Talk Archive: April 2006
I do ALL my archiving by hand. If there is something in this archive that I mistakenly archived, feel free to bring it back out of this archive (copy and paste it, but do remove it out of the archive), and put on my talk page. If you should do this, please add it to a new section at the bottom of my talk page and put a signed reason why you thought it should not be archived yet. Archives |
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I am no longer on wikibreak Eagle ( talk) ( desk) 19:27, 8 April 2006 (UTC)
Be assured of my support - even when we differ. I have to say I have suffered much the same type of treatment. And this place does seem to be awash with egos. No names of course but this behaviour is potentially a serious problem for the life of this encyclopedia. Much as life as a whole of course. I for one will welcome you back. :: Kevinalewis : (Talk Page) 07:33, 31 March 2006 (UTC)
Hi Eagle:
I've spoken to Zoe regarding the bot problem. As I understand it, the only problem was indeed the {{ cleanup}} --> {{ stub}} behavior, which had objectors we didn't know existed. (Check my and her talk page for our discussion.) In addition, a perusal of Zoe's user talk shows she (he?) has a more general problem with being abrupt and gruff, although willing enough to calm down later.
I'm sorry you had such a bad experience. I should have suggested that the bot test be put off until I was around to discuss its features and implementation. I'll be back on Monday so maybe we can restart the bot test then -- please don't start it before then!! If we do that, and I'm around to field the non-technical questions on bot behavior, then we can perhaps get the ball rolling. Please don't run off entirely; I think these problems are a lot less than emotional responses on all sides have made them, and I am a strong believer that assuming good faith can carry us a long way.
Anyway, I hope you're feeling better and that we can get Gnome rolling along soon. Take care.
Alba 14:15, 1 April 2006 (UTC)
Hey Eagle, based on comments by User:Beland, let's reprogram Gnome to add tags rather than pulling them out of cleanup altogether. The reasoning is twofold:
Nonetheless, the serious nature of the cleanup problem requires this bot and more. Check out the Wikipedia:Cleanup process/Cleanup sorting proposal page to see how far this has gotten.
I've also revised the GnomeBot task list and reasoning to match all this, as you asked. Alba 22:44, 3 April 2006 (UTC)
I saw your note on the cleanup taskforce list for March. You can grab any of the unassigned articles and assign them to yourself. A lot of the assigned articles were assigned to people who are now inactive and could be (should be) reassigned.
Would you be interested in programming a bot to help keep track of which members are active? I'm thinking of something that would go through Wikipedia:Cleanup Taskforce/Members/Members by interest and for each person check how many contributions they've made in the last month and prepare a new page that would list those who have few or no contributions in that time marked as inactive. There are other tasks that a bot could help with too. RJFJR 20:09, 1 April 2006 (UTC)
Yo, you helped me earlier, and I thought you would help me again.
How do you create a page that formally does not exist (the one I'm trying to work on is NASV) and make a redirect route link to a page that DOES exist (NASV is NASB, the difference is Version, and Bible, but essentially the same thing). So, in a search for NASV, I wanted to make a redirect route to the NASB page.
I made a page on the "Battle of the Kegs" (kinda funny, check it out urself), but I when I thought someone deleted it, I found out it was just case sensitive.
... ????
PS: I forgot about the Colonel Marksman 02:32, 4 April 2006 (UTC), but yeah, I know it's there.
Come back soon... Her Pegship 19:26, 3 April 2006 (UTC)
Hi
Welcome back - short breaks can be good too - I did leave a few small ideas for the gnome bot they are the last two in your archive2. :: Kevinalewis : (Talk Page) 07:49, 4 April 2006 (UTC)
Hi, I see you are envolved with the Cleanup TaskForce
I am a member of Archaeology WikiProject, so I noticed the template inclusion in the end of their Main Page. Can you just give me a short summary on what the idea is and where it has got to as it at first sight looks like a very good idea to get into the other two project I am part of "Sports Olympics" and "Novels" (but that one you know about. Regards :: Kevinalewis : (Talk Page)/ (Desk) 13:18, 7 April 2006 (UTC)
Thanks for your changes to the criteria. My only concern was the removals of the cleanup tags, but if your bot performs as the page you linked to indicates, then I have no problems. User:Zoe| (talk) 17:59, 7 April 2006 (UTC)
--- I blocked my self by attempting to run User:Gnome (Bot), I asked and User:Zoe agreed to unblock the bot. But apparetnly Zoe did not realize that another admin also blocked the bot for the same reason. (i.e. zoe blocked, and than 1 day later another admin blocked as well) both blocks were indefinate. If you don't belive me look at User:Gnome (Bot)'s Block log. In addition look at my previous message, posted by zoe above
If you have any questions please post them here on my talk page as my I.P. address is blocked. Eagle ( talk) ( desk) 15:41, 8 April 2006 (UTC)
Here is the second message... This is now from the original block....
