Rex talk 19:21, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

• #185/265 in the 2016 Community Wishlist Survey results (down from #43/107 in the 2015 Community Wishlist Survey results): Generate automatic summary when manually adding a section heading — wbm1058 (talk) 17:38, 6 January 2017 (UTC)

New section to test German tool

This is just some random comment. Wbm1058 (talk) 03:22, 11 January 2016 (UTC)

I was testing de:User:Perhelion/sectionSummary.js (see w:de:Benutzer:Perhelion/sectionSummary), and while I think it's a good idea, I found its implementation still has kinks to be worked out. Wbm1058 (talk) 17:49, 17 January 2016 (UTC)

Many thanks for updating SCOTUS infoboxes

I'm sure it took a fair bit of work to update the Court composition parameter for the SCOTUS infobox (not to mention the updates you did for the individual cases). I want to personally thank you for your efforts; your willingness to go the extra mile is one example of what makes this community a great place. Best, -- Notecardforfree (talk) 21:15, 15 February 2016 (UTC)

Thanks, no problem. AutoWikiBrowser made it go a lot quicker. Wbm1058 (talk) 21:19, 15 February 2016 (UTC)

• Template:Infobox SCOTUS case
• Template:Infobox SCOTUS case/doc
• Template:Infobox SCOTUS case/courts

These will need updated again when a new nominee is confirmed. wbm1058 (talk) 01:40, 13 May 2016 (UTC)

Followup on Interactive Brokers/Thomas Peterffy

Hi again Wbm,

I remembered your comments at Talk:Thomas Peterffy that went into further detail about Interactive Broker's company structure. I was rehired by them to contribute more to IB's article, and also merge the two back together. My new draft is located here; I still have images to process before I have people at IB and WP review it. As an occasional COI editor, I'm used to the whole process including having an uninvolved editor publish the draft, which is the final step for this. I'd be interested if you would share your thoughts, of course, I may hope to make it become the first FA in the topic of finance.

More importantly, I remember that your changes to Thomas Peterffy's article were left incomplete (compare pages), and I'd be very glad if more of this could be completed again. Thank you, ɱ (talk) · vbm · coi) 16:44, 14 June 2016 (UTC)

@Ɱ: You mean we don't yet have a single featured article in the topic area of finance? Incredible. Your COI disclosures & conduct are exemplary. I feel your pain re being taken to AfD as a "reward" for your disclosures. Just noting your recent editing of User:Ɱ/Thomas Peterffy2 should I use some of that? Would be nice to get the full birthdate into his bio, though I was getting mixed signals from you regarding what IB approved of and I'm unsure of the reliability of that Hungarian source. wbm1058 (talk) 22:06, 15 June 2016 (UTC)

Hey thanks, I'm glad. I took a further look at FAs, at first I only looked at the Finance Wikiproject. However the Business, economics, and finance section of the list has a few vaguely related; the only one really related to Wall Street-type finance is the Panic of 1907. In 2014 and a little bit this year I wrote the more full biography of Peterffy at that sandbox. I did plenty of research and was very interested in everything that I found, however in the end IB didn't want me to add any new information regarding Peterffy; he's a really private person. I reminded them however that all the content I used is fully public, so there's nothing stopping anyone outside the company from adding it. As for the birthdate, there is one source that more-or-less claims it as 9/29, not 9/30. It's all up to you, we could even list both. ɱ (talk) · vbm · coi) 22:28, 15 June 2016 (UTC)

Nomination of Pygments for deletion

A discussion is taking place as to whether the article Pygments is suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia according to Wikipedia's policies and guidelines or whether it should be deleted.

The article will be discussed at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Pygments until a consensus is reached, and anyone is welcome to contribute to the discussion. The nomination will explain the policies and guidelines which are of concern. The discussion focuses on high-quality evidence and our policies and guidelines.

