User talk:Magioladitis

Wikipedia:Bots/Requests_for_approval/Yobot_27

Task 27 has been approved for a small trial. — xaosflux ^Talk 05:02, 16 December 2016 (UTC)

A beer for you!

Thanks! Rubbish computer (HALP!: I dropped the bass?) 20:18, 20 December 2016 (UTC)

This weekend

I start my vacation this weekend. I'll try now to be online that often. I may do some editing but probably it's going to be via my mobile. -- Magioladitis (talk) 13:23, 21 December 2016 (UTC)

Merry Christmas

Rubbish computer (HALP!: I dropped the bass?) is wishing you a Merry Christmas! This greeting (and season) promotes WikiLove and hopefully this note has made your day a little better. Spread the WikiLove by wishing another user a Merry Christmas, whether it be someone you have had disagreements with in the past, a good friend, or just some random person. Happy New Year!

Spread the cheer by adding {{subst:Xmas2}} to their talk page with a friendly message.

--Rubbish computer (HALP!: I dropped the bass?) 14:24, 22 December 2016 (UTC)

Yo Ho Ho

Iryna Harpy (talk) is wishing you Seasons Greetings! Whether you celebrate your hemisphere's Solstice or Christmas, Diwali, Hogmanay, Hanukkah, Lenaia, Festivus or even the Saturnalia, this is a special time of year for almost everyone!

Spread the holiday cheer by adding {{subst:User:WereSpielChequers/Dec16a}} to your friends' talk pages.

ISBNs

Is there is a reason that having two spaces in front of an ISBN in the text is problematic? [1][2][3][4][5][6]... The version before your change also showed the ISBN and the number in blue, and linked to booksources, so your change seems unnecessary. Fram (talk) 07:26, 24 December 2016 (UTC)

Fram OK but it's better to have code syntax normalised. No big deal. Very few pages. The magic links soon won't be working. -- Magioladitis (talk) 07:37, 24 December 2016 (UTC)

Btw, the first one had a tab I think. I started by fixing tabs, then multiple spaces. Only double spaces are left. -- Magioladitis (talk) 07:39, 24 December 2016 (UTC)

Mag, you really need to stop these cosmetic edits. You are angering a lot of people. There is nothing harmful about a double space between ISBN and the number, and a bot will convert them eventually, so leave them alone. – Jonesey95 (talk) 15:35, 24 December 2016 (UTC)

• (talk page watcher) "The magic links soon won't be working" What's that about? I add ISBNs for books throughout the encyclopedia, happy in the knowledge that they'll automagically link to book sources. Please explain. Thanks. PamD 08:11, 24 December 2016 (UTC)

Hi PamD! I think this is the best page to start from Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/Yobot 27 and see the Links to relevant discussions part. -- Magioladitis (talk) 08:12, 24 December 2016 (UTC)

See mw:Requests_for_comment/Future_of_magic_links. – Jonesey95 (talk) 15:35, 24 December 2016 (UTC)

PamD, also see Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)#Removal of ISBN magic links. SarahSV ^(talk) 16:17, 24 December 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for the links. It seems that the decision has already been made - the Wikitech link linked as a "relevant discussion" from Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/Yobot 27 says that "In the RfC meeting for the Future of magic links RfC, it was agreed upon to disable magic links ...", and I see there was an RfC at MediaWiki - but was there any discussion involving real editors who actually edit articles about books, as opposed to those who frequent technical mailing lists and are deeply involved with Mediawiki? There was certainly no mention at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Books, as far as I can see. It seems a very sad decision. PamD 18:48, 24 December 2016 (UTC)

@PamD: "was there any discussion involving real editors" Not as far as I can tell, although it has been noticed and discussed in a few places now. Just wait for the shit to hit the fan when it actually happens. Magioladitis, I am guessing this one will generate a hailstorm of trouble when the mass of editors start to notice. Are you sure you want it to be your bot on the receiving end of it? SpinningSpark 21:37, 24 December 2016 (UTC)

