Keep fighting the good fight! I plan to be more active again.
Rlink2 (
talk) 01:04, 11 January 2024 (UTC)reply
A big thanks!
Hi GreenC,
I just want to thank you for all your help you have provided in the past few days on some of my articles. You make some good points about notability and significant coverage. Your assist with my edit requests is also appreciated. You also have a great way with words.
In theory the WaybackMachine keeps crawling dead links over time if they come back alive it picks up automatically. You could test this theory by finding an example previously-dead link and checking the WaybackMachine. --
GreenC 15:22, 22 February 2024 (UTC)reply
Hello, I am
NanoLuuke from Wookieepedia. I am reaching out to you because our editing community has expressed concern regarding our own reliance on the Wayback Machine. For context, much like Wikipedia, our own policy requires the inclusion of archival links (with around 1/6th to 1/5th of our 188000+ pages using web citation), and we use massively the Wayback Machine in this regard. Concerns have emerged from the earliest stages of the
Hachette v. Internet Archive case, and with the publication of a recent
article by the Jacobin, I'm seeing more and more editors worried that we could lose access to the Wayback Machine in the future. While I'm personally not currently feeling the same level of concern as my fellow editors, I do recognize that properly assessing the ongoing issue is a reasonable thing to do, at minima to appease the worried editors, and if worse must come, to prepare whatever steps we will need to circumvent the possible loss of the Wayback Machine's archives. That is why I wanted to reach out to you, since you seems one of the most knowledgeable editors on Wikipedia regarding web archives. I'm interested in your personal opinion on the matter, and I would also be interested if you could point me toward relevant talk pages if the Wikipedia's community as started discussing the issue. Thanks.
NanoLuuke (
talk) 13:13, 24 February 2024 (UTC)reply
Hi, the only thing I am allowed to report about that case, is to point you to this blog post:
What the Hachette v. Internet Archive Decision Means for Our Library. This is the official and only response for the public. I notice the words "Wayback Machine" appear nowhere in that post. It says "The lawsuit only concerns our book lending program." It says "Separately, we have come to agreement with the Association of American Publishers (AAP).." (ie. an agreement has been reached). It says "Our library is still strong, growing, and serving millions of patrons." It says "Because this case was limited to our book lending program, the injunction does not significantly impact our other library services." It further says 'Regarding the monetary payment, we can say that “AAP’s significant attorney’s fees and costs incurred in the Action since 2020 have been substantially compensated by the Monetary Judgement Payment.'" I hope this helps. --
GreenC 16:19, 24 February 2024 (UTC)reply
Hello everyone, and welcome to the 24th issue of the Wikipedia
Scripts++ Newsletter, covering all our favorite new and updated user scripts since 24 December 2021. Uh-huh, we're finally covering the good ones among the rest! Aren't you excited? Remember to include a link in double brackets to the script's .js page when you install the script, so that we can see who uses the script in WhatLinksHere! The ScriptInstaller gadget automatically does this.
Aaron Liu (
talk) 01:00, 1 March 2024 (UTC)reply
Got anything good? Tell us about your new, improved, old, or messed-up script
here!
Featured script
Making user scripts load faster by SD0001 is this month's featured script, which caches userscripts every day to eliminate the overhead caused by force-downloading the newest version of scripts every time you open a Wikipedia page. Despite being released in April 2021, our best script scouters have failed to locate it due to its omission from
the US of L. For security reasons, the script only supports loading JavaScript pages.
Newly maintained scripts
After earthly attempts at improving the original have failed...
Ahecht has created
a fork of
SiBr4/TemplateSearch, which adds the "TP:" shortcut for "Template:" in the search box, and updated it to be compatible with Vector 2022.
AquilaFasciata/goToTopFast is a much faster fork of the classic goToTop script that also adds compatibility for Minerva and Vector 2022.
To a lesser extent, the same goes for
PrimeHunter/Search sort. I wish someone would integrate the sorts into the sort menu instead of adding 11 portlet links.
Dragoniez/SuppressEnterInForm stops you from accidentally submitting anything due to pressing enter while in the smaller box, and works on almost anything... except the InputBox element itself, used in subscription lists and
the Signpost Crossword! Oh, the humanity!
