User talk:RexxS: Difference between revisions

Hello! I am looking into submitting Ted Kaczynski at FAC, and it was recommended in speaking with my mentor and SandyGeorgia that you be consulted on accessibility in the table of bombings on the page. If you could look into this and let me know if any changes could be make I would appreciate it. I understand that you are facing some medical trouble, so please take your time on this and let me know if you're not up to it. Best wishes for a fast recovery! AviationFreak💬 22:26, 11 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Hi AviationFreak! Thanks for being concerned about accessibility. I thought it was easiest just to do the edits I would normally recommend to improve accessibility for a table. I've done them one at a time to act as an example for you for future use: caption; column headers; row headers. It doesn't take me long and I'm always happy to help out. You're in good hands with Gog and Sandy, so good luck with your FA! --RexxS (talk) 22:59, 11 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you! AviationFreak💬 23:16, 11 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Fixed

The PubMed link in Wikidata is fixed; see [1]. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 19:33, 12 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

St Lucy's day for you

Attracting incompetent edits

Very much inclined to agree with you here (I think that's the second time I've had to undo a new editor's "heat transfers very well into the water"), but it seems wrong to resolve the issue by saying that the article actually doesn't need copyediting after all.

Has there been a change to Wikipedia signup process recently where new users are guided towards articles tagged as needing copyediting, even if English isn't their first language? Or has it always been like this? I've only really noticed it in the past couple of months or so, and it is frustrating. --Lord Belbury (talk) 17:44, 15 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

@Lord Belbury: I have only about 700 articles on my watchlist, mostly scuba-related, and Drowning has popped up with aberrant "grammar" edits more than a dozen times in the last few months and it sticks out like a sore thumb. I suspect that one or the other of those templates are the root cause of that as they were placed in September, but I have no idea of the precise mechanism. My guess is that somebody is pointing new editors to the cleanup categories, but I can't find any evidence of that in the affected user talk pages.

What is clear, though, is that the continual barrage of poor and ungrammatical edits are not improving the article, but rather compounding the concerns expressed in the templates. Removing them won't help fix the problem, but with any luck it will stop the article getting worse. Cheers --RexxS (talk) 18:04, 15 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I've seen it on a few articles where I've added a copyedit template and new users have soon started appearing making well-meaning but often flawed corrections. I figure there must be a welcome page or student guidebook somewhere that's somehow suggesting checking out Category:Wikipedia articles needing copy edit, and users are clicking on a recent month and picking an article from it. I'll do some more detective work and ask around. --Lord Belbury (talk) 18:52, 15 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

That editor was clearly using an automated grammar checker tool, without sufficient competence in English to do it right. I've just spent longer than I really wanted to, reviewing them all and reverting most - there were some good corrections amid the bad, but I just didn't have the time to re-apply those. I've told them to stop. If anyone can do a quick check on what they're doing from time to time, that would be very helpful. Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 19:23, 15 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Ya'll are probably looking for mw:Growth/Personalized first day/Newcomer tasks. --Izno (talk) 20:37, 15 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

@Izno: it certainly feels like it, but as far as I can see, it only seems to be being trialled on the Arabic, Vietnamese, Czech, and Korean Wikipedias. Is there any way of finding out whether that project applies to enwiki? I don't engage with MediaWiki, so asking there isn't an option for me. --RexxS (talk) 21:12, 15 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Doesn't look enabled here indeed, so maybe it is just innocent users. Special:Version says mw:Extension:GettingStarted is installed here, but maybe it is configured off? WhatamIdoing (WMF) might be able to verify. --Izno (talk) 21:54, 15 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Whatamidoing (WMF) I never get that right. --Izno (talk) 21:55, 15 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

You can request that the Growth team consider enabling (some or all of) it. I hear that they've gotten some good results recently, but I don't know whether they've been posted yet. Apparently newcomers are more likely to keep editing and less likely to need reverting if they have these services. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 04:47, 30 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I started Template:Welcome training almost five years ago and still use it for some goodfaith newbies, and while that doesn't include the copy editing category, there have been quite a few other variants and discussions about steering newbies to uncontentious but useful things to do over the years. So it could be a U3A class or some other training exercise approach out there. But it wouldn't surprise me if this is people who are native Arabic, Vietnamese, Czech or Korean speakers who then come to the more complete English Wikipedia as so many others do. Ϣere SpielChequers 23:25, 30 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Gentile vs blunt

RexxS, I'm sorry that you feel I may be wasting the time of others. You are welcome to offer a friendly nudge in that direction on my talk page. Posting it on the project talk page comes off as a threat and suggests that editors shouldn't ask questions. Perhaps that wasn't your intention but that is how it came across. Please forgive the intrusion. Springee (talk) 17:47, 15 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

@Springee: your persistent pushing of insufficiently-sourced content into multiple articles is wasting other editors' time. Arguing the toss at WT:MED with six posts is bludgeoning the debate. When you do that, you are quite right to take my response as a threat, as it is intended to discourage your unwelcome style of sealioning. It does nothing to discourage the asking of a question by someone who actually takes notice of the reply.

