User talk:Anomie/Archives/2013

This page is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.

WikiProject Brands and AnomieBOT

Hello Anomie: I'm looking to utilize AnomieBOT to perform automatic tagging for the categories (and subcategories within them) that WikiProject Brands covers. I'm writing to inquire about how this can be accomplished in unison with the bot's WikiProjectTagger function. This would be very helpful, because manually adding the tags is quite time-consuming. I look forward to the prospect of obtaining your input regarding this matter, and I'll watchlist this page. Also feel free to leave a talkback template on my talk page upon your reply. Thanks for your consideration! Northamerica1000^(talk) 13:23, 2 January 2013 (UTC)

First, you'd have to make a specific list of categories (tagging "and all subcategories" can lead to unexpected results, as you sometimes wind up with significant semantic drift). Then post at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Brands to get a few other people to "sign off" on the list of categories and having a bot tag them. Anomie ⚔ 13:27, 2 January 2013 (UTC)

Hello, and thanks for the response. Would the list need to be formatted something like this example page from WikiProject Toronto (with WikiProject Brands' categories, of course)? Also, I posted the initial request above on the User talk:AnomieBOT page after seeing your message on your talk page to do so there. However, since we're already communicating here, that works for me. Northamerica1000^(talk) 13:34, 2 January 2013 (UTC)

I noticed at User:AnomieBOT/source/tasks/WikiProjectTagger.pm that the entries the bot reads from are formatted as:
'Category:1850s establishments in Thailand',
'Category:1850s in Thailand',
'Category:1852 establishments in Thailand',
'Category:1852 in Thailand',
etcetera. Would this be functional? I plan on working on this, but I want to construct the list in proper format so it doesn't have to be re-edited. Northamerica1000^(talk) 13:42, 2 January 2013 (UTC)

The format in Wikipedia:WikiProject Toronto/Categories would be fine. Don't worry about what I might need to do to make the bot work with it. Anomie ⚔ 14:31, 2 January 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for the reply! I'm working on the list. It's going to take some time, because I'm evaluating each category and subcategory relative to the scope of the project. I'm manually adding the project's talk page banner to the articles that are brand-related within categories that also contain non-brand related articles, and skipping the tagging of those that are not brand-related. These categories that have both brand and non-brand related articles and content will not be included on the list. After the list is completed, I'll post it on the project's talk page to obtain input. Thanks for all of the information! Cheers, Northamerica1000^(talk) 09:07, 3 January 2013 (UTC)

New CAPTCHAs

Hi there, thanks for your support at the Village Pump. I can't believe the nonsense some people get away with uttering. Anyway, I think it's not just a matter of a change in the distortion algorithm/parameters/font, it's also a matter of dictionary. Again, I can't prove it, but my impression is that I am challenged with more difficult word combinations, many of which I don't even know what they mean, if they are words at all. Used to be a combination of two relatively common words. Is that possible?

Sampling from the login screen, now I get (or so I think): mandyamuck, billysa(?)h, n(?)llyburn, reynaseed, ribsgotta, mynahhumor, ...

Thanks for your investigation. 219.79.90.26 (talk) 15:02, 3 January 2013 (UTC)

It's certainly possible that they used a different word list when regenerating the captchas recently; for obvious reasons, I don't think the list is made public. From your samples, it seems there are a number of common English first names in there too. Anomie ⚔ 15:36, 3 January 2013 (UTC)

Thanks. Well, *someone* must know :-)... It would also be nice to know whether this change has been brought about by evidence that the CAPTCHA has been cracked, or it's just speculation/preemptive, in which case a rollback should definitely be considered. 219.79.90.26 (talk) 15:41, 3 January 2013 (UTC)

Your best bet for finding people who know is to go on #wikimedia-tech ^connect and see if you can find the people who are working on T45546. Or else ask on the bug. Anomie ⚔ 15:56, 3 January 2013 (UTC)

Templates

Hello Anomie, I´m interested in your templates, how can i see the templates you have made? I think they may be useful ^^ — Preceding unsigned comment added by Tuner420 (talk • contribs) 03:09, 5 January 2013 (UTC)

Err, Special:Contributions/Anomie maybe? Anomie ⚔ 03:21, 5 January 2013 (UTC)

(talk page stalker) Or try X!'s tool. --Redrose64 (talk) 11:33, 5 January 2013 (UTC)

Tlx

The BRFA you just closed needs a tlx on the Operator Assistance or it messes up your bot. Vacation^nine 17:03, 9 January 2013 (UTC)

Nevermind, thought it needed one. Apparently it works now. Carry on

Vacation^nine 17:07, 9 January 2013 (UTC)

The bot moves a withdrawn request to the "withdrawn" section once a BAGger applies {{subst:BT}} and {{subst:BB}} with the appropriate resolution. More specifically, it looks at the categories added by {{subst:BT}}. Anomie ⚔ 03:06, 10 January 2013 (UTC)

Ah, ok. I just saw AnomieBOT run into problems though when MBisanz closed a request and there was still BAG assistance needed tags or something. Obviously it works though. Vacation^nine 03:10, 10 January 2013 (UTC)

If you can show me diffs I'll take a look at it. Anomie ⚔ 03:11, 10 January 2013 (UTC)

The problem was this closure where MBisanz didn't add the formal closure hats. I notified him of the issue since AnomieBOT was giving an error, which he then fixed. I didn't know how the code worked exactly though, so I thought I would notify you. Vacation^nine 03:21, 10 January 2013 (UTC)

Discussion at WP Brands – Lists compiled for project banner tagging using AnomieBOT

A discussion is occurring at the talk page for WikiProject Brands at Proceeding with automatic project banner tagging using AnomieBOT regarding moving forward with automatic talk page tagging with the project's banner using AnomieBOT. All members of this project will be notified with neutrally-worded notifications about this discussion, and please feel free to contribute to it. Northamerica1000^(talk) 17:10, 12 January 2013 (UTC)

More info at User talk:AnomieBOT

Hello, Anomie. You have new messages at User talk:AnomieBOT/Archive 5#Discussion at WP Brands – Lists compiled for project banner tagging using AnomieBOT.
Message added by Northamerica1000^(talk) 19:45, 14 January 2013 (UTC). You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{Talkback}} or {{Tb}} template.