Just wanted to say thanks for the 'welcome' message you sent, its always great to be said hello to when new! And i got some useful links into the bargain. Ollie 21:10, 8 April 2006 (UTC)
Apparently some people either enter {{subst:foo-stub}} instead of {{foo-stub}}, or copy the content from [[Template:Foo-stub]] into the article. This is annoying because it removes the article from [[Special:Whatlinkshere/Template:Foo-stub]], and has a chance of also removing it from [[Category:Foo stubs]] if somebody else comes along and removes the category. Thus we can end up with stubs we (from a functional viewpoint) don't know about, but which appear (when viewing the page) to be correctly tagged. However, I think that all stub templates include id="stub"
which may, due to ideosynchracies, be written with or without spaces, and with either "double quotes" or 'single quotes' or maybe even with no quotes at all. So your bot should search each page it comes across for the following regex in the wikitext (updated it a bit):
id\s*\=\s*[\"\']?stub[\"\']?
That should catch any substed stubs. In addition to this you could also check for manually added stub categories like this:
\[\[\s*[Cc]ategory\s*\:[\s\w]+\sstubs\s*\|?\s*[\S\s]*\]\]
And manually intervene in those cases as well. — Apr. 9, '06 [02:33] < freakofnurxture | talk>
Eagle, this is awesome!
I've already mentioned you to Beland several times; just go ahead and leave a message on his talk page. Be sure to mention me and the Cleanup sorting proposal. Alba 03:39, 10 April 2006 (UTC)
Hi,
Thanks for the list, I have modified the top of the list with a few guidance notes. If you want to give those a quick look over and revise or trim as you think best. Then I think we can move it to Wikipedia:WikiProject Novels/NovelsWithoutInfobox I think that location an name covers the scan you have done and also those that my be added when we dip into the genre novels. :: Kevinalewis : (Talk Page)/ (Desk) 08:00, 10 April 2006 (UTC)
I don't see any blocks in the block log for either your username or the IP address in question. So it's likely that this was an autoblock (placed on another user) that affected you because your ISP assigned you the same IP address. Autoblocks are temporary and should clear up after a while. Unfortunately, with the Wikipedia software as currently written, autoblocks are placed automatically and inevitably innocent users are sometimes affected. There's nothing that administrators can do about this. -- Curps 08:32, 10 April 2006 (UTC)
If you don't actually make edits to pages, people can't yet criticize them yet, eh? Alba 04:53, 11 April 2006 (UTC)
I don't know about keywords, Eagle; it's so daunting a problem that I avoided trying to write an auto-categorization bot for precisely that reason. You could do statistical studies on the articles of a category and find the most common words that are not common across all Wikipedia articles; that would be effective but not necessarily easy. A simpler idea would be to go to each WikiProject, identify the key players, then message them for suggestions (identifying yourself and the purpose of the project first). Alba 19:11, 12 April 2006 (UTC)
You know, this is pretty close to what Amazon does now with "Statistically Improbable Phrases"... might check their website and search on some general texts in each area. (I'm sure their algorithm is classified :-( but maybe there are hints of how it works on the web.) I'd start with the natural sciences, the way I am on WP:PNA -- but that's mainly so our efforts can parallel. I'd guess Archaeology and Anthropology, and maybe Meteorology/Weather, would be the most obscure among those. Sorry to make more work -- if it's too much, ditch the idea. 19:24, 12 April 2006 (UTC)
... thus increasing your confidence. If you do go through with a statistical study, the ratio of (in category / outside category) could be used as a score for each word. Then you could sum up the score for a whole article and set a threshold with arbitrary specificity and sensitivity. Alba 19:49, 12 April 2006 (UTC)
Sorry. And I was just thinking off the top of my head there. Alba 20:04, 12 April 2006 (UTC)
But is it possible to run the stuff that is not autocategorization first? I.e., can you run one part (the wikify, etc.) while working on the autocategorization? Alba 20:11, 12 April 2006 (UTC)
It'll probably take that long to get WP:PNA ready for bot updating anyway. Alba 20:26, 12 April 2006 (UTC)
... with the bot User:Pearle going ahead and sorting anything that already has a tag into the categories on WP:PNA. That leaves the uncategorized stuff, which is what the categorization function of Gnome will be most needed for.
