User talk:MZMcBride

---

Older discussions are available in the page history.

Hitlerrrrrrrr

oh noes, did the WMF go too far for you? Not saying that they're Nazis, of course, but your proposal seems like a flop. —fetch·comms 23:54, 1 August 2010 (UTC)

I wonder how many of the opposers have pressed "hide' or have installed a gadget or script to hide the banners. The issue is that the readership can't really say "hey, this is annoying" and the editors have been given the tools to easily make the problem go away for themselves. I'm not sure what any of this has to do with Hitler, though. --MZMcBride (talk) 00:28, 2 August 2010 (UTC)

Your userpage quote. —fetch·comms 00:41, 2 August 2010 (UTC)

Post hoc, brah. --MZMcBride (talk) 00:59, 2 August 2010 (UTC)

Oh well. —fetch·comms 01:27, 2 August 2010 (UTC)

There was a banner ad? You mean "Work at Wikipedia" wasn't a new way of cracking the whip at recalcitrant editors? Risker (talk) 02:01, 2 August 2010 (UTC)

Indeed, I thought that was pretty rude. I already work here. Oh! They must mean work at wikipedia for money. –xeno^talk 17:57, 3 August 2010 (UTC)

Confirmed Dead

There's 2 references that confirm he is dead.Bllasae (talk) 22:46, 3 August 2010 (UTC)

No there aren't. There are two references that say he might be. – iridescent 22:51, 3 August 2010 (UTC)

You might want to let your troll friends know that I am responding to your query, and now I realize that you're just that person who wants every person on Wikipedia to be in the Possibly Alive category.Bllasae (talk) 22:52, 3 August 2010 (UTC)

And you might want to stop removing my posts. – iridescent 22:54, 3 August 2010 (UTC)

Who are you? You're not MZMcBride.Therefore, I fail to see why you're in our conversation.Bllasae (talk) 23:13, 3 August 2010 (UTC)

Who knows. iridescent might be MZMcBride. Stranger things have happened. Which two references confirm that he's dead? --MZMcBride (talk) 23:20, 3 August 2010 (UTC)

Hmm

Y R U IN MAI WIKI? —Reedy 13:46, 4 August 2010 (UTC)

Addiction. :-( --MZMcBride (talk) 16:44, 4 August 2010 (UTC)

A job for you?

Since you are running in toolserver amybe you could program your bot to tag talk pages of the pages found in http://toolserver.org/~jarry/livingparam and http://toolserver.org/~jarry/livingparam3/ with {{WPBiography|living=yes}}?

Likewise talk pages of the pages found in http://toolserver.org/~jarry/livingparam2 should be marked with {{WPBiography|living=no}}.

It's better if we automatise this job. -- Magioladitis (talk) 12:48, 5 August 2010 (UTC)

Category intersections can lead to misleading results sometimes. I'm not sure this is a task fit for automation. At some point Yobot tagged a lot of talk pages as living=yes and I'm still finding remnants of the mess. --MZMcBride (talk) 05:51, 9 August 2010 (UTC)

I think this mistake had nothing to do with the above cases. I apparently used the wrong task (lv=yes instead of liv=no) for people in dead categories. -- Magioladitis (talk) 06:39, 9 August 2010 (UTC)

True * 32

Wikipedia:Dump reports/Helium --MZMcBride (talk) 05:51, 9 August 2010 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Meetup/DC 11

Hey, just in case you missed it, there is an oppurtunity to get a free dinner this Tuesday August 11 and a chance to meet and hang out talk about Wikipedia:WikiProject United States Public Policy and WP:GLAM/SI. Sorry that this is so late in the game, I was hoping the e-mail would be a better form of contact for active members (if you want to get on the e-mail list send me an User e-mail ). Hope that you can attend, User:Sadads (talk)12:32, 9 August 2010 (UTC)

Wikipedia Categories

Hey, so I was just wondering if you knew of a simple way to get a list of the Wikipedia categories sorted by number of articles per category. Thanks. -Dfinzer (talk) 21:35, 9 August 2010 (UTC)

Are you familiar with the Toolserver? Depending on what you need, you could request an account there or have someone with an account run the reports for you.

The issue you'll probably run into is that the category table's cat_pages field isn't always accurate (and I'm not sure how it deals with namespaces...). So if you want accurate counts, you'll probably have to run a subquery to count each category individually. This also brings the advantage that you can filter the count to certain namespaces, like only articles. Unfortunately, the categorylinks table (which you'd run the subquery on) is sort of perpetually fucked (see also: bugzilla:10667).

I don't know what your time constraints are, so it's a bit unclear whether you're asking me to generate such a list or if you want to try it on your own first. If you want me to do it, you'll have to give a few more details. Hope that helps. --MZMcBride (talk) 21:48, 9 August 2010 (UTC)

Thanks, that's very helpful. It's not urgent at all; I was just wondering if something was out there already. The question came up because I compiled such a list for pages that were put under pending changes and wanted to see how that compared to categories on Wikipedia in general—but its nothing really too important for the analysis. I probably won't take the trouble to compile a list (this is the last week of my internship), and you certainly don't have to. In fact I can get most of the info I need from the Special:CategoryTree tool. Thanks for your help -Dfinzer (talk) 22:20, 9 August 2010 (UTC)

To-do

Before I forget:

• Compare IPs from a big list with Special:BlockList using API. When done, e-mail Kanonkas. Looks like about 61,000 IP blocks currently; not going to pull those from the API individually or even in bulk, that's just silly; sent an e-mail about this
• wikitools issue described on User talk:Mr.Z-man's talk page needs investigation Done!
• WP:LOGACTIONS needs to account for FlaggedRevs-related actions Nah, it really doesn't; it'll make the bottom chart explode
• http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=378366072&oldid=378355980 Done!
• WT:DBR needs some love
• WT:DDR needs some love as well
• http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=378703169&oldid=378593986 Done!
• http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=379630566&oldid=378870665 Updated the description to be non-specific
• Most-watched users (configuration) Done!
• Potential biographies of living people (2) (configuration) needs to account for year of death missing/unknown, missing people, etc. BUMP! I added Category:Missing people, Category:Year of death unknown, and Category:Year of death missing.
• Save the cheerleader Done!

--MZMcBride (talk) 20:13, 12 August 2010 (UTC)

Nomination for deletion of Template:NOINDEX

Template:NOINDEX has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the template's entry on the Templates for discussion page. Thank you. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 18:43, 20 August 2010 (UTC)

Hmph.

Wikidick measuring at its finest! Killiondude (talk) 05:47, 24 August 2010 (UTC)

Hahaaaaaa, I beat you, suck on that. --Closedmouth (talk) 11:41, 24 August 2010 (UTC)

That just blew my mind. Why in the hell are 154 people watching my talk page? And there are lots of banned/blocked/retired users way higher up the list than little old me.

Anyway, what I really came to here to say was that I, like many others, would have liked to support you at RFA, but you have to know that trust takes time, and trust that has been broken takes a long time to mend. If you want to show a commitment to avoid the drama in the future, a good first step would be to politely withdraw your nomination as you would need an unprecedented turnaround to pass this time through anyway. Just some free advice to take or leave as you please. Beeblebrox (talk) 22:30, 24 August 2010 (UTC)

As to talk page watchers, a lot of people will choose to watch a talk page when they leave a message or when observing interactions between other users. It's probably just built up over time. Throwaway85 (talk)

Well, after number 2, some people gave me grief for withdrawing early. I'm under no delusion about the final outcome. But watching some of the "thoughtful" neutrals (people too chicken-shit to outright oppose) is amusing enough to let it continue, at least for now. --MZMcBride (talk) 22:39, 24 August 2010 (UTC)

I've gotta agree with you somewhat there. I don't know why some people are so afraid to go ahead and admit they oppose, or add "moral support" when they obviously oppose the candidate. I suppose in the real world you see the same compromises between honesty and being nice, like if a woman asks you "does this make me look fat" we all know that there is only one correct answer and it is most definitely not "yes it does" but it's also not "I just can't decide, you are a bit pudgy looking in that and I don't really think you should wear it but I don't want to pile on and say you are fat." Beeblebrox (talk) 16:44, 25 August 2010 (UTC)

RfA answer

Thank you for your considered answer to my question. I am leaning towards supporting you, but I guess I'd just like a personal assurance that any further experiments that could prove controversial get at least a nominal run by the community. I think you do good work, and I think the project would benefit from your having the tools, but I don't want to get burned. Throwaway85 (talk) 03:23, 25 August 2010 (UTC)

Yes, I will give you that assurance. I don't have any intention of participating in any further experiments, but in the off chance that one comes to mind (and "experiment" in this context would be more like a "trial run" of something, not a mad scientist type of thing), I would post to the appropriate places on-wiki first. --MZMcBride (talk) 03:29, 25 August 2010 (UTC)

Good enough for me. Thanks. Throwaway85 (talk) 03:45, 25 August 2010 (UTC)

Your RfA has been closed

I regret to inform you that your RfA has been closed as unsuccessful per WP:NOTNOW. It is apparent from the overwhelming oppose opinions that now is not the right time for this request. I recommend taking the oppose opinions to heart and working to address the concerns raised there. Please let me know if you have any questions. ···日本穣^? · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe · Join WikiProject Japan! 05:21, 25 August 2010 (UTC)