Sorry for this

My bad. Not only did I not notice the discussion was closed, but I also commented in it. Sorry for the false alarm. Hoverfish Talk 21:52, 16 January 2013 (UTC)

Auto-substitution help

{{Bot block message}} has just been created as a way of telling bot operators that their bots have malfunctioned and have been blocked temporarily. Like other block warnings, it should be substituted; is the current version of the doc page sufficient to let AnomieBot know to substitute it? Nyttend (talk) 15:08, 17 January 2013 (UTC)

I'd hope the bot operator would be watching their bot's talk page and so would see the {{uw-botblock}}, so I'm not sure I see the point of it. But yes, AnomieBOT will automatically subst it since it's in Category:Wikipedia templates to be automatically substituted and has few enough existing transclusions. Anomie ⚔ 15:38, 17 January 2013 (UTC)

This is not meant to be a duplicate of uw-botblock — that's for accounts operating bots without approval, while this is for approved bots that have started working improperly. Nyttend (talk) 16:11, 17 January 2013 (UTC)

Moving forward with auto-tagging for WikiProject Brands

Hello Anomie: People at the discussion at Proceeding with automatic project banner tagging using AnomieBOT are in agreement to commence with automatic banner tagging for WikiProject Brands. Is there anything else I need to do to move forward at this time? Northamerica1000^(talk) 07:07, 20 January 2013 (UTC)

Be patient until I find time to look at it and activate the bot. Anomie ⚔ 13:32, 20 January 2013 (UTC)

Certainly, and thanks again for your time regarding this matter. Northamerica1000^(talk) 13:16, 21 January 2013 (UTC)

Your counsel sought

Hello, Anomie! Would you mind giving me some brief advice about being an admin? I'm thinking about taking on the task, and I'd like to know how you compare being an admin-editor with being an editor only. Do you ever feel bogged down so much that you can't do the types of edits you like to do? Any info you can give me about your admin experience would help me a great deal. Thank you for all your help, past present and future! – Paine (Climax!) 00:25, 28 January 2013 (UTC)

To tell the truth, being an admin hasn't made a whole lot of difference for me; I mostly fulfill some {{edit protected}} requests and delete talk pages when someone posts garbage on various file talk pages I happen to have on my watchlist. Now my new job, that takes time and keeps me from doing stuff like I used to. Anomie ⚔ 01:23, 28 January 2013 (UTC)

Excellent! and congratulations! I had already read that on your User page, but I hadn't realized that it was so recent. Thank you for your helpful response, and I hope you have lots of "fun" at your new job. If you see Jimbo, be sure to tell him I said "Hi" :>) – Paine (Climax!) 03:19, 28 January 2013 (UTC)

Using bot for replacing full stop (.) with comma (,) to separate thousands at the number of employees field of the company infoboxes

Hi, Anomie. There is a discussion about using bot for replacing full stop (.) with comma (,) to separate thousands at the number of employees field of the company infoboxes. If the proposal gains support, maybe it could be done by Anomiebot? I notified also WP:COMPANIES and WP:MOSNUM about this proposal. Beagel (talk) 18:10, 28 January 2013 (UTC)

It's certainly bottable, but you should probably ask at WP:BOTREQ because I have had very little time lately to do much of anything. Anomie ⚔ 03:32, 29 January 2013 (UTC)

Thank you. Beagel (talk) 05:28, 29 January 2013 (UTC)

Romanian Character Correcting

Hello Anomie! We talked about character replacing at the Bot Requests area. I hope you were satisfied by my response. I was wondering if I need to get special approval to go through the thousands of edits, simply because of the amount. Keep in mind every edit would be reviewed and the pages would be strictly Romanian. TL;DR Do I need special approval if the amount of semi-automated edits is extremely high? Thank you! Vaca tion 9 18:06, 30 January 2013 (UTC)

It's sort of a grey area; getting approval wouldn't hurt. Anomie ⚔ 20:18, 30 January 2013 (UTC)

Thank you! I think I'll be turning this into an automated task with User:VoxelBot anyway, but with some more robust Regular Expressions. Thanks for all your input! Vaca tion 9 20:31, 30 January 2013 (UTC)

WP Brands tagging

Thanks again for doing the work to have AnomieBot perform the talk page tagging for Wikipedia:WikiProject Brands. It is appreciated! Cheers, Northamerica1000^(talk) 04:01, 7 February 2013 (UTC)

Thanks again

Northamerica1000 has given you a Gatorade shower!

To give an editor a Gatorade shower, place {{subst:Gatorade shower|message= ~~~~}} on their talk page along with an optional customized message.