Gnome's wikify, list, etc. functions would need to operate on the whole of WP:CU, yes! But there's no need to do work twice!
Oh, and so we can keep track of everything, the cleanup-date tag stays even after sorting. We kill the cleanup tag only once we're done with it. That's why I changed the task list for Gnome to stop deleting stuff out of Cleanup entirely, and just add tags. Keeping cleanup-date saves us from having to create wikify-date, expand-date, and mumbojumbo-date. :-) Alba 20:35, 12 April 2006 (UTC)
so Don't panic. He hasn't called me back in a while either. Now, as to what Gnome is now doing:
It's basically the same set of jobs -- we're just reconfiguring so it fits in with others' efforts.
Clear now? :-) Alba 20:46, 12 April 2006 (UTC)
I want to start an article on "natural person", that is, refering to a enity, NOT a living, breathing, human being, where an article already exists.
How do I do that?
Pearle does not have a pre-programmed list of categories that she uses to find articles for WP:PNA. For each topic, the categories listed under "Categories covered" section and linked from any portals listed are read, and their immediate subcategories.
The problem of dealing with "leftover" articles from the PNA page is a little different than the general problem of auto-categorization. For PNA, the problem is not to assign articles to categories, but to assign categories to topics, and hopefully WikiProjects. In some cases, a topic page may be too full, and a new one will need to be created. In other cases, there may be no appropriate WikiProject, or only a very general one.
Theoretically, looking at category relationships should be more reliable than using keywords. If Y is a subcategory of category Y, and category Z is on-topic, then category Y might be on-topic, too. In practice, I have found that sometimes Z, a subcategory of Y, is on-topic, and sometimes it is off-topic. Human intervention is really needed to resolve the question.
The easiest way to do this would be to sort the "leftover" articles by category membership, and indicate if any of the categories listed are descendants of any categories already on PNA. It's easy for Pearle to do this, since she will already be reading in category lists from PNA topics, and constructing the leftover list.
I expect that most of the "leftover" articles will be in categories, just not any that are already listed on WP:PNA. For articles that are not in any categories at all (i.e. those on Special:Uncategorizedpages) the universe of targets should of course be all Wikipedia categories, not just those on WP:PNA. I would be wary of privileging those listed on WP:PNA in any way, as this is likely to worsen the sorting algorithm.
Back when there were far more uncategorized articles than there are today, I made some attempts to suggest categories for articles. You can see the results on Wikipedia:Auto-categorization.
A huge number were actually bot-created articles on United States municipalities, and so were easily and reliably classified automatically. After that, things became more difficult. The approach I was using was to extract links from the "See also" sections of articles, and see which categories those articles are in. This works well if there are a lot of links there, which is more often true for older, established articles than today's situation, where mostly only newer, shorter articles are uncategorized. (That may not be entirely true yet; I'm not sure.)
If you wanted to look at article contents, it doesn't seem very scalable to have humans pick keywords for each category, and it's unclear that it would be faster for them to do that than it would to simply categorize all the articles manually. (There are tens of thousands of categories, after all.) Given that you already have articles assigned to categories, it would be easy enough to take a statistical approach instead. What I would do is look at word frequency, constructing a "signature" for each category in Wikipedia. You should be able to numerically identify and suppress words that have no sorting value (that would be common in many categories) like "the" or "see" and "also". You would then determine a "signature" for each uncategorized article, and find the "closest" category match. (You could get fancy and look at N-grams. I'm not sure whether that would help or hurt reliability, but it would certainly take a lot longer to run.)