Fixed. --MZMcBride (talk) 05:26, 25 August 2010 (UTC)

Thanks, I got a good laugh out of that. Throwaway85 (talk) 05:48, 25 August 2010 (UTC)

So I see. ···日本穣^? · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe · Join WikiProject Japan! 05:35, 25 August 2010 (UTC)

That seems fairly reactionary to me. I could timeline it, but you already know you went from "ambivalent" to "raaaaage" in a matter of minutes when you were reverted. I guess that speaks to something, don't you think? --MZMcBride (talk) 18:33, 25 August 2010 (UTC)

Not seeing where you're getting "raaage" from, but whatever. I really was ambivalent about it; didn't really care one way or the other. You reverting of the closure, however, showed me in black and white (and a few colors, on the log/history pages) that you really didn't care about following guidelines and policies, especially when it comes to doing what you want to do. So, here we are, damning the torpedoes and going full speed ahead, as requested. I hope you're having fun. :) ···日本穣^? · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe · Join WikiProject Japan! 04:09, 26 August 2010 (UTC)

I can't say I really learned much from your attempted early closure. From what I've noticed about your editing habits, it seems to be a standard part of your M.O. Anyway, it's always a blast around here. :-) --MZMcBride (talk) 19:53, 26 August 2010 (UTC)

ANI Discussion

Hello. This message is being sent to inform you that there currently is a discussion at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents regarding an issue with which you may have been involved. Thank you. Access Denied ^talk _contribs editor review 05:30, 25 August 2010 (UTC)

Request related to possible edit filter

I would like a list of all pages in Category:WikiProject LGBT studies articles, where there are edits from the past couple months which the following is true about:

1. The editor is either an account which is currently blocked, or an IP address which has been blocked since the edit (if possible, this should include range blocks)
2. The edit content is either hidden (under WP:REVDEL), or resulted in a version which isn't part of Category:WikiProject LGBT studies articles.

Please send this to me by e-mail, don't post it on Wikipedia, per WP:DENY. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 16:12, 25 August 2010 (UTC)

This sounds fairly complex. Isn't this something that could be enabled in the AbuseFilter in a "dry run" mode instead? --MZMcBride (talk) 19:21, 25 August 2010 (UTC)

Actually, I'm trying to find the records for the padst, in order to write a filter. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 19:26, 25 August 2010 (UTC)

You may want to try WP:BOTREQ. I doubt I'll have much time to deal with anytime soon.

I imagine you'd go through each talk page, check the editors from the past three months, then run each through the API using &list=blocks&bkip= and whatever the equivalent is for block logs. Then you'd have to look at the page content for each edit, see if it's accessible (if not, it was revdeleted, if so, check it for the category or template code).

It's doable, but not in a database query, it requires a script. --MZMcBride (talk) 19:39, 25 August 2010 (UTC)

AutoPatrolled

Hi MZMcBride, I've recently removed the Autopatroller flag from someone who is still creating uBLs, and I was wondering if you'd help me find some more? There are bound to be a lot of false positives in this - vandals removing references, IPs turning dab pages and redirects into articles, as well as the uBLPs that turn out to be about bands, dead people or fictional characters or indeed that are referenced, so it might be safest to email me the list, but I'm looking for users with that flag who've created articles this year that have subsequently been tagged as uBLPs. A weekly run should pick up on the ones that get deleted/referenced. Do you think this is possible and if so would you be interested? ϢereSpielChequers 17:31, 25 August 2010 (UTC)

Just to make this clearer for me, you want:

• users in the autopatroller group;
• who have recent article creations;
• where those articles have been tagged with {{unreferenced BLP}}?

Is that about right? If you have any current examples of this (so that I can check my results), that'd be helpful, too. --MZMcBride (talk) 19:18, 25 August 2010 (UTC)

Thanks, yes I suppose for fairness I should also check out admins as they also have that as part of the mop, and its probably best to go for either tagged with {{unreferenced BLP}} or a sticky prod. I'll email you the example if that's OK. ϢereSpielChequers 11:08, 26 August 2010 (UTC)

I think you made up the "autopatrol" group, so I used "autoreview" instead. I'm not sure how well (if at all) you can read SQL, but here's the list you want with its query: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=385062953

It's only currently accounting for {{BLP unsourced}} (KISS). It could account for other templates in the future if you can be a bit more specific than "sticky prod" (i.e., provide specific template names). :-) --MZMcBride (talk) 22:40, 15 September 2010 (UTC)

Sorry for the belated response. Thanks for doing this, but this includes articles created as early as 2006. While I'd like people to reference their ancient stuff I'm not going to remove the Autopatroller flag from someone who currently creates referenced BLPs just because they haven't referenced articles they created in the past. Is there any chance you could produce me a list of Autopatrollers whose recent articles (I.e created in the last few months) have been tagged as uBLPs? Thanks ϢereSpielChequers 11:55, 22 September 2010 (UTC)

PS Autoreviewer has been renamed Wikipedia:Autopatrolled to avoid confusion with the whole pending changes reviewer malarkey ϢereSpielChequers 11:58, 22 September 2010 (UTC)

Try this out: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=386349423

I'm approximating page creation date based on page ID, so it's a bit rough. --MZMcBride (talk) 16:49, 22 September 2010 (UTC)

That's the ticket! I've deflagged three of them and warned another. Some of those go back before the rules changed, and some were mistagged. Would you be able to make this say a monthly exercise as I'm sure there will be more to find? ϢereSpielChequers 13:13, 25 September 2010 (UTC)

Hi MZMcBride, any chance you could run this one again? I'm assuming that there will be more Autopatrollers out there creating unreferenced BLPs, I'd also like to know of any admins doing this as well... ϢereSpielChequers 17:12, 28 October 2010 (UTC)

I don't know of a good place to put this automatically. I re-ran the query manually and put the output here: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=393457996 --MZMcBride (talk) 17:18, 28 October 2010 (UTC)

Your RfA

Hello, MZ. May I ask why you want your RfA to remain open when it is pretty much all assured of failure? Thank you. -- Avi (talk) 17:36, 25 August 2010 (UTC)

I think he already said on the RfA's talk page... he wants to get to WP:100... possibly WP:119 so that he has the most opposes.---Balloonman ^{NO! I'm Spartacus!} 17:48, 25 August 2010 (UTC)

Avi: In the real world, there are a lot of votes every year that have obvious (or seemingly obvious) outcomes. I don't think that makes it appropriate to truncate them at the whim of an individual. This vote is supposed to run for seven days. Unless there's some exigency that requires that that not happen or that I withdraw, seven days is how long it's going to run. --MZMcBride (talk) 18:23, 25 August 2010 (UTC)

For better or for worse, wikipedia is not the real world. My concern here is that the discussion in and of itself may be causing disruption. If there is a constructive reason for it to remain open, such as getting more constructive criticism, I am staunchly in favor of leaving it open despite the fait accompli of its eventual result (which you could see if you read the entire BN section). However, if the sole purpose is to gain "points" such as "Most opposed RfA", in my opinion, that does not serve to further the project, which should be the overriding issue for everything that is hosted on the wiki servers. Personally, I am going to leave my 'crat hat off now and not officially close it early, but I'd still suggest that we should all keep in mind if our actions and posts are for the encyclopedia's benefit or detriment. Thank you. -- Avi (talk) 18:36, 25 August 2010 (UTC)

As long as people continue asking questions and voting, I think there can be a presumption that the encyclopedia is being served. If, for example, you look at the exchange between me and Throwaway85, you can see that some good progress is being made in some areas. Some much-needed clarifications are being made. And some much-misunderstood points are also coming to light. I think, on the whole, the RFA is still beneficial. (And, I really wouldn't use "hosted on the wiki servers" as a good argument when there is still cruft like secret pages allowed to sit around forever. ;-) ) --MZMcBride (talk) 18:41, 25 August 2010 (UTC)

Fair enough regarding the RfA. As an aside, I've also always been against the "secret" and "fancruft" pages personally and have opined so at every request for comment that I have known about. -- Avi (talk) 18:53, 25 August 2010 (UTC)

Welcome to the Club

You've officially made WP:100 Throwaway85 (talk) 02:54, 26 August 2010 (UTC)

Twice a member now, I think. --MZMcBride (talk) 19:44, 26 August 2010 (UTC)

At least two people are on three times . -- Avi (talk) 23:57, 26 August 2010 (UTC)

Actually, not counting notes after lists, it seems that there are 9 people on 3 times, and that is the maximum number as of now . -- Avi (talk) 02:17, 27 August 2010 (UTC)

An idea for a later date

Given how useful the admin bit can be in regards to the development and testing of scripts and bots, you might want to consider asking permission to create a separate account solely for that purpose, and apply for adminship on that account with the express understanding that the tools will only be used to help you develop new tools for the wiki, and not to dish out blocks or the like. I get the feeling that, while there are undoubtedly those who simply don't like you and don't feel that you can be trusted, there are also a significant number of people who greatly appreciate the work you've done, but are uncomfortable with you acting as an administrator again. It might go a long way toward alleviating people's concerns were you to draw up a list of what that account would and would not be used for, and agree to abide by same. There's no guarantee that an RfA under these criteria would pass, but I think that, were you to start one in 3-6 months, you'd have a much better shot. Anyway, just something to consider. Throwaway85 (talk) 07:54, 26 August 2010 (UTC)