Now, I do resent your intrusion and your flagrant attempt to play the victim card here. Your previous behaviours are a matter of record and I'm not going to play games with you. If you continue to behave like that, I won't hesitate to sanction you for it. Your choice. --RexxS (talk) 18:16, 15 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

All it took was WhatAmIDoing to discuss the matter vs dismiss it as if the answer were obvious. Also, I added this content to zero articles. I disagreed with the specific reason for removal and Alexbrn's reply which had little more depth than "because". Please remember that may of us are smart people who have worked in science and research. I asked because the original answers were insufficient not because I was edit warring to get content in. Threats from Alexbrn rather than a good explanation is part of why I continued to press for a better answer. Regardless, WhatAmIDoing gave a thoughtful answer and I will drop it. Springee (talk) 18:24, 15 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

@Springee: On the contrary, WhatamIdoing had to waste her time explaining to you why that primary source would not support the claim you were making. All it should have taken was for you to read WP:MEDRS and WP:REDFLAG. She should not have to analyse the deficiencies in a particular primary source for you to get the general principle that we don't use those sort of sources for that sort of content. That much is certainly obvious. You are not a child and should not need it explained to you how a general policy or guideline applies to a particular source. --RexxS (talk) 18:36, 15 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Hmmm - this discussion doesn't live up to the intriguing header! Johnbod (talk) 18:20, 15 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Beethoven 250 years

The birthday display! --Gerda Arendt (talk) 16:40, 16 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you, Gerda. But it's really his baptismal day tomorrow – we're only guessing about his birthday! Keep safe. --RexxS (talk) 20:15, 16 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

We had longish discussions about that, DYK? I suggested to spread them out over several sets, - you see how successful that was. Google will tell us tomorrow that its his 250th birthday, sigh. I feel like Cassandre. - The major German paper had 6 pages devoted to Beethoven, today. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 20:25, 16 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Merry Christmas

	Merry Christmas RexxS!!
	Hi RexxS, I wish you and your family a very Merry Christmas and a very Happy New Year, Thanks for all you do--Ozzie10aaaa (talk) 18:51, 20 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Best wishes for the holidays

		Season's Greetings
		Wishing you and yours a Happy Holiday Season, and all best wishes for the New Year! Adoration of the Magi (Jan Mostaert) is my Wiki-Christmas card to all for this year. Johnbod (talk) 12:11, 19 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Timeline of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2019

Hi, should this also not be reverted in article if its a primary source?

https://web.archive.org/web/20200226041548if_/https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)30183-5/fulltext

The above as well as the below are both primary sources with secondary references, but you only asked for removal of the below. I understand hesitancy for having pre-print, but then shouldn't it apply to all articles under COVID-19?

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0300891620974755

Thanks Albertaont (talk) 20:40, 22 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

@Albertaont:

should this also not be reverted in article if its a primary source? – yes, if it were a primary source, but many would see it as a review, albeit a pretty limited one. That's the sort of thing that ought to be discussed at the article talk page.

I understand hesitancy for having pre-print, but then shouldn't it apply to all articles under COVID-19? – yes, in fact it ought to apply to all articles. Preprints fail WP:RS as well as MEDRS, and you can see the disclaimer at https://www.medrxiv.org/ that clearly shows how unsuitable preprints are for general use like Wikipedia. They are only suitable to inform other researchers who are capable of assessing the data.