The primary drawback to this kind of statistical analysis would be that it would probably take a large amount of CPU time and a fair amount of storage space. It would certainly have to be done offline, using a database dump. Whether you're using keywords or word frequency, there's the problem that new, unfinished articles tend to be semantically and statistically different than older, well-written articles. That will reduce reliability of many matching algorithms, but perhaps not enough to make them useless.
Regardless of the method used for auto-categorization, it's exceedingly unlikely to be reliable enough for a bot to add articles to categories by itself. (I would expect there would be a lot of complaints if anything more than say, one in a hundred articles were misclassified.) A good way to deal with this would be to have the bot make a list of suggested categorizations, and let human editors actually put articles into the right categories. If there's a way to distinguish "strong" matches from "weak" ones, sorting along that axis and putting the best matches first would help increase productivity. Once an article was classified by a human (whether by looking at the list or independently), it would no longer show up on subsequent reports.
-- Beland 14:37, 14 April 2006 (UTC)
My bot adds the wikify, expert, cleanup-list, disambig-cleanup, and several other tags, Is this still needed, if so, where should I start... I was originally operating in WP:CU--operating on the monthly cleanup articles in the backlog. My bot only ADDS tags, it does not remove any tags... with possible exeption to disambig-cleanup and cleanup-list. (will depend on what others think... does not matter to me). Eagle ( talk) ( desk) 22:16, 14 April 2006 (UTC)
I probably should have stated... the bot I am refering to is User:Gnome (Bot). and these functions are already programmed and ready to go.
Hi Eagle! Sorry, I misunderstood your message. Thanks for tidying up after me. Btw, if you want to try out your gnome bot I have an experiment I want to try. Let me know when you have time. Cheers - Her Pegship 03:30, 15 April 2006 (UTC)
The sub-cats I'm interested in are:
(I forgot there were soooo many.) and yes, please go ahead and use both terms. I'm hoping to augment my List of fiction works made into feature films and List of non-fiction works made into feature films as well as add Category:Films based on books to such articles. Thanks - (until tomorrow!) Her Pegship 05:06, 15 April 2006 (UTC)
About that redirect page we have... um... I guess you misunderstood me.
Is there a way we can take the "page" NASV, and make it nonexistant, with an "automatic" redirect to the page on NASB? Many pages will have no page on the exact wording, but will instead redirect automatically page to the actual article (e.g. typing "Drift Racing" in the search will redirect to the "drift racing" page but the top left-hand corner will note "redirected from "Drift racing"). I've seen it with other wording too. I also made a page on the "Battle of the Kegs"... but it's case sensitive! ??? Colonel Marksman 03:43, 18 April 2006 (UTC)
This one should be refreshed - possibly every month - just so we don't let it get away from us. We'll see how it goes after that. OK :: Kevinalewis : (Talk Page)/ (Desk) 14:56, 18 April 2006 (UTC)
seems to be working well. Bit more complex to work on that the last one. Starting to focus a few on the content of the article as well which is good, but does mean it slows us down a bit. :: Kevinalewis : (Talk Page)/ (Desk) 14:56, 18 April 2006 (UTC)
I have been asked "I notice there is no stub category for horror novels, political novels, or comedy novels"
Could we use the bot to find out if any Book or Novel stubs fit those genre (one at a time I think) - Ideally giving something like a crude character and word count (to give objective stub measurement) Let me know.