I already have access to everything. It's just a matter of efficiency (and a matter of bureaucracy, I suppose) whether this account is in a particular user group. --MZMcBride (talk) 19:46, 26 August 2010 (UTC)

Bribery could work too, or blackmail. Mr.Z-man 20:03, 26 August 2010 (UTC)

Congratulations

The "support" in your RfA was at 35% the level of the opposes when it was first closed, but now it is at 45% of the opposes. It would be hilarious if the "supports" eventually overtook the opposes (even if it ends up being rejected). TheGoodLocust (talk) 07:56, 26 August 2010 (UTC)

Edwards bot and interwiki Signpost subscriptsion

Hi, any chance you could contribute? diff. Tony (talk) 04:57, 29 August 2010 (UTC)

Hi. I left a note with Pathoschild here. If he isn't interested in writing the bot, I'll write it. I already wrote most of it in my head a few days ago after Sage pinged me in an edit summary. --MZMcBride (talk) 07:38, 29 August 2010 (UTC)

Oh thank you! This new functionality, I believe, is of immense significance in boosting the readership of The Signpost, and probably more importantly, of making the publication a new (but not the only) vehicle for interwiki collaborations. Tony (talk) 11:09, 30 August 2010 (UTC)

I started work on this at m:Global message delivery. I'll hopefully finish it this week. --MZMcBride (talk) 02:51, 1 September 2010 (UTC)

Okay, try to break it. :-) --MZMcBride (talk) 23:16, 1 September 2010 (UTC)

Johnny Cash

Here's the Johnny Cash version [1] - probably would be a cool infobox by the way...Modernist (talk) 13:03, 29 August 2010 (UTC)

Ah, neat. :-) I went searching around for it a bit and discovered I Forgot More Than You'll Ever Know, among other things. Pretty interesting. --MZMcBride (talk) 18:46, 29 August 2010 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Database reports/Potential reviewer candidates

Hi MZM. It has been about a month and a half since this particular database report was updated. Do you think you could update it? Thanks, NW (Talk) 13:08, 29 August 2010 (UTC)

Running now. This should probably be automated.... --MZMcBride (talk) 18:44, 29 August 2010 (UTC)

A3RO is still listed... can you configure it to leave out blocked users? Of course, it'll probably be moot if PC is disabled. —fetch·comms 23:25, 29 August 2010 (UTC)

RfA closed

I have closed your RfA as unsuccessful. Regards, —Anonymous Dissident^Talk 07:34, 31 August 2010 (UTC)

Hmm, a nail-biter to the very end. --MZMcBride (talk) 20:27, 31 August 2010 (UTC)

Test subject 1

Test message 1. --EdwardsBot (talk) 23:00, 1 September 2010 (UTC)

Test subject 2

¡Test message 2! --EdwardsBot (talk) 23:12, 1 September 2010 (UTC)

global delivery

Awesome! I imagine HaeB will be eager to try this out with the Signpost; can you add him to the access list?

		The Original Barnstar
		For paving the way for cross-project deliveries, I award MZMcBride this barnstar.--ragesoss (talk) 01:12, 2 September 2010 (UTC)

This is a great move. However, I'm a techno-dummy, so I asked Ohconfucius to try it. He has asked you a question about it here on my talk page. Thank you! Tony (talk) 02:48, 2 September 2010 (UTC)

Ragesoss: Thanks for the barnstar. :-) I added HaeB to the access list in this edit.

Tony1: I replied to Ohconfucius here. Clearly the instructions still need (a lot of) work. ;-) --MZMcBride (talk) 03:38, 2 September 2010 (UTC)

Thanks a lot for making this reality! The format looks familiar. I'll try to integrate this into the existing Signpost publication process as seamlessly as possible (on other wikis, it is not possible to use the existing Signpost template, but I was already working on a system to automatically generate a copy+pastable content list of the current issue in various formats). Ohconfucius' help in operating the bot is very welcome.

I just tried to estimate how many Signpost copies EdwardsBot has delivered already (since October 2009) and arrived at around 45,000. Nice work! I will mention that number when we announce the new service in the Signpost.

Regards, HaeB (talk) 04:08, 2 September 2010 (UTC)

I should point out that the global system was hacked up fairly quickly today and may have bugs. So you all probably want to test it a bit before using it in production mode (and updating documentation, etc.).

Regarding templates, I hope you're aware of Special:ExpandTemplates. It's probably what you want to make copy-pasteable content. It's what I'd use, at least.

And, yeah, EdwardsBot has been a busy bee. 55,325 live edits and 85 deleted edits at the moment. :-) --MZMcBride (talk) 04:14, 2 September 2010 (UTC)

No, this is mainly about non-wikitext formats such as for the RSS feed or mailing list announcements. And how would one use Special:ExpandTemplates to generate the issue content list for other wikis (e.g. this with wikilinks replaced by interwiki links to en:)? (My current plan is to extend the existing display options in Pretzels' Signpost template system, I recently wrote up some documentation for them).

My estimate was about the Signpost deliveries only (starting on 27 October 2009, when the spamlist had 986 entries, today it has 1077 - 45 weeks). Still, it seems we are the largest customer ;)

Regards, HaeB (talk) 04:47, 2 September 2010 (UTC)

Oh, links, right.... I guess you'd do a find/replace on those. Nasty. They say global templates are coming soon (where "soon" is anywhere between a month and a year). It was someone's Summer of Code project. The other parts (RSS and foundation-l posting) could be automated, but that would leave too little to do for the human editors. ;-) --MZMcBride (talk) 04:55, 2 September 2010 (UTC)

Actually, the Signpost says so (in this week's tech report) ;)

Yes, I prefer not to have a solution where the new issue is blogged/posted automatically (that should still be done by hand), but I want to avoid having to generate the HTML or mail text using - you name it - find and replace. Anyway, I shouldn't bother you with this further.

Thanks again for your work!

Regards, HaeB (talk) 05:40, 2 September 2010 (UTC)

←Ohconfucius and I bumbled through the process a couple of hours ago and sent off a cut and paste of the most recent SP talk-page message to the six addresses now listed at the target page. At another project, it yielded red links for everything—and reading above, it's clear that HaeB is the best one to organise an interwiki template for this purpose. In terms of inviting non-en.WP users to subscribe, it seems to be a relatively simple process of linking them to the [2] page and asking that they input their address in the given format. I have a few ideas for gently promulgating the existence of this functionality, when it's up and working. Tony (talk) 12:29, 2 September 2010 (UTC)

I did a successful test run with a hand-created page for the last Signpost. There is a (somewhat trivial but annoying) issue with the format of the target list, concerning user names with spaces, see m:Template talk:Target.

Regards, HaeB (talk) 06:12, 5 September 2010 (UTC)

Fixed (and replied on the talk page). --MZMcBride (talk) 06:19, 5 September 2010 (UTC)

By the way, you can incorporate the signature into the message. It doesn't have to be on its own line or anything. Nothing in the script even looks for a signature or anything like that. It is nice to include a timestamp, though, so that archive bots don't get confused. It might actually be preferable to link to "Global message delivery" instead of "EdwardsBot". Just a thought. --MZMcBride (talk) 06:25, 5 September 2010 (UTC)

Bahhhhhhh

harej 17:27, 5 September 2010 (UTC)

Haha --MZMcBride (talk) 17:29, 5 September 2010 (UTC)

Where is the Like button? Maybe we could get LQT to add one. —Reedy 07:52, 7 September 2010 (UTC)

Couldn't be worse than the current redesign plans, which include a "thanks" link and avatars, honest-to-God. --MZMcBride (talk) 08:05, 7 September 2010 (UTC)

Is it still just Werdna who is coming up with this nonsense, or are there multiple people involved? NW (Talk) 20:01, 9 September 2010 (UTC)

There's very little transparency about who exactly is proposing these ideas (like a "thanks" button or having avatars). I actually asked today in the newly created #wikimedia-dev channel and the response was along the lines of "it isn't important who's proposing the ideas." A few people are proxying the design and interface ideas; in particular Brandon Harris, who has been hired by the Wikimedia Foundation to work on various design projects, one of which is LiquidThreads. --MZMcBride (talk) 00:09, 10 September 2010 (UTC)

Fun fun. These new ideas with LiquidThreads are sounding about as good as WIKIPEDIA FOREVER. NW (Talk) 00:59, 10 September 2010 (UTC)

Wikipedia, the most popular social networking site. —Dark 07:21, 21 September 2010 (UTC)

... for nerds, maybe. Facebook is the most popular social networking site. --MZMcBride (talk) 07:26, 21 September 2010 (UTC)

How did this become a fully fledged conversation with other people? The only people who have the proper context are MZMcBride and me. harej 01:33, 9 October 2010 (UTC)

Prove it. --MZMcBride (talk) 06:16, 9 October 2010 (UTC)

May I trouble you for a favor?