Users may edit the article during the discussion, including to improve the article to address concerns raised in the discussion. However, do not remove the article-for-deletion notice from the top of the article. GeoffreyT2000 (talk) 04:07, 25 August 2016 (UTC)

Category:Pages with syntax highlighting errors is related to this. Still needs to be addressed. wbm1058 (talk) 20:30, 26 September 2016 (UTC)

Race Against the Machine

Hi wbm, I see you mention this book on your user page. Does the main thesis have implications for how Wikipedia works, and if so, on what time scale? - Dank (push to talk) 15:57, 28 August 2016 (UTC)

A main thesis of the book is that accelerating technology improvements will reduce employment, and over time this will effect more higher-skilled occupations. We see this already with jobs coming back to the US from China... because they are replacing people with bots. Yes, a few more jobs for Americans who are skilled at bot development, operations and maintenance. But way fewer jobs than were displaced in China. Of course, at Wikipedia there are relatively few editors that work for money. We already have very intelligent bots such as ClueBot NG that help tremendously with tasks such as vandalism reversion. That one has over 4 million edits now! Bots also help with spelling corrections. There could be further enhancements to these tasks that could reduce the need for new page patrollers and spelling correctors. Time scale is dependent on volunteer contributions, or possible funding by the Wikimedia Foundation. wbm1058 (talk) 17:29, 28 August 2016 (UTC)

Thanks. The future seems to be coming at us pretty fast. I try to stay informed-but-neutral. - Dank (push to talk) 17:50, 28 August 2016 (UTC)

Year nav/dab

Hi Wbm1058, for year nav/dab templates, I've compiled a rough list of the top candidates for changes here, if you're interested. While I was not a proponent for change in the first RfC, I remarked that I may be interested in making template changes if consensus emerges in the second RfC. Thanks for that note under the "AD" section. Anyway, just an FYI — Andy W. (talk · ctb) 17:26, 6 October 2016 (UTC)

While you are in {{Decades and years}}, is there any chance you can fix the "0s BC" decade to point to 9–1 BC? I think it's in /row. I'd do it, but I'm on my smartphone, and I'm too likely to make a misteak. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 19:59, 12 November 2016 (UTC)

Hi Arthur, thanks for reminding me of this section on my talk page. I've taken note of your wishlist at Template talk:Decades and years. Yes, I've been trying to fix that. That template has so many levels of sub-templates, it's like opening up a Russian doll. Note my research to figure it out at Template:Decades and years/testcases, and I also added a documentation subpage to Template:Decades and years/yearlink. Note that this subtemplate points to 100s when it should point to 100s (decade). The problem here is that the template was originally written when the convention was to name the "first decade of the century" pages as 100–109, but when that was moved to 100s (decade) on 30 November 2011‎, that sort of broke this template. So then GeoffreyT2000 tried to fix it on 11 August 2015, but I'm not sure whether that's the right "Russian doll" to patch. I'm working on sorting it all out. Instead of linking to 9–0 BC though, it should really link to 0s BC (decade) and that should redirect to 0s BC. I can't imagine doing this on a phone, but then I'm kind of a retro-grouch when it comes to phones as I'm still on a 2G phone. I know I'm gonna need to upgrade to a new phone soon though. Just need to take some time off from Wikipedia to go shopping! Don't worry about making a misteak though, you can't do that on a smartphone. That's something you get when you leave your steak on the charbroiler too long ;) Best, wbm1058 (talk) 20:40, 12 November 2016 (UTC)

Birth dates in biographies and California Law AB-1687

Here's an interesting news item: California Enacts Law Requiring IMDb to Remove Actor Ages on Request

I participated in an interesting conversation about this here. I'd be interested in hearing from others who are interested in this. What do you think? wbm1058 (talk) 22:16, 13 October 2016 (UTC)

• Revealing an actor's age is illegal? IMDb website sues California wbm1058 (talk) 22:09, 11 November 2016 (UTC)

Invisible orphan template

Per this edit of yours to template code, why is the orphan template sometimes hidden? I was very surprised when I made this edit and the template disappeared from view. SpinningSpark 22:54, 30 November 2016 (UTC)