Just a little more appreciation for your help with auto tagging the WikiProject Brands banner on brand article talk pages! Northamerica1000^(talk) 06:13, 7 February 2013 (UTC)

User:Lgfcd

Hi - I'm puzzled by your block of this user. The edits appear semi-automated/assisted editing at best, rather than an unassisted bot. Even if it were, surely a warning would have been in order? An optimist on the run! 07:58, 7 February 2013 (UTC)

When a user comes along and makes the exact same automated-looking edits to an article that were just made and cleaned up the day before, it looks to me like either a bot or a person acting like one closely enough to make no difference. Someone who is doing semi-automated or script assisted edits properly should notice that they already edited the article and check the history to see why their script is wanting them to edit it again.

When bots are blocked, they're normally blocked immediately until their operator promises to fix the problem (stop the script, get approval at WP:BRFA, etc). Anomie ⚔ 12:50, 7 February 2013 (UTC)

Hi Anomie. I appreciate the reasoning above, and don't in any way consider it a bad block under the circumstances. However, I've now unblocked Lgfcd, since it seems pretty evident that he's not running an unapproved bot. I've suggested he avoid making such bottish edits in the future, but since there's no bot or automated editing taking place, I can't see a good reason to leave the block in place. Yunshui 雲‍水 09:31, 15 February 2013 (UTC)

Scribunto

I gather from a recent wikitech-l post that you are working on Lua/Scribunto. I'm looking for somewhere to raise an issue (probably a bug in Module:mw where text == nil but is being indexed at line 401), and to ask about performance with a large table of data in a Lua module. I'm wondering if you would be willing to discuss this here, or tell me where to ask (I read wikitech-l from archives; I could subscribe but I very rarely see Lua mentioned and I don't know if that is the right place). Thanks. Johnuniq (talk) 07:26, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

Update: I've worked out what a "Script error" backtrace means now, and my earlier opinion was upside down. The problem is that I have been working on Module:Convert which reports user input errors by passing some text through a formatter that I've never paid any attention to. The formatter is Module:Mw which apparently was created to simulate some part of Scribunto that was missing. It works by creating a global mw = {} if no such global existed, then inserting mw.text and mw.text.tag if they did not exist. Module:Convert calls mw.text.tag(...). Something may have changed recently because I got some strange "Script error" messages that have never occurred (in five months) before. It looks like the Scribunto mw.lua is now active in some way that it wasn't before, and under some circumstances, my calls to our Module:Mw fail because "text" in mw.text.tag is nil (very hard to see how that happens, unless the Scribunto mw.lua is somehow blocking our Module:Mw). I have to leave this now, and I'll see if I can work out any more in 24 hours. I guess I really need to know whether there is something other than mw.text.tag(...) that I should be using to format an error message (actually, I don't have any idea why I need to call anything—perhaps for some particular style?). I have temporarily avoided the problem by creating Module:Mwlocal as a copy of Module.Mw, and replacing all "mw" with "mwlocal" in Module:Convert. Johnuniq (talk) 11:24, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

Each module is loaded in its own cloned environment, so any globals it sets are not available outside the module. This is to prevent one module from making changes to the globals that would break other modules. But I'm having trouble finding a version of Scribunto where that did work. If you wanted something like Module:Mw to work, you'd have to have it return the mw object and then use mw = require 'Module:Mw' in the caller (I think that'll work without breaking anything).

There's no particular need to use a wrapper; you could just construct the wikitext string manually. But it doesn't hurt if you want to use one.

The fastest way to ask me questions is to find me on #mediawiki ^connect, #wikimedia-dev ^connect, or #wikimedia-tech ^connect (usually 14:00−22:00 UTC); here is OK too, but it'll take longer to get a reply. Anomie ⚔ 15:02, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

I believe my problem with Module:Mw is resolved, thanks. As mentioned, I'm writing Module:Convert which used Module:Mw by calling mw.text.tag(...) when it needs to display a message indicating that invalid input has been passed to the module. I never looked at how it worked until I noticed that it had broken a few hours before my first message here. It definitely worked, and it worked in the way described above, so at one stage it must have been possible for Module:Mw to insert mw.text into a global variable which Module:Convert could access.

One reason for my confusion is that I looked at a couple of pages that did something similar, and they appeared to be working even after adding ?action=purge to the page URL. Testing shows that I must have been looking at cached results, and in fact mw.text.tag(...) is broken for all modules (a nil edit would show the problem).

I've worked out that mw.text.tag(...) was intended to emulate {{#tag:...}} (pretty obvious in retrospect!). It looks like a Lua module currently has no access to a magic word like #tag, so I guess I'll just insert what I need without attempting to use mw. Another time I will post again to raise the performance question I mentioned.

From a post at WP:VPT, it seems Scribunto will be enabled on enwiki next Monday. There should be a page where people can discuss Lua and ask questions (a temporary forum). It would be too distracting at VPT—both for people not interested in Lua, and for people trying to understand Lua (due to a bunch of non-Lua posts). Johnuniq (talk) 08:18, 15 February 2013 (UTC)

Template:Infobox television season

Hello. I see that you have edited some of the str templates. Do you know what edit broke the header on Template:Infobox television season? 117Avenue (talk) 04:28, 21 February 2013 (UTC)

Oops, I had an extra "}" in {{str sub}}. Fixed. But I also fixed an issue in Template:Infobox television season, too. Anomie ⚔ 14:27, 21 February 2013 (UTC)

module sandbox

Hi Anomie.