Please run this page through EdwardsBot.<br. />—NBahn (talk) 04:21, 9 September 2010 (UTC)

Sure, running it now. I made a few tweaks; hope you don't mind. --MZMcBride (talk) 04:28, 9 September 2010 (UTC)

• NOT AT ALL! Thank you so much!<br. />—NBahn (talk) 05:11, 9 September 2010 (UTC)

DC Meetup #12

An off-wiki discussion is taking place concerning DC Meetup #12. Watch this page for announcements.
—NBahn (talk) 04:35, 9 September 2010 (UTC)

P.S. You are receiving this message either because you received a similar one before and didn't object, or you requested to receive a similar one in the future. If you don't wish to receive this message again, then please let me know either on my talk page or here.

List of secret pages

Hi, MZMcBride. I plan to do a mass nomination on secret pages at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Secret pages 2. The nomination will have a reasonable chance of succeeding because consensus at Wikipedia talk:What Wikipedia is not/Archive 34#Does WP:NOTMYSPACE apply to secret pages? is that those pages violate the policy WP:NOTMYSPACE. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Secret pages failed because there was no policy discussion that established that WP:NOTMYSPACE applies to secret pages.

Would you run a script to search for the remaining secret pages on Wikipedia? Something like this? Thank you, Cunard (talk) 04:45, 9 September 2010 (UTC)

This should be simple enough. I'll try to get to this tomorrow. --MZMcBride (talk) 04:58, 9 September 2010 (UTC)

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=383882596 is sort of what you want, but with a lot of extra noise. It's all subpages in the User / User talk namespaces that contain certain phrases ("super hidden", etc.). You'd obviously have to review the pages manually to determine whether they're actually "secret" pages. Further filtering could be done, I suppose.... --MZMcBride (talk) 19:43, 9 September 2010 (UTC)

Thank you for the list. I will manually review the page over the next week before I create an MfD. Cunard (talk) 00:38, 10 September 2010 (UTC)

I have started Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Secret pages 2. Cunard (talk) 06:20, 12 September 2010 (UTC)

Watcher bug

I think Watcher is bugged, since I have 28 watchers and 1 centijimbo is 22.1 watchers so therefore I should have 1.2 centijimbos. Ғяіᴆaз'§Đøøм | Champagne? 06:58, 14 September 2010 (UTC)

Most people would have "—" instead of "28" there. And most people wouldn't be measuring centijimbos. I guess there's a bug, probably trivial to fix. I'm more concerned that the table isn't centered, to be honest. That seems like something on your end, though.

Do you own the account "FD"? --MZMcBride (talk) 07:06, 14 September 2010 (UTC)

Oh ok, thanks MZM; no I don't I meant to create the account, then the userpage with redirect. >.< Ғяіᴆaз'§Đøøм | Champagne? 10:54, 14 September 2010 (UTC)

This should be fixed now.

If you don't own the account "FD", you shouldn't be using it in your user signature. --MZMcBride (talk) 15:06, 14 September 2010 (UTC)

yeah McBride. How dare you calculate the almighty centijimbos wrong. You suck. —Dark 15:11, 14 September 2010 (UTC)

3.8, eh? 8=D --MZMcBride (talk) 15:14, 14 September 2010 (UTC)

Ok, thanks MZ! Ғяіᴆaз'§Đøøм | Champagne? 08:30, 15 September 2010 (UTC)

Same problem, but only when logged out. The centijimbos field shows "-" but when logged in it says 1.3. Regards, —Ғяіᴆaз'§Đøøм • Champagne? • 09:35, 19 September 2010 (UTC)

It should show "—" when you're logged out for both "watchers" and "centijimbos" when the number of watchers is less than 30. That's expected (proper) behavior. Everything looks fine to me. --MZMcBride (talk) 01:26, 20 September 2010 (UTC)

ok thanks :) —Ғяіᴆaз'§Đøøм • Champagne? • 04:23, 20 September 2010 (UTC)

Nashville area?

There is some talk of a Nashville area meetup. Would love to have your participation! -- SatyrTN (talk / contribs) 00:20, 15 September 2010 (UTC)

I'd love to be there. I've been crazy busy lately, though. Probably won't be able to. :-( --MZMcBride (talk) 22:23, 15 September 2010 (UTC)

<cough>

Hi MzMcBride, I've been meaning to pop by for a while and say just how useful Wikipedia:Database reports/Uncategorized and unreferenced biographies of living people has been, amongst other things it picks up anything up to a dozen vandalised articles a week. Would you mind nudging your friend Bernstein about it, as it seems to have slipped from his list? ϢereSpielChequers 06:22, 15 September 2010 (UTC)

Awfully loud cough. ;-) Thanks for the poke. I'll respond in the other section above. --MZMcBride (talk) 22:24, 15 September 2010 (UTC)

Hi again - actually this is a unique little query in its own right, but I found it a really effective way of finding vandalised articles. Can you restart it? ϢereSpielChequers 11:39, 22 September 2010 (UTC)

Oh, I thought you were poking me about the autopatrolled query. This is what I get for not reading carefully. I've fixed this now. Apologies for the delay. --MZMcBride (talk) 17:23, 22 September 2010 (UTC)

Seasons Greetings

Cute. :-) --MZMcBride (talk) 01:27, 20 September 2010 (UTC)

new pending poll

Hi MZ, there is a new poll regarding Pending Protection, Wikipedia:Pending changes/Straw_poll on Interim Usage seems only reasonable to notify the users that commented in the recent previous, there were about 700 Wikipedia:Pending changes/Straw poll could you automate by bot the users from the previous poll? Off2riorob (talk) 17:02, 20 September 2010 (UTC)

Something like this to all the users that commented to that poll...

Hi, as you recently commented in the straw poll regarding the ongoing usage and trial of Pending Protection, this is to notify you that there is an interim straw poll as regards keeping the tool switched on or switching it off while improvements are worked on and due for release on November 9, 2010, the poll is only in regard to this issue and sets no precedent for any future usage. Your opinion as regards this issue is greatly appreciated. See here - Wikipedia:Pending changes/Straw poll on Interim Usage Off2riorob (talk) 17:13, 20 September 2010 (UTC)

Here is the list of users - Off2riorob (talk) 17:18, 20 September 2010 (UTC)

Running this now... or I would be, but EdwardsBot is already in use. Guess I'll have to wait. The message is set up here, if you want to copy-edit it or something. :-) I'll start the bot once it finishes its current run. --MZMcBride (talk) 21:48, 20 September 2010 (UTC)

Thanks a lot for running that. Off2riorob (talk) 14:51, 21 September 2010 (UTC)

bugzilla:23819

^^ Do you know who I could bother to look at this request? =] –xeno^talk 13:04, 23 September 2010 (UTC)

Looks fairly trivial to implement. Though even if you found someone to submit a patch/commit the change, you'd still wait ages and ages for it to go live. --MZMcBride (talk) 17:22, 23 September 2010 (UTC)

That thinking kinda makes the perfect the enemy of the good =] I've got a plan in the meantime (add a button to the usurp templates), but it'd be nice to have it integrated. –xeno^talk 17:24, 23 September 2010 (UTC)

Signpost deliver to a project

I was promoting the meta delivery of the signpost to the Dutch wiki community, and the request was made for a delivery to project space, so that people could watchlist that, and not be bothered by a cluttered talkpage and too much orange banners. Would it be possible to deliver to something like nl:Wikipedia:Signpost? —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 11:56, 24 September 2010 (UTC)

Heh. I really have no desire to modify the code. Set up a role account "User:Signpost" or something and redirect the talk page? The bot should follow redirects. :-) --MZMcBride (talk) 16:07, 24 September 2010 (UTC)

Church of Google

Greetings,

As you were the last administrator to delete Church of Google, I thought I'd come to you. The titles Church of Google and The Church of Google are each protected from creation, due to an apparent history of abuse. However, I'd like to humbly suggest that both of them simply be redirected to Googlization, and hope you will consider recreating those pages for that purpose, even if they remain protected afterwards.

Thank you for your time, Mnmazur (talk)

I don't really have any views on this one way or the other. It looks like I deleted some broken redirects at those titles and another administrator finally protected the titles from re-creation. You'll probably have to use Deletion review to get the titles unlocked. Or hope that some kind admin is watching this talk page. --MZMcBride (talk) 16:10, 24 September 2010 (UTC)

• It needs to go to Deletion review. The pages are salted because there have been multiple deletions in the past, including at least one AfD. Googlization has a different meaning. Risker (talk) 16:28, 24 September 2010 (UTC)

Your bot

Hello, please create a user page for your bot at fr.wiki indicating at least where to contact you. Also if you plan to use it on a regular basis please apply for a bot flag. Nakor (talk) 21:19, 27 September 2010 (UTC)

Hi.

I created a user page at fr.wikipedia.org. I also created a user page at every other current wiki where EdwardsBot exists.

Regarding bot flags and blocks, please see here.