Hi, maybe I should add a FAQ to my talk page? See User talk:Wbm1058/Archive 4 § Orphan tags no longer default display. Also read the Template:Orphan documentation, and let me know if you still have any questions after that. The community seems to have problems with any creative solution I come up with to implement compromises to resolve contentious debates. My "page cache" solution for lengthy lists of TV episodes (List of The Simpsons episodes and List of Survivor episodes) wasn't totally accepted, and my idea for resolving the "New York debate" isn't getting any traction either (m:2016 Community Wishlist Survey/Categories/Editing#Administrator- and Page mover-editable display titles, that make more than cosmetic changes to the title). I guess people would rather argue until either their jaw drops off or they get their way, rather than compromise. Sorry, I know you just asked an innocent question and just got more answer than you bargained for... /soapbox wbm1058 (talk) 23:12, 30 November 2016 (UTC)

Yes, I had read the documentation page and realised it was a deliberate feature. What the documentation page does not say is what the purpose of the feature is. Perhaps you would get fewer inquiries if it did. SpinningSpark 00:11, 1 December 2016 (UTC)

Good point, thanks. wbm1058 (talk) 01:01, 1 December 2016 (UTC)

I added a new Rationale section to the Template:Orphan documentation. wbm1058 (talk) 01:47, 1 December 2016 (UTC)

Template:Campaignbox American War of Independence: West Indies

Regarding your change of the protection settings on {{Campaignbox American War of Independence: West Indies}}, was there a reason that you chose not to consult me, as the protecting admin? Ultimately, I don't really care about the template and would have agreed with your suggestion, but (rightly or wrongly) there was a reason why I set the protection settings as I did and frankly I feel that common courtesy would have been for you to discuss it first. Regards, AustralianRupert (talk) 07:45, 2 December 2016 (UTC)

@AustralianRupert: Sorry about that, I just reverted my protection-change there. I was patrolling Category:Wikipedia pages with incorrect protection templates for the first time, so was working in somewhat unfamiliar territory. The issue was actually that the template protection was transcluded to American Revolutionary War, causing a somewhat hard-to-track-down error. So the needed fix was to noinclude that (as described by the instructions on the category page). I probably should have reverted myself as soon as I realized the problem, as I understand your rationale now for giving it template- rather than admin- protection, even though it's not high-risk. So again, sorry for the slight, and please do sandwich pp templates on template pages inside noinclude tags as the error is tricky to track. Best, wbm1058 (talk) 14:03, 2 December 2016 (UTC)

No worries, thanks for your reply. Sorry for muffing the protection template. I guess we were both working in unfamiliar territory as I wasn't aware of that issue. Regards, AustralianRupert (talk) 22:16, 2 December 2016 (UTC)

G'day, hope you are well. Just letting you know that I have removed the protection from this template (and Template:Campaignbox Third Anglo-Maratha War), as it is probably no longer necessary. I have attempted to correct the messy history that developed as a result of its earlier move (which had been the catalyst in me protecting it in the first place). If you have any concerns, please let me know. All the best. Regards, AustralianRupert (talk) 01:17, 11 January 2017 (UTC)

Caribbean theater of the American Revolutionary War

Hello, would you mind to tell me the rationale to create the redirect? Except for the above template it wasn't linked anywhere, and it's misleading as there isn't a proper place to point it. Best regards. Bertdrunk (talk) 01:49, 7 December 2016 (UTC)

These pages link to Caribbean theater of the American Revolutionary War.

I'm not sure if they all just transclude one of these templates but if that's not the correct title to link to then feel free to change it. My understanding is that it refers to naval battles fought in the Caribbean region, but I'm not responsible for creating any of this. I just stepped in when someone made changes that left red links behind. If the configuration of this topic area is changed then all the links need to be tended to properly so that nothing's broken. That's all I'm checking for.