You said that module can be sandboxed the same way templates can. i tried what i understood, i.e., i created User:קיפודנחש/sandbox/Module:testit, and from Special:TemplateSandbox i defined "User:קיפודנחש/sandbox" as "Sandbox prefix", and tried to see what {{#invoke:testit|f}} will do. nada. can you please point me to somewhere where "module sandboxing" is explained, or just explain it yourself?

thanks a bunch,
peace - קיפודנחש (aka kipod) (talk) 19:27, 23 February 2013 (UTC)

Try moving it to User:קיפודנחש/sandbox/Module:Testit. Anomie ⚔ 19:29, 23 February 2013 (UTC)

trying to move it failed: apparently, i can't move anything to User:קיפודנחש/sandbox/Module:Testit - i got a message that this is on the "title blacklist" or somesuch (apparently the "move" logic and "create page" logic are not identical - i can create this page just fine, but couldn't move another page to it).

however, i was able to create a whole new page User:קיפודנחש/sandbox/Module:Test, and the sandboxing actually worked. my guess is that the "title blacklist" is some perversion of one of the abuse filters, and is local to enwiki, so i do not worry too much about it.

thanks again for this nugget of information. i guess it would be good if this was actually published documented/somewhere...

peace - קיפודנחש (aka kipod) (talk) 20:03, 23 February 2013 (UTC)

The title blacklist is MediaWiki:Titleblacklist. One of the rules there is to prevent people from using foreign-script letters in page move vandalism, and unfortunately several of those letters appear in your username. An admin can move pages in your userspace for you, and if it becomes a major problem it might be possible to whitelist your userspace at MediaWiki:Titlewhitelist. Anomie ⚔ 20:45, 23 February 2013 (UTC)

thanks for the explanation. i did not plan on becoming a nuisance - when i registered i did not plan to contribute much outside of hewiki, and i'm still not sure how much i'll be involved here, but it definitely grew more than i originally planned. i guess that if this will continue (i.e., if i continue to be active on enwiki), i'll try to adopt a NIK in latin script that will be less annoying to everyone else...

peace - קיפודנחש (aka kipod) (talk) 23:09, 23 February 2013 (UTC)

I wouldn't worry about it for others' sake, you've got "aka kipod" in your sig which is enough. Happy editing! Anomie ⚔ 09:53, 24 February 2013 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Lua requests

Hi Anomie, I noticed you contributed Lua scripts at Module:String and some fixes at Module:Mw. I just created a request page for Lua scripts at Wikipedia:Lua requests and it'd be great if you could watchlist it to assist anyone who needs help with Lua scripts. Thanks! Dcoetzee 00:56, 24 February 2013 (UTC)

Watchlisted, thanks. Anomie ⚔ 09:54, 24 February 2013 (UTC)

Hey talk page stalkers

In case anyone cares, I'm going to take something resembling a wikibreak. I'm still going to watch this page and a few others, but for the moment I've unwatched pretty much everything else. In a few days (maybe even tomorrow) I'll probably start watching WP:VPT and some other technical pages; once I do that, if there's something that needs my attention feel free to let me know. Anomie ⚔ 03:55, 25 February 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for updating mw to include mw.loadData() (docs). I browsed the change in mw.lua—you made the addition of loadData look easy! I know it all depends, but what is a possible/probable deployment data at test2? At enwiki? I'm hoping to try loadData at this test2 module. Johnuniq (talk) 05:44, 25 February 2013 (UTC)

<WMF hat on>Unless we decide to push it out earlier, it will go up with 1.21wmf11. See mw:MediaWiki 1.21/Roadmap.</WMF hat on> It was fairly straightforward, thanks to the way Scribunto does the sandboxing and Lua does lexical scoping the mw.loadData() function can load things in the outer sandbox and cache them for reuse in every inner sandbox. Then it was just a matter of making sure the inner sandboxes couldn't use this to communicate when we don't want them to, which is why functions are forbidden. FWIW, tables-as-keys could probably be made safe, but they're not really necessary and it saved me having to write and test code to do it. Same goes for certain kinds of metatables, the limited kinds of metatables that could be done safely are probably not terribly useful. Anomie ⚔ 14:45, 25 February 2013 (UTC)

FYI, talk page stalkers, I've re-watchlisted WP:VPT and various Lua-related pages. Anomie ⚔ 06:16, 27 February 2013 (UTC)

Be prepared for lengthy WP:TLDR diatribes headed by a bullet and some boldface as if to say "hey everybody, look at my comment, it's more important than anybody else's" --Redrose64 (talk) 11:38, 27 February 2013 (UTC)

What, more so than usual? ;) Anomie ⚔ 14:53, 27 February 2013 (UTC)

Your signature

So, I just realized that while I thought for the longest time your signature contained a unicode square, it is probably something that my computer isn't rendering (is that the correct word?) Is it a square, or is it some other design that has been hidden from me for 2 years now? Ryan Vesey 05:03, 1 March 2013 (UTC)

It doesn't render for me either, except Firefox displays "2694" in a box to show the Unicode number. I copy-pasted it to the "Characters" field at http://rishida.net/tools/conversion/ and clicked "View names". It says "U+2694 CROSSED SWORDS", and shows an image of two crossed swords. I'm not sure why Anomie uses it but see Crossed swords. PrimeHunter (talk) 06:03, 1 March 2013 (UTC)

Ha, that's very coincidental. Per User:Ryan Vesey/common.css all admins sigs have crossed swords but it doesn't work on my primary computer (it also shows the square). If anyone knows how I can modify my computer to see it (I'm currently using Chrome 25.0.1364.97 m), I'd be grateful. Ryan Vesey 06:06, 1 March 2013 (UTC)