Cheers. --MZMcBride (talk) 14:12, 28 September 2010 (UTC)

Your assistance is requested

Hi MZM - I want to go back and review all of the articles I put on to pending changes during the trial so that I can determine whether PC remains appropriate for those articles.[3] For better or worse, I had the highest number of configurations[4], so I know I've got my work cut out for me. I'm trying to think of a way that will allow me to do so with the least amount of effort and with the greatest amount of information that would be useful to the community. I'm wondering if it might be possible to create a pre-populated table that would include all the article names, the date entered into the trial, the date taken off trial (if applicable), total days on trial, the number of pending changes reviewed during the trial period, and then a blank space allowing editing, where I could identify what action I have taken (return to semi-protection, leave on PC, remove all protection, or "other"). Any idea how to do that? Risker (talk) 22:39, 27 September 2010 (UTC)

List of Users by Articles created

I know you have a million things going on but I was wondering if it would be possible to create a list of users by articles created, similar to the List of Edits? If possible adding a column to the existing list would, in my opinion be best, if this request is even reasonable or possoible. --Kumioko (talk) 15:15, 30 September 2010 (UTC)

Wikipedia:List of Wikipedians by article count? --MZMcBride (talk) 19:03, 30 September 2010 (UTC)

Cool thanks. --Kumioko (talk) 03:03, 2 October 2010 (UTC)

Good Morning again, After looking at the above list if looks as though it hasnt been updated since March. This also appears to be true of Wikipedia Wikipedia:List of Wikipedians by number of recent edits.

• Would it be possible to update those?
• Also, shouldn't the opt out list apply to these as well?,
• As well as the rule that typically excludes bot edits?

My last question is something of a curiousity one.

• Wouldnt it be better to just add a column to the List of Edits list for "Recent changes" and "Articles Created"?

I know this would add time to the generation of the list but then it would only be one list that needed to be updated? thanks again--Kumioko (talk) 10:15, 2 October 2010 (UTC)

Look at Wikipedia:List of Wikipedians by article count/Data. It was updated last week.

I don't have any desire to deal with Wikipedia:List of Wikipedians by number of recent edits. Try WP:BOTREQ or something.

The lists couldn't easily be merged. It's perfectly possible for someone to have the most recent edits in a week but not have a high enough edit count to hit the list for all-time edits. The data would become completely meaningless. --MZMcBride (talk) 20:30, 3 October 2010 (UTC)

I see your point on the recent edits list and truthfully I thinks its pointless. Frankly I have months with over 7000 and some where I dont edit at all due to work, vacation etc. --Kumioko (talk) 23:54, 3 October 2010 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Database reports/Transclusions of deleted templates

The transclusion counts appear to be a bit off, is this a bug? I was going to have SporkBot help orphan some of these, but then noticed that there actually weren't as many transclusions as are listed. The top one on the list is correct, but many after that seem to be a bit off. Thanks! Plastikspork (talk) 00:09, 1 October 2010 (UTC)

Yes, some of transclusion counts are wrong. I believe this is mentioned on the Database reports talk page. It's an underlying issue in the database itself where the templatelinks table is referencing non-existent page IDs. If you look at this paste, you can see that {{spoiler}} is allegedly being used on 76 pages (tl_from is a key to page_id). Most of these tl_from's reference non-existent page_id's. Oddly, it's listed on the database report as having 760 transclusions. So who the hell knows what's up with that.

A join against the page table might fix this. I'm not sure why I didn't do this initially. Probably some combination of laziness and stupidity. --MZMcBride (talk) 00:23, 1 October 2010 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Database reports/Cross-namespace redirects/2

Something seems to have gone wrong when Bernstein just updated this page, it added the page to a lot of different categories--Jac16888^Talk 00:38, 1 October 2010 (UTC)

Fun. This issue was the result of this edit to the {{plnr}} template. I believe I fixed this issue with this edit. Cheers. --MZMcBride (talk) 01:10, 1 October 2010 (UTC)

Hmmm, does not seem to be fixed yet. That page is still in CAT:ESP. There is also a thread on this at WP:VPT#SPER before I noticed this on your talk page. Thanks, Stickee (talk) 03:00, 1 October 2010 (UTC)

Bingo. Fixed now. --Stickee (talk) 03:12, 1 October 2010 (UTC)

Wiki-style site

Hi MZMcBride!! The user MBisanz recommend me you, because i asked him how to creat a Wiki-style site... Can you help me please...?! Regards. Light Warrior^{Conspiracy?!?} 01:21, 3 October 2010 (UTC)

Sounds like you want a wiki. MediaWiki is a popular piece of wiki software, but you don't necessarily need to install it on your own. You can use a service like Wikia, which lets you set up your own MediaWiki installation pretty easily. There are similar services to Wikia. There are also other types of wiki software that you can play with. Try List of wiki software. If you do want to install MediaWiki on your own, there's plenty of help available (cf. mw:MediaWiki on IRC). --MZMcBride (talk) 01:31, 3 October 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for your fast reply and sorry my delay... i was very sick and didn´t stayed here... I will check this. Thanks very much. Light Warrior^{Conspiracy?!?} 18:50, 20 October 2010 (UTC)

Hi

Will you be my friend? I have added you to my userpage under Friends. Rapturenator (talk) 15:35, 3 October 2010 (UTC)

That's kind of creepy. --MZMcBride (talk) 20:10, 3 October 2010 (UTC)

He'll be there for you. Killiondude (talk) 21:22, 3 October 2010 (UTC)

Cuz your there for him tooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo Mike Rothstein (talk) 18:24, 9 October 2010 (UTC)

This conversation might interest you

Please see here You might already be watching it, so pardon me if I'm wasting your time. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 20:16, 3 October 2010 (UTC)

I replied there. --MZMcBride (talk) 20:26, 3 October 2010 (UTC)

Unprotect Farassoo

Dear MZMcBride, I want to create the page for Farassoo but it has been protected by you due to previous advertising contents on that. Would you please kindly unprotect the page? I work for Farassoo and I want to create a neat wiki page for our company. Thanks Bahadorjn (talk) 08:17, 7 October 2010 (UTC)

You'll have to use Deletion review. You may want to create a draft of the article first at User:Bahadorjn/Farassoo. --MZMcBride (talk) 17:25, 7 October 2010 (UTC)

I have created a draft here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Bahadorjn/Farassoo . Please check that out. Bahadorjn (talk) 08:47, 13 October 2010 (UTC)

Watcher tool

How come statistics don't show if your {{tps}} count is under 30? Is there any way to resolve the problem? :| TelCoNaSpVe :| 05:00, 9 October 2010 (UTC)

"How come"? What are they teaching in school these days? ;-)
If you visit User:MZMcBride/watcher, it explains that the limit is in place due to concerns the Toolserver admins had. I think you have to complain to them, but I doubt that will accomplish much. Killiondude (talk) 06:05, 9 October 2010 (UTC)

What he said. The talk page has some useful comments as well. --MZMcBride (talk) 06:15, 9 October 2010 (UTC)

userspace links report

How is your userspace links report generated? I assume it's done from toolserver, but how do you query against the page text? Can I see your script/query? tedder (talk) 18:03, 9 October 2010 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Database reports/Articles containing links to the user space/Configuration --MZMcBride (talk) 18:09, 9 October 2010 (UTC)

That's too easy. Thanks. tedder (talk) 19:52, 9 October 2010 (UTC)

Speaking of this report, any idea why every article which has {{Mantidae-stub}} has been listed for the last few reports? It did have a user link but it was removed before the first time they were all listed--Jac16888^Talk 23:30, 9 October 2010 (UTC)

For whatever reason, you have to null edit the pages in order to make the links update. I have a script called "touch.py" that can do null edits to a list of pages. I'll run it on the list and then re-run the database report. --MZMcBride (talk) 00:10, 10 October 2010 (UTC)

gotcha, cheers--Jac16888^Talk 00:24, 10 October 2010 (UTC)

Looks like this is resolved. --MZMcBride (talk) 00:25, 14 October 2010 (UTC)

Re: Permalinks

Thanks for reminding me about permalinks. I'll add the appropriate one to the discussion at the Village Pump. For the record, though, I think it is ridiculous to characterize my edit as compromising the quality of the article, especially since that is essentially what your edit has done. – Zntrip 04:35, 12 October 2010 (UTC)

Aye. I worded that poorly (and it wasn't as specific to your edit as it was a general statement). My bad. --MZMcBride (talk) 05:02, 12 October 2010 (UTC)

You suck

Yeah. —Reedy 12:14, 13 October 2010 (UTC)

??? What exactly justifies that? I nearly reverted that as vandalism until I recognized the name. The Thing // Talk // Contribs 12:23, 13 October 2010 (UTC)

An IRC thing, perhaps? Aiken (talk) 12:32, 13 October 2010 (UTC)

Prove it. --MZMcBride (talk) 13:37, 13 October 2010 (UTC)

It keeps Max and I amused. —Reedy 23:17, 13 October 2010 (UTC)

McBride has always sucked. What's new? —Dark 07:48, 17 October 2010 (UTC)

STOP THE BOT !