Doǵu/Adiutor(pictured) provides a nice, integrated interface to do some twinkley tasks such as copyvio detection, CSD tagging, and viewing the most recent diff.
Eejit43 has quite the aesthetically pleasing scripts, all made in
TypeScript.
/afcrc-helper is a replacement for the unmaintained
Enterprisey/AFCRHS and processes Redirects for Creation and Categories for Creation requests.
/ajax-undo stops the "undo" button from taking you to another page while providing a text box to provide a reason for the revert.
/redirect-helper(pictured) adds a much better interface for editing and redirects, including categorization, for which valid categories are dictated by
/redirect-helper.json.
/rmtr-helper helps process technical requested moves without being able to actually move them.
Guycn2/UserInfoPopup(pictured) adds a flyout after the watchlist star on userspace pages that displays the common information you might use about a user.
Jeeputer/editCounter, under userspace, adds a portlet link to count your edits by namespace, put them in a table, and put that table in a hardcoded subpage, all in the background.
Hilst/Scripts/sectionLinks converts all section links to use the § sign, which are known to be preferred over the ugly # by 99% of the devils I've met.
PrimeHunter/Category source.js adds portlet links to tell you where a category for an article comes from and supports those from template transclusions.
Sophivorus's
MiniEdit adds some nice, li'l buttons next to paragraphs to edit their wikitext with a minimal interface.
Edit-listings
Dragoniez/ToollinkTweaks adds more and customizable links next to users in page history, logs, watchlist, recent changes, etc.
Firefly/more-block-info optimizes the display of rangeblocks in contribution pages. Doesn't work outside the English locale of any wiki, unfortunately.
NguoiDungKhongDinhDanh/AjaxLoader makes paging links (e.g. older 50, 500, newest) load without refreshing and makes you realize how slow your internet actually is.
Appearance-ricing
Ahecht/RedirectID adds the redirect target to all redirects. For all the
WP:NAVPOPS haters. (Do these exist?)
Dragoniez/MarkBLockedGlobal: Remember the "strike blocked usernames" gadget? Now you can use a red, dotted line to highlight rangeblocks and global locks!
Jonesey/common(pictured) has some styles to overhaul your Vector 2022 experience. It reduces padding everywhere, and makes the top bar animation faster.
Aaron Liu/V22 is a fork that narrows the sidebars instead of upheaving them, reverts the January 2024 dropdown changes, and restores the old page-link color for links that don't go outside the current wiki.
Nardog: SmartDiff is a spiritual successor to
Enterprisey/fancy-diffs. It makes the page title part of links in diffs clickable, along with template and parser function calls. Unnamed parameters can be configured per template to also be linked. All links are styled based on the normal CSS classes of rendered links.
For the paranoid:
Rublov/anonymize replaces your username at the top of the screen with the generic "User page" text. Remember, it is your duty to persuade everyone that
editing is an honor.
/AjaxBlock provides a dialog box for easy input of reasons while blocking users.
/Selective Rollback(pictured) provides a dialog box to customize
rollback edit summaries and does them without reloading the page. Seriously, why doesn't MediaWiki already do this?
/flickrsearch adds a portlet link to search for uploadable flickr images about the subject.
/randomincategory adds a portlet link when on Category pages to go to a random page in the current category.
Vghfr/EasyTemplates adds a portlet link to automatically insert some of the most common inline {{fix}} templates.
Yes, we're just doing 'em as we go now. Thanks for reading through this looong issue, if you did! I'm sure this'll send a record for the longest issue ev-ah. You may need to wait even longer for the last issue, as our reserve of old-y and goodie scripts have ran out... We encourage you to try and do some of the requests or improvement tasks. See you in Summer, hopefully!
I'm going through your instructions, since they appear the easiest to get started with a bot. Thanks for creating them! Should I ask questions here or at the yet-to-be-created red-linked
User talk:GreenC/BotWikiAwk? I'll ask here for now...