You have "U+2696 SCALES" there. http://rishida.net/c/Miscellaneous%20Symbols/2694.png and http://rishida.net/c/Miscellaneous%20Symbols/2696.png are different. PrimeHunter (talk) 06:21, 1 March 2013 (UTC)

Oh yeah, the coincidence is gone. I was going to do the swords, but decided the scales were more reflective. I forgot about that decision since I couldn't see it. Ryan Vesey 06:22, 1 March 2013 (UTC)

You could try installing the DejaVu fonts, I think they have those symbols. As for why crossed swords, at the time things seemed argumentative and I felt like marking my talk page as a battleground. AnomieBOT uses a lightning bolt (⚡, U+26A1) in its signature, FWIW, because it's a bot. Anomie ⚔ 07:41, 1 March 2013 (UTC)

Would I be installing it into my computer or my browser? Do you know how to do that? I downloaded them from Sourceforge, but didn't know what to do from there. Ryan Vesey 07:46, 1 March 2013 (UTC)

Fonts are installed to the computer's operating system, so that they may be shared by different applications. My desktop PC has the same OS (Windows XP SP3) and browser (Firefox 19) as my mother's laptop PC. Mine just shows the Unicode square containing 2694; hers shows the actual character. Conversely, if we visit any page at Chinese or Japanese Wikipedia, mine shows the text just fine, hers doesn't - every page is full of those little numbered boxes. So, it's down to the fonts that are installed. More information on U+2694 "Crossed Swords", including supporting fonts, may be found at FileFormat.info; The Unicode Character Reference; HtmlEscape.net; stosberg.net; Charbase. --Redrose64 (talk) 12:46, 1 March 2013 (UTC)

PERTable and SPERTable

Hi Anomie, and sorry to trouble you on your wikibreak, but it looks like AnomieBOT has stopped updating User:AnomieBOT/PERTable and User:AnomieBOT/SPERTable as of yesterday. I tried to pinpoint the time that things stopped working, and I think it must have been between this edit by AnomieBOT and this edit where I answered a protected edit request. Any ideas what might have happened? Best — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 23:57, 2 March 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for letting me know. For some reason one of the bot processes got stuck trying to restart. I killed that one and it finished restarting fine now. Anomie ⚔ 02:32, 3 March 2013 (UTC)

AnomieBOT BRFA Status Updater Not Working?

What's going on? As you can see here, it's not updating the current BRFAs. For example, VoxelBot 4 was filed a few hours ago and the bot still hasn't updated the table. Vaca tion 9 16:43, 3 March 2013 (UTC)

Same as the problem above, one bot process got stuck again so the bot couldn't restart. Found the problem this time: it was hanging on a circular redirect. Fixed the code to correctly handle this, and fixed the redirect too. Anomie ⚔ 19:14, 3 March 2013 (UTC)

Proposed bot and Main Page cacheing

Since you are the most visible and accessible of the WMF software engineers, I was hoping if you could chime in at this bot discussion, regarding the technical implications of running this bot. There are server resourcing concerns that should be handled by an expert on the subject. --Nick Penguin_(contribs) 17:43, 6 March 2013 (UTC)

Note WMF hat is off for this reply. I don't really know enough about the operations side of things to make any official pronouncements about the performance impact of that; you'd do better to ask in #wikimedia-operations ^connect on Freenode. From a purely personal perspective, I'd rather see purging 4 times per day (probably taken care of by the DYK updates, don't they happen 4 times per day already?) than 4 times per hour. Anomie ⚔ 12:36, 7 March 2013 (UTC)

ElphiBot

Hi Kindly please unblock my bot (ElphiBot) because we need it in wikidata. I promise you that i'll never run the bot in ~~de.wiki~~ en.wiki. thanks in advance. Elph (talk) 16:57, 8 March 2013 (UTC)

Your bot may be unblocked here on the English Wikipedia when you have a successful request for approval; until then, there's little point in unblocking it since it's not allowed to edit here anyway. The block here would not prevent it from editing wikidata. I also have no idea what you're telling me about dewiki for.

Also, BTW, please read WP:SIG, particularly WP:SIG#NT. Anomie ⚔ 18:16, 8 March 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for answer. de.wiki was my mistake :). I don't know why i need to have a successful request for approval when i not intend to running the bot again.عباس‎ ☢ ✉ 08:05, 12 March 2013 (UTC)

I don't know why you need the bot unblocked if you do not intend to run it again. Anomie ⚔ 10:34, 12 March 2013 (UTC)

Soccer ball.svg

Hi. I'm an assistant language teacher in Japan. Over the past seven months I've been making a visual novel type game to help my students with English. To aid this, I have used one of your pictures that you have kindly made available under a Creative Commons licence. I just wanted to thank you personally for making the resource available. If you want to play the game, though please bear in mind a lot of it is in Japanese, it can be downloaded online (I won't put the link up as it might count as spam, but let me know if you want it and I'll pop it up). Thank you very much — Preceding unsigned comment added by Watashinotabi (talk • contribs) 00:02, 8 March 2013 (UTC)

Hi! I didn't actually make that image, I just uploaded it locally here on the English Wikipedia so it could be protected. The original is at Commons:File:Soccer ball.svg. Anomie ⚔ 03:02, 8 March 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for the update, I'll be sure to update the credits. Watashinotabi (talk) 00:27, 13 March 2013 (UTC)