I note that American Revolutionary War has an infobox Template:Campaignbox American War of Independence: West Indies, the title of which is American Revolutionary War: Caribbean theater and if I click on Caribbean theater that redirects you right back to American Revolutionary War which is a circular link, and that's a no-no. Are you trying to write the Caribbean theater out of the war, or what? I don't follow what the objective is here. wbm1058 (talk) 02:21, 7 December 2016 (UTC)

Bertdrunk, I note that at 03:45, 29 September 2016‎ Yamakkusa moved page Caribbean theater of the American Revolutionary War to Action of 11 September 1779. Does the Action of 11 September 1779 constitute the entire "Caribbean theater"? The campaign box implies it was one of many. Then someone hacked up the former article so it now just covers one single battle? So you had a detailed article about the Caribbean theater that was entirely "summarized" and duplicated in it's parent article Naval battles of the American Revolutionary War, so now it redirects to the parent? Someone's sloppily made a quick and dirty mess here, and left it for others to clean up, apparently. wbm1058 (talk) 02:34, 7 December 2016 (UTC)

Hello, and thx for the answer. Well, as they say down here, let's start by parts. When I saw that you had created the redirect, I pointed it to the ARW cause I'm unaware of any page dealing with the topic, if there's a topic at all. I thought of asking you about it, cause soon or later someone could be linking it, but let it be. So more soon than later a genius today added it to the ARW campaignbox, pointing it to itself because of the redirect, creating a nice circular template that don't go anywhere and providing the links you pointed out. I know that because somedays ago there was only one link left that I correct.

As far as I'm aware there was an article in the primordium, that got merged/melted/hacked into pieces over the years and ended disappearing sometime ago. I remember that there was a history somewhere but I can't find it anywhere, and the article you linked is from a battle in South Carolina. I was just wishing for a solution that don't require correcting wrong incoming links from time to time, but now that you're saying there's mischief around I don't know anymore. Bertdrunk (talk) 03:33, 7 December 2016 (UTC)

Actually, at 18:28, 1 December 2016 I restored page Caribbean theater of the American Revolutionary War (3 revisions restored: invalid rationale for deletion; created as the result of a page move) so I didn't create it; I restored a page which should not have been deleted. I was hoping someone else who works the topic area would notice and sort it out. I suppose I may need to do that if nobody else does soon. Thanks, wbm1058 (talk) 03:40, 7 December 2016 (UTC)

The trouble started at the end of Sept. / beginning of October, so its gotten a little stale. wbm1058 (talk) 03:42, 7 December 2016 (UTC)

Curious for some feedback...

What would you name this template if it were published? (Also, please excuse the rough "/doc" page included; I'm still working out how to simplify it.) Steel1943 (talk) 10:20, 8 December 2016 (UTC)

@Steel1943: Interesting. Template:Navigation link? Not sure I like the idea of section links in navboxes; these links should be for significant topics and I'm not sure about encouraging more creeping "navigation-box clutter", though there may be exceptions where it makes sense. The second application, to help with link-cleanup, I need to see how that works, but potentially very helpful. - wbm1058 (talk) 13:11, 8 December 2016 (UTC)

Jimbo award?

Could you please mark here in response to this question, where it is documented that there is a "Jimbo's prize for the oldest vandalism reversion of the week"? - 68.87.42.110 (talk) 21:45, 9 December 2016 (UTC)

Oh, it's just a rhetorical device. I'm not sure whether such a prize would actually be a good idea. wbm1058 (talk) 22:17, 9 December 2016 (UTC)

Democratic organisation listed at Redirects for discussion

An editor has asked for a discussion to address the redirect Democratic organisation. Since you had some involvement with the Democratic organisation redirect, you might want to participate in the redirect discussion if you have not already done so. - CHAMPION ^{(talk) (contributions) (logs)} 05:09, 13 December 2016 (UTC)

Merry Christmas!