@PamD and Spinningspark: There were discussions with "real editors" unless you don't count people like Magioladitis, Jonesey95, me and a dozen other people that I know of real editors. They contacted people who have major dealings with ISBNs. This is also a purely technical problem that needed to be "fixed". ISBN, PMID and RFC were magiclinks that were outliers in the code. The downside is magiclinks for these three were easy to write up. The upside to using templates, ISBNs can now be checked for errors and if there is a problem, the article will end up in Category:Pages with ISBN errors. Template could convert ISBN-10 to ISBN-13 or add dashes to the appropriate spot. The big upside for me is CheckWiki will no longer check for bad ISBNs that use Magiclinks and I don't have to fix them. YEA!!! Checkwiki will still look for bad syntax for ISBN and PMIDs. The bad syntax causes the magiclinks not to work. Soon, fixing the syntax will allow bots to convert these to templates and make the templates work... nowikis around ISBNs, ISBN [[Special:Booksource/1234567890]] and ISBNs in external links are very common. We just added checking for ISBNs in external links, so we have a huge backlog to fix. Here is the listing if you would like to help. MZMcBride created the ISBN template. He would be the one to ask if/what can be added to the template. Bgwhite (talk) 07:23, 27 December 2016 (UTC)

I expect PamD meant "content creators" when she wrote "real editors", and I don't think any of the people you mention are that. But I can see how that could be taken as an insult. Any issue that changes how editors go about their business is not a purely technical issue. SpinningSpark 10:17, 27 December 2016 (UTC)

Sorry if that was an offensive term - I guess I meant something like "the 99+% of editors who don't frequent technical discussion boards but just edit articles and the occasional talkpage". Though I'm intrigued about "They contacted people who have major dealings with ISBNs", which didn't include Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Books - I suppose it means "They contacted people who have major dealings with the technical details of handling ISBNs". Anyway, it all seems done and dusted, and I used the {{ISBN}} template in an edit this morning and accept that this is just another piece of "progress" whose immediate impact on me personally is a mild negative. Season's Greetings to editors of all sorts! PamD 11:20, 27 December 2016 (UTC)

• @Bgwhite: @Spinningspark: I can see that this is a fait accompli, and can understand that the delightful, useful, slightly quirky, "magic" is perhaps old-fashioned and complicates matters for current technology, so after my initial shock I am now resigned to the fact that this "progress" will happen. It will have a negative effect on my personal editing experience, having to remember to use the template (and include 5 extra characters, more than 5 keystrokes with shifts, even messier if on mobile) rather than just typing a natural ISBN and knowing the magic will happen.

But a more serious concern is: what mechanism will pick up and templatise bare ISBNs added in future? Will it be added to the AWB "genfixes"? Will there be a bot trawling regularly to check for bare ISBNs? I suggest that the number of times an ISBN followed by a number is a deliberate non-link is vanishingly small, so that it would be reasonable to templatise all of these automatically. Is there a plan? PamD 09:00, 27 December 2016 (UTC)

PamD I am not an expert on that. As you may have noticed I also discovered this scheduled change by asking around. I requested a bot Wikipedia:Bots/Requests_for_approval/Yobot_27 to change all existing ISBN links. -- Magioladitis (talk) 09:03, 27 December 2016 (UTC)

Fair enough. I've copied the above comment to Wikipedia:Village_pump_(policy)#Removal_of_ISBN_magic_links. PamD 09:27, 27 December 2016 (UTC)

Pam, I think that is a very dangerous assumption. Bots should limit themselves to linking in sections known to be lists (works, references, bibliography etc). By the way Bgwhite, an ISBN in "external links" is usually an error. Books belong in "further reading". SpinningSpark 10:17, 27 December 2016 (UTC)

@Spinningspark: What danger is there? If by any chance the number following "ISBN" is not intended to be an ISBN, following the link will presumably lead to an error message. But in what circumstances can you imagine this happenning? It's just replicating what the magic links have been doing for years: are there any known examples of this having caused a problem? I regularly add date and ISBN in brackets after a mention of a book in the flow of text, not just in a list. PamD 11:01, 27 December 2016 (UTC)

I was thinking, for instance, of articles that give ISBNs as examples of ISBN format (I haven't looked for examples, but the ISBN article, articles on library indexing, history of libraries etc etc might do this) but the actual link might be entirely irrelevant or just not work because it is a dummy number. We should only provide links where they are helpful to the reader, there is WP:OVERLINK to consider. SpinningSpark 11:17, 27 December 2016 (UTC)