Restricted-use media list

An RfC that may interest you has been opened at MediaWiki talk:Bad image list#Restricted-use media list, so please come and include your opinion. – PAINE ELLSWORTH ^CLIMAX! 09:53, 19 March 2013 (UTC)

I note that the change linked from your RfC has not actually been merged yet, contrary to the claims made there. Fortunately I really don't care much anyway; I'm going to stay out of it. Anomie ⚔ 11:36, 19 March 2013 (UTC)

What links here self-ref

Hi Anomie. Re Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 109#Self reference (sort of) in what links here - do you know when gerrit:54225 goes live? It's apparently not live yet, see Special:WhatLinksHere/East Anglian (train). --Redrose64 (talk) 23:45, 24 March 2013 (UTC)

It is in 1.21wmf12, see mw:MediaWiki 1.21/Roadmap for the schedule. Note that affected pages will probably need a null edit (or a real edit) to be updated. Anomie ⚔ 23:54, 24 March 2013 (UTC)

Ah, so later today then. Thanks. --Redrose64 (talk) 00:05, 25 March 2013 (UTC)

Your user script

Hello Anomie, I'm trying out your user script User:Anomie/hide-images and I'm really impressed. Excellent work!

The only thing I don't like is the yellow-red-checkered placeholder, this is offensive! ;-) It's kind of crying out loud "look-lookatthis-whatisthisabout"?! I changed it to red-white-checkered, but best would be blue-white I guess (visible enough, works well with Wikipedia's design, not overly attention-grabbing). Would you consider a change?
The script blocks big images and small icons alike, have you thought about an exception for images smaller than 50x50 (idea found here) or something similar?
What I really wanted to ask though: Can we present your script on WP:NOSEE? Interested people would be more likely to find it there :-) Or even turn it into a gadget, if there is demand? (not so much yet) I can see this become very popular for users editing in cafes, public transport or where ever :-)

Thank you for this great tool and all the best to you! --Atlasowa (talk) 12:32, 25 March 2013 (UTC)

Replies in order:

Ha! In a discussion somewhere where the script was mentioned, I said something along the lines of "unless someone finds a red and yellow checkerboard pattern offensive". ;) Make a blue-white version and upload it as PD-ineligible, and I'll take a look.
Some people might find tiny icons as offensive as large images, so no. What if someone made a 49x49 pixel penis icon, or a 49x49 pixel image of a woman's face which might be offensive to adherents of some religion that thinks women should be completely covered if they must be seen in public, or for that matter a 49x49 pixel spider icon which might be offensive to someone with arachnophobia.
Feel free, if you can get consensus. It should be directly usable as a gadget with a definition line like "hide-images[ResourceLoader]|hide-images.js|hide-images.css". I don't promise to have time to do much if bugs turn up or if people want changes, though.

Anomie ⚔ 13:08, 25 March 2013 (UTC)

I'm now using and proposing File:November_flag.svg (which is not square, unfortunately) with blue border. File:Batternburg-white-red.svg is a second choice.
Good point.
So I'll include the user script in WP:NOSEE, and we'll see ;-) Thanks --Atlasowa (talk) 18:24, 25 March 2013 (UTC)

Replacing table.concat

(Not urgent - enjoy your break):

I realize that some sandbox development I was doing on a function "better.concat" ([1]) partially overlaps your work on Module:User:Anomie/deepToString. One of the first things I did while learning was Module:DisplayLuaTableContents, so this seems very important to me for learning purposes. I should note that since your "deepToString" only handles tables, it would seem better named as a table.concat variant.

I would like to see a straight out replacement for table.concat which:

Expands all subtables.
Returns "nil", "function", etc. instead of choking on invalid entries.
Returns all entries in the table, sorted 1 to n, then other numeric keys lowest to highest, then strings lowest to highest.
Accepts arrays for the i and j bounds, so that you can choose to list only elements [3][4] to [3][6] and ["key"][7][1] to ["lock"][4][3].

I'm not sure if a literal replacement of table.concat is in the cards. I see that someone commented in Module:mw that reassigning parts of mw. doesn't actually work, haven't tried it myself. But if it can be done, then I'll add:

Works exactly like table.concat for any set of the first four parameters, including script errors, so that it is reverse compatible.

I think I should be able to code up all the details of such a routine (not this weekend though), but I'm not yet familiar with the norms for creating new libraries. What module and function names and overall formats do you think would be best for beginning such a thing?

Best regards! Wnt (talk) 14:08, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

If you're talking about a module here on enwiki that people could load if they want, I don't know what norms there might be either.

If you're talking about it being included in Scribunto, I can tell you that table.concat is not going to be changed as we don't want to deviate from the behavior of standard Lua more than is necessary. It's possible such a function could be added to mw.text, although I'd suspect something more along the lines of deepToString would be more generally useful. Anomie ⚔ 14:43, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

OK, thanks. Wnt (talk) 15:19, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

Monitoring protected edits

In regards to User:Anomie/User Admin adminstats/style (which is involved in a truly wonderful userbox I don't know why more people don't use), I was going to remove the "protected edits" bit since it's not tracked - I assumed before looking that it was done in the past or something - but I see now that you put it in ages ago preemptively, seeming to imply it would, eventually, get tracked. Is that true? ~ Amory (u • t • c) 20:06, 30 March 2013 (UTC)

Neither is true. I put it in there because at the time most of my admin work was with CAT:EP, and it irritated me that there was no mention of this in the stats. So I put it in, with the notation that the number wasn't tracked. Anomie ⚔ 20:47, 30 March 2013 (UTC)