It appears to be recreating recreating BLP articles deleted at AfD. --Kudpung (talk) 07:56, 15 October 2010 (UTC) Sorry, that was wrong - but it appears to automatically creating talk pages for articles that were originally deleted.--Kudpung (talk) 08:04, 15 October 2010 (UTC)

I don't know what you're talking about. Try a few links or proper nouns. --MZMcBride (talk) 00:59, 16 October 2010 (UTC)

message on meta

see this. THENEWMONO™ 03:29, 16 October 2010 (UTC)

Replied there. --MZMcBride (talk) 20:49, 16 October 2010 (UTC)

The draft version of Farassoo

I have created a draft here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Bahadorjn/Farassoo . Please check that out and please unprotect Farassoo if it is OK. Bahadorjn (talk) 06:51, 16 October 2010 (UTC)

You need to use Deletion review. --MZMcBride (talk) 20:49, 16 October 2010 (UTC)

Children's literature portal move

Hi MZMcBride, you had previously helped us out at Portal:Children's and young adult literature with using LawBot (talk · contribs) to do some page moves. We now have consensus to move the portal to a much simpler name, on the way towards some quality improvement efforts. :) Please see Wikipedia:Bot_requests#Portal_move.2C_and_subpages_-_Children.27s_literature. Do you think you could help out with this? Thank you for your time, -- Cirt (talk) 02:55, 17 October 2010 (UTC)

Actually, looks like someone else might do it. ;) -- Cirt (talk) 04:47, 17 October 2010 (UTC)

Done. --MZMcBride (talk) 06:27, 17 October 2010 (UTC)

Thank you! -- Cirt (talk) 06:44, 17 October 2010 (UTC)

Any way you can edit the text on all the portal pages and subpage - search for "Children and Young Adult Literature" or "Children's and young adult literature", and replace all instances of those 2, with "Children's literature" ? -- Cirt (talk) 09:16, 17 October 2010 (UTC)

Update: Not necessary now, as another bot came through and fixed a few double-redirects. Thanks again, -- Cirt (talk) 10:12, 17 October 2010 (UTC)

Rick Sanchez

The Rick Sanchez article (current version) is a complete piece of shit. Wikipedia shouldn't have an article at all if this is the type of content it's going to push out. --MZMcBride (talk) 04:41, 17 October 2010 (UTC)

Database facts

Hi, As in User_talk:Closedmouth#How_did_you_know.3F, I was told you are the expert on this issue. So are there dynamic database update routines in Wikipedia that populate pages? Thanks. History2007 (talk) 16:09, 18 October 2010 (UTC)

Hi. Most database reports are updated by a bot, specifically BernsteinBot. If you click the "configuration" links next to each report title in the index, you can view the underlying source code and cron job that's used to update the reports. Hope that helps. --MZMcBride (talk) 16:11, 18 October 2010 (UTC)

Thanks, that helped me understand that the bots cross check and update "within pages". But do any of them access external sources? For instance, I had complained to myself before that pages such as CAC Mid 100 are almost always incorrect. In fact I just checked and it was last updated in May 2010, so it is probably incorrect now. One day these pages just need to read the public databases. Is that done anywhere now? I thought Lars Svenonius‎'s death might have been picked up from the web automatically, but it does not look like it now. Anyway, one day, one day... History2007 (talk) 16:55, 18 October 2010 (UTC)

There are a lot of bots running around the site. They do various things. I don't know of any off-hand that update articles from public databases regularly, but I also wouldn't be surprised if one or two did. I favor a reporting system because it allows for human review. So, for example, you could query public databases, compare to our articles, and then output lists for humans to check over. If you have ideas for database reports (or dump reports), feel free to make a section on the respective talk page. --MZMcBride (talk) 16:59, 18 October 2010 (UTC)

Certainly a semi-automated version will be the start, e.g. check all living people over 60 against obituaries in the NY Times, etc. and suggest updates. Or check the composition of CAC/DAX/NASDAQ, etc. I have plenty of ideas... time is another issue however. But I am writing these things up, gradually. I am still looking for the 1st bot that updates from public sources. I may just write it anyway, just to get things started. I do have Wikipage-generation software I wrote to format image galleries, so I can just modify that one day. If you do see an external bot, please do let me know. Thanks. History2007 (talk) 17:38, 18 October 2010 (UTC)

Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape appears to be a POV fork of Nanticoke Indian Tribe

Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape appears to be a POV fork of Nanticoke Indian Tribe. I would like to merge the first into the second, much better article. May I? Bearian (talk) 22:56, 18 October 2010 (UTC)

Why are you asking me? --MZMcBride (talk) 04:29, 19 October 2010 (UTC)

MZMcBride is awesome

You are awesome. Just sayin' —Preceding unsigned comment added by 203.194.9.193 (talk) 08:42, 19 October 2010 (UTC)

I know. :-) --MZMcBride (talk) 17:39, 19 October 2010 (UTC)

Signpost Delivery

Hi MZM. User:Pedro João wants Signpost delivered to User talk:Pedro João rather than their user page. I added their user talk to the spamlist here thinking that might fix it, but it's still being delivered to their user page. Could you please fix it? :) The user made their request here. Cheers, Ncmvocalist (talk) 11:02, 19 October 2010 (UTC)

The bot follows redirects. Fixed: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/Tools/Spamlist&diff=391678236&oldid=391604079&diffonly=1 --MZMcBride (talk) 17:41, 19 October 2010 (UTC)

Derp

Derp derp derp, lol, derp. —Reedy 14:10, 19 October 2010 (UTC)

ihu :-( --MZMcBride (talk) 17:41, 19 October 2010 (UTC)

Don't lie. Just don't. Killiondude (talk) 04:59, 20 October 2010 (UTC)

Unapproved use of LawBot?

Hi there MZMcBride. I saw LawBot made a large number of moves a few days ago, following a request at BOTR. I don't see that the bot has been approved at BRfA to make these moves (the only BRfA I can find for this bot is Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/LawBot). So I was just wondering if you actually had approval for these moves? - Kingpin¹³ (talk) 13:20, 20 October 2010 (UTC)

I guess you don't know who the bot was named after. :-)

I thought its approval was broader than it is (could've sworn I slipped something in there about general non-controversial tasks). Oh well. Is there a problem with the moves? --MZMcBride (talk) 16:16, 20 October 2010 (UTC)

Oh, I meant to mention above, the only problem I had was you maybe went a little bit too fast here (about 50 moves a minute). But regardless you should still get bot approval for these, just a matter of procedure really (although it is necessary and I find nearly always beneficial, as more often then not something is fixed/improved at BRfA). Of course BRfA is especially backlogged at the moment, so every thing is going a bit slow :/. Uhh.. no, but User:Law? Just a wild guess :D. Heh, I almost named the section "Unlawful use of LawBot?" ;). - Kingpin¹³ (talk) 21:02, 20 October 2010 (UTC)

Nomination for deletion of Template:Userspace BLP

Template:Userspace BLP has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the template's entry on the Templates for discussion page. Thank you. PC78 (talk) 19:25, 20 October 2010 (UTC)

Can I get a list...

I'd like a list of articles that contain two (or more) links to FindAGrave.com. It would need to pick up both the template and direct URLs. Do you have any ideas about how to go about that? (See this 70K-long VPM discussion for context.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:09, 22 October 2010 (UTC)

Sounds dangerously close to what I was discussing here. --MZMcBride (talk) 03:23, 22 October 2010 (UTC)

Question on edits

I was wondering if you knew of any tools or scripts that can help analyze an editor's contributions besides Soxred93's counter? Specifically, I was hoping to be able to single out large byte changes or something along that line. I need to be able to separate WikiGnome edits from actual content changes done by a certain editor. bahamut0013^words_deeds 01:17, 23 October 2010 (UTC)

I don't know of any tools that do that. It depends whether you want to focus on the past 30 days of edits or further back. The past 30 days is trivial because the database stores the current page length and the previous page length for each edit (making a quick substitution of the two values painless). If you want to go back further than 30 days, you have to take each edit, get its current (stored) page length, and then get the length of the previous revision (assuming that previous revision isn't something bizarre like a page protection entry). If you provide the user's name, I can likely write and run a query. It's also possible to write a rudimentary tool, I suppose. It kind of depends how fast it is to analyze (which would probably mean limiting a potential tool to users under a certain edit count). --MZMcBride (talk) 01:54, 23 October 2010 (UTC)

full version of Wikipedia:Database reports/Non-free files missing a rationale?

A hopefully simple request - could you do a run of Wikipedia:Database reports/Non-free files missing a rationale without the 2000 article limit & pop it somewhere in my userspace? Muchas gracias in advance :) Skier Dude (talk 02:39, 24 October 2010 (UTC)

It's kind of annoying to do, as I recall. Someone asked me earlier about doing this. I don't really remember why it's annoying, but I remember that it is. --MZMcBride (talk) 18:59, 24 October 2010 (UTC)

Better response: why do you want the full list? It's updating 2000 daily. Is that not enough work or something? --MZMcBride (talk) 19:27, 24 October 2010 (UTC)

I've gone through the first 2000 with the FuRme - and want to work with the other albums/films. Skier Dude (talk 05:19, 25 October 2010 (UTC)

Hmm, the report updates daily. If you're adding rationales, those non-free file entries should be removed in the following day's report update. Would a more specific list of only albums/films work for you? --MZMcBride (talk) 05:21, 25 October 2010 (UTC)

Abuse Filter question

Hi. I want to set up an abuse filter which matches a set of badwords (using contains_any()) in the text. I want it to prevent saving the page if a badword exists in the new wikitext of the new version of THAT SECTION of page the user is editing. So for example if page is like this:

== Section 1 == Text text badword. == Section 2 == Text text. == Section 3 == Text text badword.

And the user is replacing "text" with "test" in section 2, nothing should happen. However, if he is editing section 3 and NOT removing the badword from that section, he should be warned and saving should be disallowed.