I know that Toolforge recently changed. I'm hoping that won't be a problem. I already observed that the page
User:GreenC/BotWikiAwk/Toolforge says:
Deprecated - Toolforge no longer has a Grid, as of December 2023. These instructions are outdated. A future version of BWA that supports Toolforge concurrency will be forthcoming.
Fortunately, I am new to Toolforge, so I won't bother with trying out the old system. ;)
Questions/comments so far:
(1) I'm at
User:GreenC/BotWikiAwk#Setup right now using SSH login to Toolforge. So far so good.
One line that confused me was that I thought "/home/adminuser/BotWikiAwk/lib" should be typed exactly, but I believe "adminuser" is my username. It might be helpful to make that clear in the instructions.
About to try that.
(2) Where it says:
Add BotWikiAwk to the PATH eg.
PATH=$PATH:/home/adminuser/BotWikiAwk/bin
Log out and back in so environment vars are set.
Why does is say to log out and log back in? If I log out, doesn't that clear the variables? I am planning to add it to my .bashrc (or possibly .kshrc or .zshrc [whatever that is]). I haven't used UNIX in about 30 years, so it's only slowly coming back and new features have been added!
Oh, I believe I see the problem. I think you mean it should be added to the .bash_profile just like the other one rather than from the command line... If that line was indented, I think it would be less confusing...
--
David Tornheim (
talk) 11:39, 16 March 2024 (UTC)reply
Well, if your intention is to use it on Toolforge instead of on another computer (home etc.), then I don't know what to do because they recently changed to using containers (in December) and you need to make a custom container since there is no container available for shell tools (that I am aware of)- and I don't know how to make one. If you do install on Toolforge, the PATH will be to wherever BWA was installed, use the 'pwd' command to check. The setup instructions are really for installing anywhere except Toolforge. --
GreenC 14:50, 16 March 2024 (UTC)reply
Note that you might also want to export the path.
Aaron Liu (
talk) 15:18, 16 March 2024 (UTC)reply
IP vandals
Hi! I saw your post on Materialscientist's talk and started tracking this problem yesterday. I've just blocked 2.45.126.120 for a month following an edit they made, and will do the same for any similar edits from the same vandal that I come across. Feel free to ping me if you spot any others. Nice to do something different for a change :) —
Smalljim 17:46, 20 March 2024 (UTC)reply
The Italian editor is persistent over a long period. They don't mind reverts or blocks, as a mobile IP they show up every few days and make a series of subtle changes to numbers (heights of buildings and mountains). Mostly it's been in the 2.44.0.0 and 2.45.0.0 Class B ranges, lately. --
GreenC 18:40, 20 March 2024 (UTC)reply
Your edit on my talk page
Hey GreenC, about a month ago, I added the template to indicate a user is deceased to my talk page in anticipation of my suicide, which you removed with a fairly insensitive edit summary. I unfortunately survived the attempt, but in the future, please don't assume in bad faith that users would facetiously use that template for "retirement." I understand that you probably run into that situation more often than an actual death, and I also acknowledge that my own edit summary was not very specific (though it should be obvious why I might've wanted to keep the details under wraps), but just remember that there are human beings behind the usernames. I will also do my part and not reuse the template again for future attempts; rest assured I had read the guidelines about using the template beforehand, though it seems I misunderstood something. Anyway I've seen some of your contributions elsewhere on the site and they're always constructive, keep up the good work. --Nsophiay (
talk) 02:16, 19 April 2024 (UTC)reply
Thank you for explaining the situation. Using the template for oneself could constitute a threat of self harm, which is governed by
WP:SOS. I'll keep that in mind in the future. Thank you for bringing it to my attention. I am going to close this thread. Please email if you want. --
GreenC 05:15, 19 April 2024 (UTC)reply
Best practice on archive link
Hey GreenC, quick Q - if I look at an old article that has been archived on the Wayback Machine, usually there are many versions over several years. What's the best practice in terms of picking up which link to include in a reference on Wikipedia? I am assuming in this scenario that any version would do for the purposes of providing a reference (i.e. the changes are minimal, if any, from one year to another). Thanks! --