Regarding template userboxbreak

Please see the problems in my userpage most probably due to the edits you made to the template - Userboxbreak. Please correct it immediately. It has destroyed not only my user page, but also that of several others. - Jayadevp13 15:24, 1 April 2013 (UTC)

It wasn't my edit, it was this edit by Technical 13 (talk · contribs). Anomie ⚔ 15:32, 1 April 2013 (UTC)

Thank you for correcting the mistake. Sorry for the wrong accusation. - Jayadevp13 15:34, 1 April 2013 (UTC)

No problem. Anomie ⚔ 15:35, 1 April 2013 (UTC)

I think the permission for editing the template should only be given to administrators, who are generally more experienced. In such a case this problem might not have happened. Opinions sought. - Jayadevp13 17:14, 1 April 2013 (UTC)

Template:Userboxbreak is broken without my modification.

No, it is broken without my change... See User:Technical_13/Userboxes/OS/Examples and User:Technical_13/Userboxes/Browser/Examples. — User:Technical 13 ( C • M • Click to learn how to view this signature as intended ) 15:44, 1 April 2013 (UTC)

{{userboxbreak}} is not designed to work with {{usbktop}}/{{usbk}}/{{usbkbottom}}. It is designed to work with {{userboxtop}} and {{userboxbottom}}, and your change is breaking that. Create {{usbkbreak}} if you want something to work with that family, and stop being so careless as to not test the existing uses of templates. Anomie ⚔ 15:47, 1 April 2013 (UTC)

Following {{usbkbottom}} specifically says to use {{userboxbreak}}. — User:Technical 13 ( C • M • Click to learn how to view this signature as intended ) 16:12, 1 April 2013 (UTC)

It also says to use {{userboxtop}}. What's your point? Anomie ⚔ 16:17, 1 April 2013 (UTC)

My point is if {{usbkbottom}} specifically says to use {{userboxbreak}}, why wouldn't it be designed for it? — User:Technical 13 ( C • M • Click to learn how to view this signature as intended ) 16:20, 1 April 2013 (UTC)

It seems your point is that you either have poor reading comprehension or you're trolling. Enough of this. If you break {{userboxbreak}} again, you'll be blocked. But feel free to unredirect {{usbkbottom}} so you can stop pretending to be confused by it. Anomie ⚔ 16:25, 1 April 2013 (UTC)

I removed the redirect as you instructed. Now the whole thing doesn't work right. I'm directing everyone that complains to me about it to you since it was per your instructions I removed the redirect. — User:Technical 13 ( C • M • Click to learn how to view this signature as intended ) 16:34, 1 April 2013 (UTC)

Please stop the trolling. Thanks. Anomie ⚔ 16:36, 1 April 2013 (UTC)

Hello. There is currently a discussion at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents regarding an issue with which you may have been involved. The thread is Need assistance dealing with Administrator failing to WP:AGF and name calling.. Thank you.— User:Technical 13 ( C • M • Click to learn how to view this signature as intended ) 16:52, 1 April 2013 (UTC)

Hello. The discussion at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents regarding the thread is Need assistance dealing with Administrator failing to WP:AGF and name calling. has been closed before you got an opportunity to respond to my final comments and questions towards you. What I want to know is if we can work together in the future without you WP:BITEing my head off WP:UNCIVILy and WP:ABF? I'm hoping that we can work together and get along. I spent five days thinking about and trying to research what you could have possibly meant and how my edit could have broken anything not knowing the the templates it worked with were poorly written and redirected where it shouldn't have been before I reverted your edit. It didn't add up, so I made the reversion and immediately made a not on your page with links to how it was broken without my edit (which you never offered me to see what was happening). — User:Technical 13 ( C • M • View signature as intended) 20:17, 1 April 2013 (UTC)

Look, the general consensus on ANI was that there was more fault on your end than Anomie's. So asking him to compromise by coming completely over to your - requests - seems completely backwards. If you want to compromise, according to the ANI thread, you should be giving up the most ground. That means, you need to make an effort to listen and understand. Compromise of course takes two and I am sure Anomie would be willing to consider a kinder approach, but you'll have to demonstrate effort on your part first. There was more fault found in your approach than that of Anomie's.--v/r - T P 20:49, 1 April 2013 (UTC)

Talkback: you've got messages!

Hello, Anomie. You have new messages at Wikipedia:Bot_requests#Update_for_an_old_request.
Message added 22:15, 5 April 2013 (UTC). You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{Talkback}} or {{Tb}} template.

—Theopolisme (talk) 22:15, 5 April 2013 (UTC)

AnomieBOT is down

Sorry to bother you during your break, but it seems AnomieBOT is down completely at the moment (no edits in ~16 hours) --ThaddeusB (talk) 04:31, 11 April 2013 (UTC)

AnomieBOT's server appears to have gone down. Anomie ⚔ 10:40, 11 April 2013 (UTC)

Daan Roosegaarde

Hi, Daan Roosegaarde doesn't seem to be an orphan page anymore. It has got links from TodaysArt, 21c Museum Hotel and List of Design Indaba speakers` (BruceJanssen (talk) 13:13, 15 April 2013 (UTC))

And you are telling me this why? I've never edited that article, or anything in that topic area. If it's no longer orphaned, remove the orphan tag. Anomie ⚔ 13:18, 15 April 2013 (UTC)

