User:Rich Farmbrough/FAQ

Answers are in italics.

Why have you created this FAQ?

To save your time and mine. I actually don't get all that many FAQs so I don't mind answering them, but if the answer is here already, you don't have to wait. is this some trivia about smackbot signed alk

Robots or Bots and other tools

You made a lot of edits just now, are you using a bot?

Not on this account. I have a bot account User:SmackBot. I do a lot of very simple edits where the same (often search and replace) improvement can be made to several or many articles, if it is many articles and can be automated (and approved) I will do it under SmackBot, otherwise I will do it manually here.

Why are you doing those tasks?

If I see an error, I like to fix all occurrences, not just the one I've come across. I also help people with tasks when they request it.

You are messing up articles "using AWB", who should I shout at?

Me, in the first instance.
AWB is well tested and most of its built in functions have full community support. In the unlikely event of a bug I'll pass it on to the developers. More likely it's either a mistake I've made (people do that) or something we can discuss.

I'd like you to fix a bunch of articles

I'll certainly have a look. If it pertains to dates I have more specialised tools at my disposal.

SmackBot added fact/citations needed/cleanup etc. tag to an article...

While SmackBot will occasionally tag an article with "stub" "wikify" etc., you are almost certainly seeing that SmackBot dated the tag placed by another user. Check the history.

SmackBot capitalised a tag, and made no other changes. Why?

Because SmackBot deals with over a thousand templates, each of which can be formatted in hundreds of ways, it is necessary to canonicalise templates to make the problem tractable. In general SmackBot will only edit an article like this when a date needs adding (or fixing), but, occasionally, the tag will be dated or removed before SB gets to the article, or will be in a different form, a new tag SB is just learning about, or I may have had to fall back to a previous version of SB for some reason. Or indeed someone may have broken the category inclusion rules, by breaking a template or any of half a dozen other actions.

Known reasons for SmackBot visiting an article it can't fix

Timing differences
1. Tag already removed
2. Tag dated by another agent
3. Category lag (articles show up as being in a category when they have been removed)
SmackBot knowledge
1. New template SB is not aware of
2. New dated super-category
3. New redirect SB is not aware of
Page errors
1. Template broken
2. Substed cleanup template (SB can fix some of these)
3. Template munged with comments, extra parameters, nested templates etc. (SB can fix most of these)
4. Undated category include explicitly
5. Tag or category placed or left on redirect page
Article in Category:Articles with invalid date parameter in template
1. Date mis-spelled, wrong format, etc. (SB can fix most of these)
2. Date vandalised
3. Other part of template vandalised
4. Dated category not yet created
5. Dated category deleted
6. Reversion of article to include previously deleted category
Any of the above
1. Reversion of article to re-include any of the other problems

Note that SB will keep visiting these articles until the underlying problem is solved, however it is unlikely to change them more than once, if that.

Dates

Why did you delink the dates in <article>?

It's only worth linking date like entities in a very few contexts.

Where the date is itself important - so that there is value in following the link - decreasingly often as WP grows.
When the text is about the entity e.g. a link to 2000 or 2001 in The Millennium.
When a date includes a day and month, which means formatting preferences will be invoked by linking it, e.g. 10 April 1962.
There is also the process of linking to "[Year] [month] in <subject>" via a piped link, e.g. 1999 in television as 1999 - this eventually can suffer the same problem as the first point, and is seen by some as an undesirable Easter egg - i.e. taking the user to a different place than expected.
Notes: In the infancy of WP all these entities were linked as there was a plan to extract meta - data from them. Similarly there is a request to the mediawiki developers to provide a different way of allowing date preferences to work than overloading the linking mark-up.

See WP:DATE for details, and the talk page for over 48 archived pages of wrangling over the exact meaning of "links valuable in context" and "the correct use of the non-breaking space" or "the endash".

Why did you link the dates in <article>?

Note: MoS has now changed in this respect to reverse this practice.

When a date includes a day and month, user formatting preferences ("my preferences" "Date and time") will be invoked by linking it, e.g. [[10 April]] can show as either April 10 or 10 April, and hence should almost always be linked. Any associated year should also be linked viz: 10 April 1962 because the software can display this as 1962-04-10 for those who have their date preferences set to ISO. In due course a feature may be added to MediaWiki to allow a different syntax from linking to do this.

I believe it is policy only to wikify the first mention of a particular date or year in an article.

It is indeed a guideline to link only the first occurrence of a link, except where style or user convenience dictates otherwise. However dates that include the month and day number will format differently according to user preferences, and hence should almost always be linked thus 1 May 1999 (WP:DATES) - bare months, years, days of the week, seasons or centuries should almost never be linked.

Wording

Why have you changed "Trivia" to "Miscellanea"?

The reason is that "Trivia" is information which is not really of use or interest. Ideally information that is of interest should be in the article body, information that is not should not be in the article at all. Nonetheless miscellaneous useful information may need a section of it's own - calling that section "Trivia" invites the addition of facts such as "Harold Lloyd took more cream in his coffee making this film than in the two previous films put together." You may well find a better name than I have used, if so, please change it and let me know. See also Wikipedia:Trivia.

Euphemisms especially "passed away"

WP eschews euphemism in all its forms. However euphemisms that have an alternative meaning are worse, moreover they are often anachronistic or unclear to non-native speakers.

ISBN numbers

Why have you changed the layout of an ISBN number

They are not ISBN numbers they are ISBNs. They should be thirteen characters long until the end of 2006 - according to the standard: nine digits, three dashes or spaces and one check character that can be a digit or X. However wiki magic that makes ISBNs linkable did not work with spaces until late 2007 so we have used the dash. Therefore I remove ":"s between the "ISBN" and the "number", and hyphenate the ISBN according to the rules published by the International ISBN Agency[1]. This means

Wikimagic will now work
The ISBN is correctly formatted
language area and publisher can be told from the ISBN together with other hints.

Why have you labelled an ISBN as "invalid"

Either

It does not have enough characters, or it has too many
It does not conform to an issued "language area" or listed "language area" "publisher-range".
Or it does not have a check digit matching the number. See ISBN for more details.
Or I may have made a mistake - let me know if you think so.

Note: the first two, and most of the third will be labelled with a template next to the invalid number(s), the rest of the third with a category at the end of the article. (The fourth could be either of course!) The category page links to Wikipedia:List of pages with Invalid ISBNs which has an alphabetical list of articles of the third type that I have identified, together with the problematic pseudo ISBNs.

Yes but why do you care?

Because:

It is the correct way to present ISBNs on WP
A uniform appearance makes WP look good.
Catching clearly wrong ISBNs
- Fixes an error (always good)
- Gets us ready for the change-over to 13 digit ISBNs when we decide to do it. Since the current check-digit will be "thrown away" we need to garner the benefit ASAP, preferably now.

References and external links

SmackBot will make these headings plural (and correct a number of spelling errors and capitalisation errors) - per MoS [2].

What are the reasons for this?

There are a number of reasons. (And of course there are a number of reasons that the singular is good too.) Wikipedia:External links is the guideline, and the main reason is style. We use plural for both "External Links" and "References" (and I guess "Notes") in the same way that books have a "Contents" page even if there's only one chapter. Subsidiary reasons include that people often add links without updating the headings, and consistency. If you trawl through the talk page you'll see the various arguments come up on either side.