But thinking about that some more, such cases must already be doing something to suppress the magic link, so you are right, there is not really a problem. SpinningSpark 11:22, 27 December 2016 (UTC)

@Spinningspark: I suggest that this tiny proportion of the total occurrences (a) will cause no harm if linked, and (b) if found to be unhelpfully linked can be easily fixed by "nowiki" or "nbsp"; the other 99+% of instances will benefit from being linked, just as they have historically been linked by magic. Intriguingly, one of the only two linked ISBNs in International Standard Book Number, for Reeder's book, seems to be wrong (and the other is an instance of where the system has broken down and two books have identical ISBNs). There are a few instances where someone has used a comma when discussing an ISBN, to prevent it linking. I would look into it further but Real Life calls. PamD 11:30, 27 December 2016 (UTC)

@Spinningspark and PamD: Trying to answer some questions raised.

1. Checkwiki already finds ISBNs that have incorrect syntax, such as using a comma. As mentioned above, there are cases where the ISBN is not intended to be an "ISBN". Checkwiki has a whitelist (International Standard Book Number is on the list as it has comma), as well as ~10 articles in CheckWiki's code that contain such cases. While this stops from "finding" these articles, bots and humans still visit. Using <nowiki> or {{notatypo}} would probably be the best option. Also, AWB won't "fix" anything inside those two options.
2. By the way Bgwhite, an ISBN in "external links" is usually an error. Books belong in "further reading" This isn't what I was meaning. I mean an external link, such as used in refs... [http://books.google.com/books?l343ooj2 ''Tale of Two Cities'' ISBN 0-7475-3269-9 p.24] With the ISBN inside the link, a Magiclink won't work. An ISBN template does work. However, anything after the ISBN template is no longer part of the external link and will not be linked blue. Most of the time this is fine, but not all, which is why fixing these are being done manually. Also, many bots won't change things inside an external link, so those bots couldn't be used to convert magic links to external links.

Bgwhite (talk) 00:40, 28 December 2016 (UTC)

Sigh. There is no reason to use code to check the ISBN numbers, and if there was it would be better to use the ISBN magic than overload the template system. Moreover Spinningspark is correct that the current design of Cite totally overlinks such that ISBN is now the most-linked to article. It also broke the previous method of tagging incorrect ISBNs.

In my opinion the way the Wiki works best is as an ecology of templates, MediaWiki, bot and humans editors (including cyborgs like Stiki).

All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 17:39, 27 December 2016 (UTC).

Reasons to use code to check ISBNs have been given above. Editors often make errors (as you can see if you read your talk page or mine), including mistyping of ISBNs. Without error-checking, those errant ISBNs will not be flagged and will make it more difficult for readers to locate sources cited in articles. Straightforward.

Magic links are going away, according to the MediaWiki people, and magic links never performed (or could perform, as far as I know), any error checking, so saying that they could is neither here nor there. – Jonesey95 (talk) 05:22, 28 December 2016 (UTC)

Merry, merry!

From the icy Canajian north; to you and yours! FWiW Bzuk (talk) 23:17, 26 December 2016 (UTC)

Errors 7, 19, 25, 83

@Bgwhite and Ladsgroup: After reports, I think it's better if CHECKWIKI errors 7, 19, 25, 83 are not done by Yobot anymore. Dexbot's code is much better on that area. -- Magioladitis (talk) 09:41, 27 December 2016 (UTC)

Barnstar

Not sure that's possible...but one can always try. :-)

Thanks very much for the lovely hardware. Happy new year, and happy editing into 2017! --Ser Amantio di Nicolao^{Che dicono a Signa?}_{Lo dicono a Signa.} 12:45, 29 December 2016 (UTC)

Ser Amantio di Nicolao If Bgwhite is right, you don't sleep so you probably spend some hours just loading. :) I get a 6 hour sleep every night thus if I could reduce this I could do 25% edits per day. Think about it :D -- Magioladitis (talk) 12:48, 29 December 2016 (UTC)

What is this sleep of which you speak? I am not programmed to recognize it. --Ser Amantio di Nicolao^{Che dicono a Signa?}_{Lo dicono a Signa.} 12:52, 29 December 2016 (UTC)

The Cosmetic Theorem

Every edit that changes the visual outcome is not cosmetic.