Oh yes the aim being to see if there is a case for such stubs. Yes, if many - No, if there are only a few. :: Kevinalewis : (Talk Page)/ (Desk) 15:16, 18 April 2006 (UTC)
Secondly, All articles in a category ending "*novels" where "Horror" is used in the text, or categories - listing should give Character Count and/or Word Count (i.e. article size) Can these be done, and do they sound about right for the purpose intended? :: Kevinalewis : (Talk Page)/ (Desk) 15:32, 18 April 2006 (UTC)
How about a listing of all articles that claim to be Novels which do not have the project notice {{ NovelsWikiProject}} in the article talk page. :: Kevinalewis : (Talk Page)/ (Desk) 15:16, 18 April 2006 (UTC)
Hmm, yes, that happens for me too. "Civil" is a word I wish were put into practice more where I work - at a high school, where the youngsters take manners kind of, um, loosely. :P Her Pegship 18:10, 18 April 2006 (UTC)
Do references have to be websites? Colonel Marksman 18:37, 18 April 2006 (UTC)
Howdy! Just so you know:
More to come... Her Pegship 19:14, 18 April 2006 (UTC)
Here's the result from the second batch. If you would rather I put these on the work page, or just delete the links without listing them here, let me know. You may have already noted these issues. Cheers, Her Pegship 19:39, 20 April 2006 (UTC)
And thanks for fixing my edit problem on my userpage! Cheers, Her Pegship 21:19, 21 April 2006 (UTC)
Thank you for your interest in VandalProof, Nixeagle/Talk/Archive/3! You have now been added to the list of authorized users, so if you haven't already, simply download and install VandalProof from our main page. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me or any other moderator, or you can post a message on the discussion page. AmiDaniel ( Talk) 01:03, 19 April 2006 (UTC)
Hi :) I usually do use the warning tags, but sometimes I get lazy and skip it. I'll be sure to use them in the future. Qtoktok 05:40, 19 April 2006 (UTC)
http://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Oral_Roberts&diff=next&oldid=47366795
But Oral Roberts is 88, right?
Hi, you've reverted my edit and i'm not sure why. Please see Talk:Lou_Dobbs#Removed_Dobbswatch.com_.26_Opinion_Journal thanks. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 216.254.126.222 ( talk • contribs) ---When archived, will go into unsigned section
Nice to have you "officially" on board. And I can't tell you how many times I have made that same code oops... Cheers! Her Pegship 00:45, 23 April 2006 (UTC)
I think I probably clicked in that warning button accidentally. I can't remember doing that, but it is highly unlikely there's other explanation. F e tofs Hello! 01:33, 23 April 2006 (UTC)
Link to proof:
[1]—Preceding unsigned comment added by 64.247.102.100 ( talk • contribs)
Replied to above, I told him/her that wikipedia cannot be used to cite itself. Eagle ( talk) ( desk) 04:05, 24 April 2006 (UTC)
I just blocked and deleted all of his fake "blocked" messages, I think thats the best way to do it -- Tawker 06:55, 24 April 2006 (UTC)
Could you please clearly elaborate why my updates were reverted? For example, the SmarTone group is now operating the mobile network in the name of SmarTone-Vodafone [2]. Thanks!
Nicholas S. Milligan
The Bola Tie page lists some famous bola tie wearers, but some are incorrect. 1)Robert Evans wore a belly charm, not a bolo tie. He bought it from a belly dancer for (I believe) $1,000, but I'm not sure and it was a lucky charm for him.
2)Harlan Sanders is actually Harland Sanders according to Wikipedia so it's either wrong on the bola tie site or his site. In addition, he wears a black bow tie, not a bola tie.
Therefore, I request that these two be removed from the famous wearers of the bola tie.
--Nicholas S. Milligan
I'm at home sick & just chipping away at the films/novels list. I'm checking all the articles for false hits or already-separated items, then I'll go back and "do the splits". Enjoy your time free of the all-consuming technology. Cheers, Her Pegship 19:21, 25 April 2006 (UTC)
Sorry, forgot to post this when I made you a mod:
Thank you for your willingness in helping me out with VandalProof! You've now been made a moderator, so when you load VandalProof the next time, you should see 'Moderator' in front of your username, and you should also find the Moderate List item under the User Tools menu. I've made a very basic page explaining what's expected of moderators and how to do certain tasks, which can be found here: User:AmiDaniel/VandalProof/ModeratorTools. If you change your mind and don't want to moderate, please contact me. Again, thanks! AmiDaniel ( Talk) 06:52, 27 April 2006 (UTC)
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