Is that possible? huji—TALK 15:51, 24 October 2010 (UTC)

I really don't deal with the AbuseFilter much. The way it's implemented (particularly its bizarre syntax) frustrate and annoy me. Prodego might be able to help you. If not, there's an AbuseFilter requests page somewhere or there's always the technical village pump if you get desperate. --MZMcBride (talk) 18:57, 24 October 2010 (UTC)

Thanks huji—TALK 23:17, 24 October 2010 (UTC)

George A. Berglund

I have added two links. Will that be sufficient? Cecilia Anderson (talk) 16:18, 24 October 2010 (UTC)

Looks like the issue is that the article doesn't make it clear why the person is notable. --MZMcBride (talk) 18:56, 24 October 2010 (UTC)

I might find one or two other articles. Those are, I think, old. If I find them, is it possible to upload Pdf files? Or are the only articles suitable, those that already are on the web? Cecilia Anderson (talk) 20:02, 25 October 2010 (UTC)

You can upload PDFs to this site if you own the license to them or they constitute fair use. --MZMcBride (talk) 17:09, 28 October 2010 (UTC)

File:USA-satellite.jpg

This image does not have a direct link to its source. I saw that you deleted the talk page for the file, so I wanted to ask you about this first. Do you know the source for this image? Hamsterlopithecus (talk) 14:54, 25 October 2010 (UTC)

No idea, sorry. --MZMcBride (talk) 17:10, 28 October 2010 (UTC)

Heads up about an RfC

Please note that there's a new discussion at Wikipedia:Requests for comment/2010 ArbCom election voting procedure in which you may wish to comment. It is expected to close in about a week. You have received this message because you participated in a similar discussion (2009 AC2 RfC) last year.  Roger ^talk 05:44, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

Huh, I read the title and totally thought it was an RFC about me!

Thanks for the heads up. :-) I commented in one of the sections (regarding a "none of the above" option). I'm still not sure which way I lean regarding open/closed ballots. I trust a lot of the people on the closed ballot side, but it feels a bit ... wrong to me still. I suppose I'll simply abstain from voting. --MZMcBride (talk) 05:55, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

[Chuckle]

I expect it'll evolve a bit over the years as the technology develops. The difficulty over changes though is getting enough interest sufficiently far ahead to implement in time for the election :)  Roger ^talk 05:58, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

List favor

Can you come up with a list of baseball, basketball, and american football unsourced BLPs so I and people from the relavent wikiprojects could take care of them. Thanks Secret ^account 01:49, 28 October 2010 (UTC)

I think we've supplied Secret with the lists. But I have a question for you. Is there a tool/database list that you can use to analyse the article creation date (not the tagging date) of all articles in Category:All unreferenced BLPs? Basically we want to know how many of the "tagged since XXXXXX 2010" were created after the magic March 18 date that the BLPPROD came in.The-Pope (talk) 16:09, 28 October 2010 (UTC)

It's fairly trivial to query the MIN(rev_timestamp) for an article. --MZMcBride (talk) 17:08, 28 October 2010 (UTC)

Great, any chance of making this one of your regular reports? We suspect there could be several hundred out there that are eligible for sticky prods but not yet prodded. ϢereSpielChequers 17:15, 28 October 2010 (UTC)

I've been pretty busy lately, but if you can throw some specifics (like template names, exact date you're looking for, category names, etc.) on WT:DBR, I should be able to get to it at some point. Being specific (and clear) is always helpful to me. For example, "I want all non-redirects in namespace 0 [instead of "articles or "pages"] in Category:Baz that were created before October 1, 2010 that use Template:Spam and Template:Eggs." If you want a regular report, try to come up with a decent report title and provide an update frequency. Providing these kinds of details lets me handle these requests in a much quicker manner because I don't have to ask follow-up questions or debate these details myself. --MZMcBride (talk) 17:23, 28 October 2010 (UTC)

OK done Wikipedia_talk:Database_reports#New_BLPs_that_might_be_eligible_for_a_sticky_prod - hope that's what you need. ϢereSpielChequers 17:43, 28 October 2010 (UTC)

AWB

Hi there MZMcBride. Just letting you know I've removed your account from the AWB list of bots (you added yourself here). You should not run bots on your main account, I've added you to the users list, so you will still have access to AWB's non-bot functions. If you wish to run an AWB-bot, please go through a BRfA to obtain approval. Cheers, - Kingpin¹³ (talk) 00:56, 1 November 2010 (UTC)

Clouseau! --MZMcBride (talk) 17:16, 1 November 2010 (UTC)

Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition! - Kingpin¹³ (talk) 23:46, 1 November 2010 (UTC)

Gabriel Fragnière

Good morning, young MZMcBride. Your Bot tells me I should give references to the biography of Gabriel Fragnière. I wonder what you mean by that. My text seems convincing to me and verifiable, if someone did contest one or other detail.

My text is based on my own research and on information I have received from Fragnière himself. Would you find it useful that I add as reference 'information given by Fragnière - research done bij A. Van den Abeele?' I suppose not.

Much of the 'references' on the English version of wikipedia are newspapers articles to be found on the internet, which I consider as a not very reliable reference and one which will sooner or later disappear from the internet. It seems rather disparaging for wikipedia that it cannot be considered as a prime source and has to refer to what others have written already. If others didn't, well than Wikipedia should be considered as a prime source. It is then up to the critical reader to decide if the information is plausible and trustworthy or not.

I am a keen reader of footnotes and references in historical books. But when it comes to an encyclopedia, this seems to me superfluous and often rather pedant. Like in this biography e. g., which I consider as speaking for itself. Nevertheless to please the adept of references I added a couple of these.

Best regards, Andries Van den Abeele (talk) 11:52, 1 November 2010 (UTC)

P. S. Do I understand correctly from the above message AWB that you do not longer have the Bot-facility?

Morning.

This edit looks great. Thank you for adding references. :-)

The message above regarding AWB is idiotic and best left completely ignored. Cheers. --MZMcBride (talk) 17:19, 1 November 2010 (UTC)

Hello

Reagarding [5] I hold no grudges. If I see good contributions from yourself then I will be positive. Polargeo 2 (talk) 15:25, 2 November 2010 (UTC)

I'm just a bit lost. According to this, you were abusively using alternate accounts. For most users, that would result in a ban. You resigned your tools and I thought you had left altogether (effectively implementing a self-ban). I was surprised to see you editing with yet another account. I'm sure there's an interesting back-story here. --MZMcBride (talk) 18:15, 2 November 2010 (UTC)

I wasn't abusively using multiple accounts. I was using one or two of them not strictly in accordance with letter of policy. After I handed in my bit I scrambled my password and hopped about a bit but I didn't try to hide who I was, I just wasn't as above board as should be expected by policy. Hence Arbcom passed a motion restricting me to a single account and forcing me to undergo an RfA if I wanted the bit back. I am fine with this. I think they were mostly pissed off with me turning up at the proposed decision talkpage under different names as they found it confusing. I was pissed off because they went into whack a mole mode and also started clamping hundreds of IP addresses rather than just saying, "hey Polargeo chill". Ultimately there is only one winner in that situation and that is the boy with the biggest stick. Polargeo 2 (talk) 10:40, 3 November 2010 (UTC)

Watcher

Hi, as a project to improve our coverage of problem edits to BLPs I've started lumping BLPs arbitrarily into tranches of 5000 articles each, providing a reasonably sized subset that a single Wikipedian has a chance of monitoring using "related changes". See User:Tony Sidaway/Living people/tranches.

Off2riorob pointed me at your "watcher" tool which takes a bumch of pages and returns the number of page watchers for each of them. Obviously it would make sense to use the information to prune the list by removing articles that seem to be adequately covered. It looks like it will be suitable for my purposes. I have one or two questions though.

• Does it only produce HTML output, or can it also respond, say, with XML?
• Does it accept POST requests?
• Is there a limit to the number of titles it can handle in one request?

I'm contemplating running this tool against the entire half-million articles about living people on English Wikipedia, though obviously not in a single afternoon!

If there are already reasonably up-to-date static lists with the same data, obviously I would prefer to use them rather than hammer the tool server. --TS 18:03, 4 November 2010 (UTC)

To answer your questions:

• Only HTML output.
• Only GET requests.
• The limit is based on max URL length; I don't believe I hardcoded any value in the tool itself.

That said, it's an insane way to do mass-querying. You have a Toolserver account. Just produce a dump of the aggregate data (page_title \t watchers), output it to a file, and read the file. Querying over HTTP is going to be slow as shit. A query run on the watchlist table should take about 15 minutes. --MZMcBride (talk) 18:08, 4 November 2010 (UTC)

I'll do it from the toolserver side. The MediaWiki people sounded doubtful that the watchlist data was generally available on tool server (yes, #mediawiki was the wrong place to ask and the response left a big question as to how your tool manages to do it!) Thanks. --TS 18:14, 4 November 2010 (UTC)

It wasn't always a public table. I petitioned for it to be made public in an anonymized form and then wrote the watcher tool once it was. --MZMcBride (talk) 18:27, 4 November 2010 (UTC)

Thanks, that explains a lot. --TS 18:40, 4 November 2010 (UTC)

Why no signpost

hello,

why do i don't get the signpost every day?-- ♫Greatorangepumpkin♫ T 21:56, 5 November 2010 (UTC)

It's published weekly. --MZMcBride (talk) 21:57, 5 November 2010 (UTC)

You publish that godawful blurb from The Signpost that craps up so many talk pages? I don't hold any personal animus on this, but why can't you just tell people which page they need to watchlist, and update the page to point to the latest edition? This isn't rocket science, and if you did that you'd be reducing the sheer amount of unbelievable crap we humans have to wade through just to say something to another editor. --TS 22:50, 5 November 2010 (UTC)

You don't see it delivered to this talk page, do you? ;-)

I run EdwardsBot, the bot currently tasked with delivering the Signpost to various talk pages. EdwardsBot also handles m:Global message delivery.