-- Magioladitis, 2016

PS. The Cosmetic Theorem does not give any clue for the other direction nor contains a solid definition of "cosmetic". The term appeared for the first time before 2009 from a pyscript which pybots could optionally turn on. The script was doing very trivial staff and soon got outdated. Back then editors were getting approval to run pybots and the phenomenon of people running this script solely appeared. The script soon became unused. In 2010, the term "cosmetic" was connected for the first time with some of AWB's general fixes. It was the first time that the term was not 100% determined by a closed set of actions since AWB's general fixed included 100+ syntax fixes of all kinds. It was very later that the term "cosmetic" tried to be connected with "no changes to the visual outcome". Community practice / common logic in many on-wiki activities shows that very often the community by consensus (sometimes a weak consensus, some other times a strong one) decides to make changes that change the wikicode without changing the visual outcome. -- Magioladitis (talk) 14:15, 29 December 2016 (UTC)

Your RFBAG

Hello Magioladitis, I have closed your BAG reconfirmation as unsuccessful. Please see the closing note. Thank you for all of the uncontroversial parts of your BAG service. Best regards, — xaosflux ^Talk 16:52, 29 December 2016 (UTC)

Xaosflux Thanks for letting me know. It was the wise thing to do. Independently10 of the reasons the most important is the trust within the community. -- Magioladitis (talk) 19:29, 29 December 2016 (UTC)

Thanks

Because we often forget to give credit where credit is due, I wanted to thank you for being more open and interacting at WT:Bot policy, etc. relating to community norms for cosmetic bot editing. I appreciate the willingness to step back and take another look. ~ Rob₁₃^Talk 10:06, 30 December 2016 (UTC)

BU Rob13 Many greeting to you too. I wish you a Happy New Year. -- Magioladitis (talk) 10:18, 30 December 2016 (UTC)

Broken WP:ANIME assessments

I don't know why, but your bot royally screwed up many WP:ANIME assessments, which doesn't even match the project's assessment scale when you merged {{WikiProject Yu-Gi-Oh!}} in as a work group. (example) I am trying to fix the issue, but be more careful next time. —Farix (t | c) 13:26, 30 December 2016 (UTC)

Farix I did these manually. Since there were no instructions of how to treat duplicated importance I choose randomly the highest and I expected WikiProject people to lower if needed. -- Magioladitis (talk) 13:37, 30 December 2016 (UTC)

That is something you absolutely should not do. That just creates more work for others and would have meant a number of articles were incorrectly assessed if the issue wasn't caught. If you are merging one project into it's parent, keep the parent's assessment as the default. If you believe the article should be reassessed, then submit the article to the assessment queue. —Farix (t | c) 13:43, 30 December 2016 (UTC)

Farix OK. Sorry. -- Magioladitis (talk) 13:44, 30 December 2016 (UTC)

AWB Rules of Use violations

My thanks above appears to be premature, unfortunately. The following edits are all violations of AWB rule of use #4. [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] Since you are an administrator, AWB access cannot be revoked, which leaves a block as the only possibility. If this persists, this is going to have to go back to ANI, where a block is going to be borderline inevitable. In short, if a visual change isn't made to the page, you must not make the edit with AWB. You must review all your edits to ensure they're non-cosmetic. The community is at wit's end here, as am I. If you genuinely do not know what a cosmetic edit is at this point, go by the rule of thumb that the edit shouldn't be made when in any doubt and ask others about specific edge cases. ~ Rob₁₃^Talk 18:40, 30 December 2016 (UTC)

Rob, Magioladitis wrote in 2012: "We should treat pages as we want them to be perfect from every possible aspect." [12] He was talking about the rendered page, but perhaps he extends the same principle to the wikitext. If so, it's not that he can't figure out what constitutes a cosmetic edit, or that he can't fix the bugs, it's that the cosmetic edits are an important part of what he does, in his view. Is there any truth in this, Magioladitis? SarahSV ^(talk) 19:28, 30 December 2016 (UTC)