Hello Wbm1058: Enjoy the holiday season, and thanks for your work to maintain, improve and expand Wikipedia. Cheers, Class455 (Merry Christmas!) 17:47, 18 December 2016 (UTC)

Spread the WikiLove; use {{subst:Season's Greetings1}} to send this message

Templates for deletion for deletion

See also: Wikipedia talk:Requested moves § Archive and search, and Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 152 § Search prefix:

{{Search deletion discussions}} and {{Search prefixes}} and all that authors other stuff should probably be deleted after emailing him. His {{Create parameter string}} is used but not well.

For now, I'd fix wp: Deletion process § Search all deletion discussions with a search link for each of the fullpagenames in wp:Deletion process § Step-by-step instructions (all discussion types).

I would. And I'd be glad for an invite to help you with any queries or discussions on this matter. — Cpiral§Cpiral 05:57, 21 December 2016 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 61 § is there a way to search several sections with one search? – June 10–17, 2009

And User talk:Rainman § modification to search several Wikipedian sections at one time – June 15–17, 2009

And User talk:Stmrlbs/Archive/001 § multiple prefixes – June 15–17, 2009

June 17, 2009 Help:Searching documentation update, alas documentation of this multiple-prefixes-separated-by-pipes feature was removed on October 11, 2009 when this was rewritten, to try to improve usability

"To search multiple sections of Wikipedia with different prefixes, enter the different prefixes with a pipe delimiter."

"This should be especially useful for archive searching in concert with inputbox or searchbox."

• MediaWiki search engine improved, 10 November 2008
  • en.wiki migrated to new search backend, June 2, 2009. Wikitech-l
• Initial import of rewritten Lucene-Search extension
  • History No commits between August 2007 and March 2010. So where is the June 2009 change to support this?

@Cpiral: so clearly prefix did at least briefly take pipes. Unfortunately, the volunteer developer of that, Rainman, isn't active any more either, and I haven't been able to locate his code changes that implemented that feature. – wbm1058 (talk) 02:48, 30 December 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for the history lesson. Interesting. Maybe useful.

Anyway, for now we have wp:deletion process#Search all deletion discussions. Hope that helps. — Cpiral§Cpiral 07:59, 30 December 2016 (UTC)

None of those redirects should go to Sense

None of those redirects should go to Sense -- which is a problematic article, and I have already tagged for merging. As a user I got very confused by the bad Sense article and it took me a long time to find the information I was looking for, which is in Sensory system. So when you claim we need to be consistent, we should be consistent forward in the good direction, not backward in the bad direction. LaurentianShield (talk) 23:36, 30 December 2016 (UTC)

Regarding Arsh Shah Dilbagi

I have been managing the page for a while but there are severe problems pertaining to Wiki policies. Kindly check if you can contribute to rectify the same otherwise the page will be deleted soon.

SteveDorf (talk) 05:44, 31 December 2016 (UTC)

Happy New Year, Wbm1058!

Happy New Year!

Wbm1058,
Have a prosperous, productive and enjoyable New Year, and thanks for your contributions to Wikipedia.
Class455 (talk | stand clear of the doors!) 18:35, 1 January 2017 (UTC)

   Send New Year cheer by adding {{subst:Happy New Year fireworks}} to user talk pages.

Happy New Year, Wbm1058!

Happy New Year!

Wbm1058,
Have a prosperous, productive and enjoyable New Year, and thanks for your contributions to Wikipedia.
Donner60 (talk) 09:37, 2 January 2017 (UTC)

   Send New Year cheer by adding {{subst:Happy New Year fireworks}} to user talk pages.

User:RMCD bot has a log somewhere?

Hi Wbm1058. Just lately I needed to search through the December history of WP:RMTR to see if a certain page had been moved through a request there. (The person who did the move did not clearly document why, but hinted that a move request was involved). While doing so it occurred to me that if RMCDbot made a log of its actions, I could quickly check if there was a related RM, even though that's not not exactly the problem that I was having at RMTR. So, is there a log that the bot makes in its daily work that shows where the discussions are, or the names of the pages proposed for moving?