Molochmeditates (
talk) 20:00, 24 April 2024 (UTC)reply
Avalon Hill games
Hi there. :) While you've got your
Avalon Hill sources out, maybe some of the following might have more sources to make something out of them?:
Oh yeah the red. It's more time, right now, I'm trying to get the early history of AH and Tactics figured out, there are some important people, like Eric Dott, and Shaw, who shaped the whole industry for a couple decades until the 1984 crash. He was Avalon Hill, sort of like the head of a Hollywood Studio during the golden age, he was the greenlight guy and herder of talented sheep. --
GreenC 16:22, 7 May 2024 (UTC)reply
That's fine, work on whatever your priorities are (and those are good ones), but if you do come across anything for these, or any already existing articles for games... :)
BOZ (
talk) 16:34, 7 May 2024 (UTC)reply
OK will do. I came across a good source for Yellowstone which I added
Special:Diff/1220672532/1222653960 and now I'm curious about a game of herding sheep! --
GreenC 16:44, 7 May 2024 (UTC)reply
Recently at a film
Saw your closing statement at
Talk:The Hunt for Gollum#Requested move 12 May 2024. Seems you've been editing WP about as long as I have, and congratulations for hangin' in so long! As you must already know, on WP sometimes you get the bear (consensus) and sometimes the bear gets you. Again, thanks for all you've done to improve Wikipedia and to help build a better and better encyclopedia!P.I. Ellsworth ,
ed.put'er there 00:03, 13 May 2024 (UTC)reply
No hard feelings. I was trying to establish consensus for what I believe will be a reoccurring topic of conversation over the next year or two, but, things got chaotic and bad faithy, and solutions are not clear, and I have more important things to work on. Someone else will deal with it, there is no lack of attention there. And it's no loss to reclaim my time to do other things on Wikipedia. --
GreenC 01:40, 13 May 2024 (UTC)reply
Hi GreenC: I've seen your bot updating several of my articles over the last few weeks and fixing links to WebCitation.org – many thanks for running this useful tool. Over the years while researching stuff for potential future articles, I have compiled a list of webpages I have archived for possible future use (off-Wiki, on a spreadsheet). Unfortunately, in some cases – back in the days when I was using WebCitation and it was working properly – I only saved the "short" link (e.g. www.webcitation.org/6EBcbrCbU), so I no longer know what the full URL was and therefore cannot look for it in other archives or see whether it is still a live page. Do you by any chance have a way of running your code across this list, if I provide it to you, and determining what the full URLs are, and potentially linking to an alternative archive site if the URL has been archived elsewhere? I'm not very technically minded so I have no idea if that is even possible! Best wishes, Hassocks5489 (Floreat Hova!) 20:48, 13 May 2024 (UTC)reply
Hi
User:Hassocks5489, it's not possible to check directly while WebCite is down. But you can send me the list, and I'll see what I can find by comparing with known URLs. For example if I know that 6EBcbrCbU = example.com based on previous encounters with 6EBcbrCbU elsewhere on Wikipedia, which are kept in my logs. --
GreenC 22:09, 13 May 2024 (UTC)reply
Suggest post the list to a sub-page in your user space, I'll update to long form any I can, then run the bot on those to convert to another archive provider. --
GreenC 22:16, 13 May 2024 (UTC)reply
Many thanks indeed for doing this – it has been very useful. Spreadsheet now updated accordingly! Best, Hassocks5489 (Floreat Hova!) 16:28, 14 May 2024 (UTC)reply
User:GreenC bot is the user account (ie. me). The bot code running in that edit is
WP:WAYBACKMEDIC. That edit was based on a request at
WP:URLREQ#bigten.org ie. a domain name specific run. Medic is a specialized bot that requires manual controls to adjust for soft-404s and other issues, so there is no web page where users can run it, rather users can make requests for it to process domains, at
WP:URLREQ. If you want to control an archive bot on a page, there is
https://iabot.org .. but it has limitations, Medic can do things IABot can not, at the cost of manual interventions, and thus
WP:URLREQ. --
GreenC 17:57, 16 May 2024 (UTC)reply
Oh for that domain, if you see anything it missed let me know, I can make adjustments. I depend on feedback, particularly domain-specific knowledge others have. --
GreenC 18:28, 16 May 2024 (UTC)reply