I agree with you in principle. People really ought to be using RSS and a proper blog to write and read the Signpost. The current delivery system makes no sense. That said, there is a demand for it, and if it's going to be done, it may as well be done well. The current bot has an on-wiki access list and control system, making it a lot better than the AWB monsters used previously. And the EdwardsBot system is obviously adaptable to other types of deliveries (the WikiCup uses it, for example). --MZMcBride (talk) 23:02, 5 November 2010 (UTC)

Yeah. Just so you know, I even object to long cluttery signatures. My principle is that content is king and there should be one location and lots of pointers. I can understand why that might be hard to establish on a wiki where the principle is that "wiki is not paper." --TS 23:12, 5 November 2010 (UTC)

I'm the person which makes EdwardsBot post around 1100 of these "godawful blurbs" each week, although I didn't invent this system - I merely inherited it when I took over as the editor of the Signpost some months ago. The messages are in fact just pointers to a central location (templates transcluding the contents page), but it's true they still take up some space. Just this week I removed a little bit of useless code from the distributed message (which had been sitting there since 2009), saving the servers around 65kB of wikitext each week ;)

There is actually a page which you can watchlist to see when a new issue is published (Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Issue - judging from pageview stats, around 100 people use this to view the contents of the new issue each week). And we do have a blog too, where you can subscribe via RSS, and you can also get notified of new issues via our Identi.ca and Twitter feeds. But it seems that despite all these shiny superior technologies, many users prefer to get notified via the same public messaging system they are already used to for other Wikipedia communication, namely their user talk page.

Regards, HaeB (talk) 00:51, 6 November 2010 (UTC)

I just want to put it out there that I love the Signpost, even if I don't really love its delivery methods. I think Michael did an awesome job, I think Sage did an awesome job, and I think HaeB is doing an awesome job (among many, many others who contribute individual pieces, weekly columns, help with copy-editing, and more). Producing the Signpost is a sizable amount of work each week that a lot of people appreciate, and I hope my comments here don't suggest otherwise. I was merely speaking from a technical perspective regarding the bot. (A bot that I'm happy to run, by the way. I view it as my small contribution to a shining part of Wikipedia.) --MZMcBride (talk) 04:05, 6 November 2010 (UTC)

Don't worry, I hadn't conceived your comments in any other way. And thanks for the compliments - having seen in other contexts that you don't shy away from public criticism when you consider it necessary, I suppose they mean something ;)

About the talk page clutter: Users who consider this a problem might appreciate an alternative subscription method where the bot replaces an existing message each week, instead of posting a new one (this could look exactly like Template:Signpost-subscription, except that instead of being updated via transclusion, the date would be changed explicitly by the bot for each new issue, so as to generate "you have new messages"). Just thinking aloud here, not actually suggesting this should be implemented at this point. I don't know how difficult it would be technically to search and parse such a template on subscribers' talk pages. And such updates might get lost among other messages. And it seems that at least some subscribers like that the current system enables them to treat the messages similar to open browser tabs, clearing them out from their talk page after they read the corresponding issues.

Regards, HaeB (talk) 15:47, 14 November 2010 (UTC)

Srsly

Just no.

Btw, you're the worst. <3

—Reedy 14:00, 6 November 2010 (UTC)

Wikipedia is the worst. --MZMcBride (talk) 03:59, 8 November 2010 (UTC)

You're more worse. —Reedy 12:42, 8 November 2010 (UTC)

Wikipedia DC Meetup 13

You are invited to Wikipedia DC Meetup #13 on Wednesday, November 17, from 7 to 9 pm, location to be determined (but near a Metro station in DC).

To keep up-to-date on local events, you can join the mailing list.

You can remove your name from future notifications of Washington DC Meetups by editing this page: Wikipedia:Meetup/DC/Invite/List.
BrownBot (talk) 13:44, 7 November 2010 (UTC)

Mohamed Abdul Salam Mahgoub

There isn't much info on him in English (sorry). While I've managed to get a degree of good info off the Egyptian State Information Service, I must confess that one of my main sources of info on him are his near-ubiquitous campaign posters for the upcoming parliamentary elections (which all list his rank, name, and district, and often his ministerial position as well). I'll try to get a photograph up if I can get my hands on a camera by 28 November, if I can't find another source. Lockesdonkey (talk) 17:31, 8 November 2010 (UTC)

Cool. :-) --MZMcBride (talk) 20:24, 13 November 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for raising the issue of free software

Hi MZMcBride, this is user:Agradman, an acquaintance from WP:Law (my memory is failing me -- I can't find your footprints at WP:Law), editing as an IP due to a long-term (school-related) Wikibreak.

I enjoyed reading your comments in the Foundation-I mailing list regarding Wikimedia Foundation office switching to Google Apps. And I am surprised to see that the Signpost article has gotten zero comments. Regardless of whether the Foundation's decision is "right" or "wrong", I expected it to stir up controversy. Merits aside, there is something symbolic in the idea that the standard-bearer of a "free" internet is moving away from the flagship "free" products.

In a poetic moment, it made me think of two poignant paragraphs by Peter Drucker, where the gentle Brenner Pass in Italy is used to illustrate how a small change can forebode big changes to come. And so I'd like to ask your opinion, since I am not a close follower of free software issues: Should we be troubled by this change? Do you think it is foreboding of ... troubles in the "free" world?

Thanks. Kind regards, -user:Agradman editing as 128.59.179.240 (talk) 23:57, 9 November 2010 (UTC)

Request

Hi there, recently the page for http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AcidFlow was deleted by an admin with my citing of the various flaws within the page. Please stop your bot from recreating the page again. —Preceding unsigned comment added by GrandKokla (talk • contribs) 02:24, 10 November 2010 (UTC)

The bot (LaraBot) created the talk page, not the article. Is there some problem with the talk page existing? --MZMcBride (talk) 20:23, 13 November 2010 (UTC)

Perhaps of interest?

... for toolserver?  Roger ^talk 07:59, 10 November 2010 (UTC)

Rick is much smarter than me and has been doing this for a lot longer. I'll let him do it. :-) --MZMcBride (talk) 20:17, 13 November 2010 (UTC)

Preventing removal of shortcuts

User:BernsteinBot has removed a shortcut from each of these three pages.

• Wikipedia:Database reports/Most-watched pages
• Wikipedia:Database reports/Most-watched pages by namespace
• Wikipedia:Database reports/Most-watched users

Can you please revise the program so that updates will leave the shortcuts intact? (I am adding this talk page to my watchlist, and I will watch here for a reply or replies.)
—Wavelength (talk) 16:26, 11 November 2010 (UTC)

Yeah, the configuration for the intros to these reports is still kind of nasty. I suppose I could add the shortcuts at some point. So much to do and so little time (or maybe so little will). :-( --MZMcBride (talk) 20:22, 13 November 2010 (UTC)

Thank you for your reply. I respect your limitations. I have added them back for now.

—Wavelength (talk) 21:17, 13 November 2010 (UTC)

Template:Essaycatscore

{{Essaycatscore}} needs to be fixed or deleted or I need to MMOB. -- Uzma Gamal (talk) 14:51, 13 November 2010 (UTC)

It took me a minute to figure out what "MMOB" was. Then your message made so much more sense. The template description page looks a little goofy because it's trying to do math without having any real input. Once the template has input (e.g., here: Wikipedia:WikiProject Essays/Assessment/Links), it works fine. HTH and HAND. TTYL! --MZMcBride (talk) 20:20, 13 November 2010 (UTC)

MMOB = Mind My Own Business. And yes -- Hope this helps. Have a nice day. -- it did. OK, I may be in the process of generating more problems : ). I think BernsteinBot is used by WikiProject Essays banner to rate the impact of essays. That is brilliant, by the way. I've edited WikiProject Essays banner, but I am unsure whether it will mess up the bot. Would you please reply at WikiProject Essays banner. Thanks! -- Uzma Gamal (talk) 15:18, 14 November 2010 (UTC)

Ekram Ahmed Lelin

Hello !! I am trying to write about the profile of Ekram Ahmed Lelin ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ekram_Ahmed_Lelin ). He is one of the popular bengali writer of Bangladesh. Publisher already published his seven books those you easily get any books shop of Bangladesh. "BOI-MELA" is the yearly public fair in Bangladesh for books where he got reward from them. Bangladesh is not well enough to proof everything in website. I am his very fan thats why writing his profile in wikipedia. If you kindly help me to develop his nice profile in wikipedia, I'll be very happy for it.