Thank you for your understanding. I hope you'll feel free to ask me if you are uncertain; and more importantly, to engage early on the talk page as that will bring more eyes to bear on issues as they arise. --RexxS (talk) 20:54, 22 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Tozinameran

I wrote a tongue-in-cheek sentence to try to lighten the mood a bit. It was obviously sarcastic, I explicitly indicated so. If you really resent it I will delete it, but I would prefer not to. Vpab15 (talk) 12:54, 23 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

@Vpab15: No problem - it's the usual issues of text not being capable of transmitting nuance very well. There's no need to delete anything; it's all part of the rough-and-tumble of robust debate. --RexxS (talk) 15:05, 23 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Passenger data representation

Hey RexxS,

Wonder if I can get your thoughts on Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_UK_Railways#UK_Railway_figures_2019-20? Is there a way to represent this data nicely in Wikidata? Example article: Manchester Piccadilly station, the stuff under the "Passengers" header on the infobox (specifically, the year, the number of passengers for that year, and the number of interchange passengers for that year). I suspect maybe "passengers" needs to be a label, and things like passengers/interchange passengers as qualifiers, or something? Alternatively, we could use data templates (one for each year)? ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 13:54, 23 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

@ProcrastinatingReader: It would be nice to have the figures on Wikidata, but I don't see a suitable property to hold the values. I'll ping Andy to see if he knows of any suitable properties.

It's quite analogous to properties like population (P1082), and places like Taipei (Q1867) have a large number of values with the point in time as a qualifier. Interestingly, that item illustrates an alternative means of holding the data in a central location by use of tabular population (P4179) and you can see the data on Commons at c:Data:Taipei Population.tab, where it can be manipulated as JSON data. I think that eventually that is the best place to hold the data, but we would have to write a module to retrieve the data and format it for display on Wikipedia. The idea would be to use a bot to scrape an external database ource and automatically update the data table.

In the meantime, using a data template is probably the only sensible option (although you could optionally hold it in a Lua data module as a more flexible means of working with the data). I'll try to make some Commons data tables for stations and knock up a demo to see what the snags are. That might take me a few days (or longer if the tools to do the job don't exist yet). --RexxS (talk) 19:01, 23 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

There appears to be no explicit property for this; the best I can come up with is used by (P1535), qualified with a number and date, thus. It needs a ciattion. Perhaps it's worth proposing a property? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 19:13, 23 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

patronage (P3872) --Izno (talk) 22:00, 23 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, Izno! That definitely fits the bill. So we could store the data on Wikidata quite cleanly. I could certainly pull that in automatically from Wikidata. I'll have a look at that.--RexxS (talk) 22:12, 23 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Wikidata is messy when trying to specify time periods. I've added the values for patronage (P3872) to Manchester Piccadilly station (Q600367).

{{wdib|ps=1|P3872|qid=Q600367|qual=P2348|list=ubl}} →

25,973,000 (2015-2016 one-year-period)
27,807,000 (2016-2017 one-year-period)
27,725,000 (2017-2018 one-year-period)
30,133,000 (2018-2019 one-year-period)
32,199,000 (2019-2020 one-year-period)

See how the labels for the qualifiers switch from hyphen to ndash? Yuk. I'd have to write a custom module to get a decent output, but that's easy enough. --RexxS (talk) 22:29, 23 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

@ProcrastinatingReader and Andy: I made a quick demo of a table at c:Data:Sandbox/RexxS/Piccadilly.tab. Creating the page is a clunky process that doesn't work as advertised since JSON doesn't actually support comments and it doesn't like the last item in a list being terminated with a comma. However, adding data afterwards is simple and altering labels is a doddle. There is a module already written to read such tables at Module:Tabular data and it can be used to explore the data on Commons. {{#invoke:Tabular data|wikitable|Sandbox/RexxS/Piccadilly.tab}} gives:

v
e
Passenger numbers for Manchester Piccadilly station by year
Year	Inc/Dec	Passengers
2015/16	Increase	25,793,000
2016/17	Increase	27,807,000
2017/18	Decrease	27,725,000
2018/19	Increase	30,133,000
2019/20	Increase	32,199,000
Copied from en:Manchester Piccadilly station Data available under Creative Commons Zero.

It's easy enough to write a bespoke module for displaying the table data as multiple rows in an infobox as I did for Module:Infobox power station. As there's no automatic association between a Commons data table and a Wikipedia article, the name of the data table would have to be passed each time unless the name of the Commons page matched the Wikipedia article title, when we could pass that, but if other wikis wanted to use the code, it would fail because of the localisation of the article title. Let me know if you want me to help experiment further. --RexxS (talk) 21:58, 23 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

This is very neat, and thanks for getting around to it so quickly! Some initial questions:

{{Rail pass box}} usually asks for a percentage change (YOY) and then does the increase/decrease calculation automatically based on that. You can see an example at Union Station (Los Angeles). UK railway stations didn't use {{Rail pass box}} pre-merge, so we carried over the increase/decrease method. I still have to discuss this as a matter of content at WT:UKRAIL, but if they decide to show % change is it possible to calculate this auto (based on previous year's figures) or would it need to be manually added to each row in the tabular data?
Are the Commons Data and Wikidata in sync or separate? As in when the yearly update of passenger numbers is done, would the bot/script run on Wikidata or Commons or both?
UK stations only show the most recent 5 years of data, so that when 2020-2021 data is added, the 2015-2016 should automatically hide in the infobox. I'm guessing it's possible to add some logic in to do this?

ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 16:20, 24 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

@ProcrastinatingReader: it's an interesting problem and it piqued my interest.

Because there would have to be a Lua module that reads the data, it is trivial to calculate the percentage increase/decrease for each year (except the first year for which we have data, of course). I would anticipate having the module read the entire data set for the station and calculate percentages - that's a very quick operation. I only put the Inc/Dec column in the tabular data for demonstration.
The data held on Commons are completely separate from those on Wikidata, sadly. I would choose one method or the other. It is quite possible that someone might write a bot to scan the Commons data and replicate the changes on Wikidata, or a bot/script could update both at the same time.
The logic to show only the last n years is pretty simple. The data would be held as a sequence in the module (i.e. a table indexed from 1 to the number of entries) and it's easy to loop through the last n of those when running the display routine. It would mean passing n to the module, but that would then be hard-coded into the invocation in each infobox definition, and editors would not have to concern themselves with it for each article (although it could be a parameter with a default value of n, if per-article variance was desirable).

Please feel free to get back to me if you want some more-tailored demos to use when discussing the possibilities at the WikiProject. Cheers --RexxS (talk) 18:38, 24 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Merry Christmas

	Merry Christmas RexxS
	Hi RexxS, I wish you and your family a very Merry Christmas and a very happy and healthy New Year, Thank you for all your contributions to Wikipedia, –Davey2010^Talk 20:04, 23 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

White House

Now that's interesting. I have it on good authority that its elevation is 59 feet. --Deepfriedokra (talk) 03:25, 24 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Tozinameran copyvio followup

... here. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:55, 24 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry, I was having a bit of a rest today, but I'm pleased that MER-C has acted decisively. I'll keep it on my radar in case anything else is needed. Cheers --RexxS (talk) 18:08, 24 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Season's Greetings

	Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year
	I'm glad you have recovered to continue your incredible efforts and contributions. Have a lovely day. Whispyhistory (talk) 08:28, 25 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Natalis soli invicto!

		Natalis soli invicto!
		Wishing you and yours a Happy Holiday Season, from the horse and bishop person. May the year ahead be productive and distraction-free. Ealdgyth (talk) 15:16, 25 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

False ban

Hi, I filed a request for unban as pre-arbitration step here. It will be great if you can speak out there, since you were the initiator.--Александр Мотин (talk) 12:36, 28 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Happy New Year

Happy New Year 2021
I hope your New Year holiday is enjoyable and the coming year is much better than the one we are leaving behind.
Best wishes from Los Angeles. // Timothy :: talk

A barnstar for you!

	The Civility Barnstar
	It's been seven months, but I just want to thank you again for you incredibly civil discussion at List of diver certification. DarthFlappy 00:52, 3 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

2021

I tried to give 2021 a good start by updating the QAI project topics, and one item mentions your essay on indenting. Please check and correct, - not a member, but an old friend! - For moar private "happy new year" see here. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 20:18, 6 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I don't see how {{WPEUR10k}} leaves a blank line afterwards, and it shouldn't. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 11:50, 8 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Gerda: There were extra newlines in the template's definition. I've removed them now. You may have to purge the article where the template is used to see the change. --RexxS (talk) 13:04, 8 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Aha, I see some magic fixie dust! That'll come in handy! [Darwinbish fills her pockets and absconds.] darwin bish 13:07, 8 January 2021 (UTC).[reply]

@@ Line 277: / Line 277: @@
 :
 : {{re|Gerda Arendt|label=Gerda}} There were extra newlines in the template's definition. I've [https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:WPEUR10k&diff=999091969&oldid=997436521 removed them] now. You may have to purge the article where the template is used to see the change. --[[User:RexxS|RexxS]] ([[User talk:RexxS#top|talk]]) 13:04, 8 January 2021 (UTC)
+::Aha, I see some magic fixie dust! That'll come in handy! [''Darwinbish fills her pockets and absconds.''] [[User:Darwinbish|<b style="color:#22F;">darwin</b>]]&thinsp;[[User talk:Darwinbish|<span style="display:inline-block;transform:rotate(-20deg);position:relative;bottom:0.4em;color:#909;">bish</span>]] 13:07, 8 January 2021 (UTC).