A follow up to our conversation from 2013, wanting permanent links to closed AN3 reports: User talk:Wbm1058/Adding permalinks to block log entries. I solved this for my own use by putting the diff of my AN3 closure in the block message, when I post on the user's talk. For instance here. This still doesn't get the link to the report into the actual block log, but it makes it easier to find things later. And the diff survives any archiving that the user may do of his own talk. The link still works after the AN3 report is archived.

Since we last talked about this, you've made further progress in the area of RMTR, since you now get the rationale into the edit summary. Very convenient! Thanks, EdJohnston (talk) 19:18, 8 January 2017 (UTC)

@EdJohnston:

1. The bot doesn't create any long-term logs, but Wikipedia:Requested moves/Article alerts includes a list of recently closed discussions, and there are two archives of that – maintained by AAlertBot:
   • Wikipedia:Requested moves/Article alerts/Archive, September 2016 and earlier
   • Wikipedia:Requested moves/Article alerts/Archive 2, September–December 2016

   See Wikipedia talk:Requested moves#Archive and search. I response to that I intend to implement a new search box on that page. More powerful searching techniques from the group at WMF tasked with implementing the "discovery knowledge engine" would help with that, though.

   Is that helpful, or is there something else more specific I could work on that would be better?

2. It's been a long time since I looked at blocking. I've kept in on my talk page though, it's near the top. I generally avoid archiving stuff that hasn't been resolved. I didn't have the admin tools when I worked on this, but now I have them doing technical work in this area should be easier. Would you like me to see what I can do to put permalinks in the block log?
3. Actually, putting the RMTR rationale in edit summaries was the work of others. They also created the sub-template Template:RMassist/core, which leaves less template-code clutter on the RMTR page. See Wikipedia talk:Requested moves/Archive 29#Reason in move summary.

—wbm1058 (talk) 20:18, 8 January 2017 (UTC)

You could also search the bot's edit summaries for the month of December. wbm1058 (talk) 20:42, 8 January 2017 (UTC)

Sorry about that

Regards: Velocity-addition formula I'm new. The subsection was already hidden; I've been doing my best to fix it. Should the warning have gone just above the subsection? Kebl0155 (talk) 19:12, 11 January 2017 (UTC)

Hi Kebl0155, you should choose the most appropriate template from the selection at Wikipedia:Template messages. More specifically one of those at Wikipedia:Template messages/Cleanup.

Offhand, I'd say that {{Requires attention|section}} would be a good one to use. Sorry, I didn't go the extra mile to replace your template with that one. The problem is that {{multiple issues}} is intended to be a "sandwich template" that wraps two or more maintenance templates inside it, and I patrol for cases where that template is used improperly. It's fine to put in the hidden section as long as it's not triggering an error. I see that an earlier bot edit had incorrectly attempted to replace your custom template with one of the standard ones, see this diff. I think maybe the template had been substituted. @Bgwhite: FYI. wbm1058 (talk) 21:37, 11 January 2017 (UTC)

I'm not a bot. I patrol for template coding in articles. Usually, it is a cut/paste. I use the template the editor was trying to add as I've gotten yelled at in the past for not doing that. Bgwhite (talk) 23:36, 11 January 2017 (UTC)

Bgwhite, oops sorry, I temporarily got you mixed up with your bot. You were in "human bot" mode, or whatever label you want to put on it. I've done it too. Best, wbm1058 (talk) 23:50, 11 January 2017 (UTC)

Once again my apologies for my rookie error. Sorting out the symbolisation on that entire page was my first editorial contribution to this excellent site. My intent was to warn readers that serious problems remained with that particular section, which was true at the time I added the template. I looked for, but didn't find, template guidance; I ended up having to do a google search for "this page has issues" and copied and pasted a template on a page I found there, with modifications. It was the best I could do, having spent 12 hours of continuous effort to make sure all minus signs were correct and symbols were consistent. I am very grateful for the template guides you have linked above. Respectfully, Kebl0155 (talk) 00:38, 12 January 2017 (UTC)