Resolved

I'm assuming they are telling you because you AnomieBot did something there, which of course since it is an automated bot, you would know nothing of directly. Either way, I've taken care of it. Technical 13 (talk) 13:28, 15 April 2013 (UTC)

I was bored, so I decided to confirm my theory. Technical 13 (talk) 18:03, 15 April 2013 (UTC)

IFD closer format question

Hi Anomie, I have a question about the IFD closer and multiple nominations. If I nominate 10 images for deletion and use a section header like "All uploads by User:Reallybadcopyvioguy", I know that the bot doesn't recognize when they have been deleted and just ignores the section. But if I use a section header like "File:one of the images.jpg and nine others", will it close the section when File:one of the images.jpg is deleted, ignoring the text outside of the link? What if there are two links - like "File:first image.jpg and File:second image.jpg" - will it close the section when either(?) or both(?) of the images are deleted? Thanks, --B (talk) 17:54, 15 April 2013 (UTC)

The bot will ignore the section unless the header consists of a single link to a file. So any extra text will result in the section being ignored, as will multiple links. Anomie ⚔ 18:23, 15 April 2013 (UTC)

Thanks. --B (talk) 18:45, 15 April 2013 (UTC)

Your input is requested

Greetings, Anomie! If we have not met, I'm AutomaticStrikeout. I've come here to ask you to take part in the survey at User:AutomaticStrikeout/Are admins interested in a RfB?. I am trying to gauge the general level of interest that administrators have in running for cratship, as well as pinpoint the factors that affect that interest level. Your input will be appreciated. Happy editing, AutomaticStrikeout (T • C • Sign AAPT) 02:14, 17 April 2013 (UTC)

Stumped trying add functionality to Template:Userboxtop

Hello, I know that you've worked on this set of templates before and I've been trying to add some functionality to this template to allow the box to be collapsible and/or have a set height and use a scrollbar. Can you take a look at Template:Userboxtop/sandbox and Template:Userboxtop/testcases and help me figure out why it isn't working? Thanks. Technical 13 (talk) 17:48, 17 April 2013 (UTC)

The collapsing seems to be working, although I'd recommend using the newer mw-collapsible and mw-collapsed instead. As for the scrolling, I'd recommend someone who wants that just wrap their userboxes in a div with the appropriate CSS instead of trying to shove it into {{userboxtop}}.

Also, you may want to look into {{yesno}} for handling yes/no options, rather than rolling your own. Also, I'd be very wary of adding "clear", as people may have layouts with multiple floats that that would break. Anomie ⚔ 12:35, 18 April 2013 (UTC)

Someone with a non-latin username that I can't read made some changes to make the collapsing work. I had originally had the userbox inside of a userbox (as I've seen users do like User:Miss Bono) I'll try the mw- option next.

I just looked at {{yesno}} and it doesn't include "true/false" or "on/off", so I think I'll leave mine for now, but thanks for showing me that, it was interesting and informative.

The clear is part of the template as it exists now and I just hadn't removed it from the sandbox version I am working on. Technical 13 (talk) 13:12, 18 April 2013 (UTC)

קיפודנחש (talk · contribs) is a regular at WP:VPT, and is normally known to those who can't read Hebrew as "kipod".

We don't normally code for true/false or on/off options - there are three forms of Boolean test in common use:

yes/(anything else)
(anything else)/no
(non-blank)/(blank)

The {{yesno}} template, in its default state, resolves values to yes/(blank) but may be configured in other ways. --Redrose64 (talk) 16:53, 18 April 2013 (UTC)

yes, i should have said - it's just that immediately after my little experiment i had to disconnect, so i did not leave any note or explanation. the problem was that the previous sandbox added the new "collapsible/collapsed" classes, but it placed all the boxes as part of the "th" element, and as it happens, the "collapse" script does not touch the th (aka title). all i did was add a new "tr/td" pair, and shoved the userboxes in them. sorry for being a bit terse about communicating. peace. קיפודנחש (aka kipod) (talk) 18:22, 18 April 2013 (UTC)

Ahhh. I would have come to you directly kipod, but I wasn't sure it was you. קיפודנחש looks the same as שחנדופיק to me. It now makes sense why the [show] button was showing up where it was. I have learned from this and can now expand upon it to make it do both the collapse and scrollbar options. I'll reconsider the {{yesno}} and see if i can work it in too, I may submit a request to modify that to because true/false and on/off are more intuitive to some freaks like me. Technical 13 (talk) 18:37, 18 April 2013 (UTC)

Removing the tags on section controversy on article Believers Church

I had made the necessary changes to the section controversy. If you feel the edit is as per the requirement kindly remove the tag on the article. Benedictdilton (talk) 20:58, 23 April 2013 (UTC)

You should talk to LoveYourNeighbor1 (talk · contribs), who is the person that added the tags. Anomie ⚔ 00:46, 24 April 2013 (UTC)

Vandal taking advantage of your bot

I've been battling the Philippine Airport Vandal (Category:Suspected Wikipedia sockpuppets of 112.204.10.208) for years, and the way I detect vandalism is seeing familiar IPs editing articles on my huge watchlist. However, the latest appearances of this IP vandal is leaving an incomplete CN tag which attracts your bot, and as a result I and many other editors may not notice vandalism done. Is there a way you can slow the bot or do something? HkCaGu (talk) 14:16, 24 April 2013 (UTC)

You should be checking behind bot edits too, really. But I will adjust the TagDater to wait longer for IPs and users with few edits, like OrphanReferenceFixer does. Anomie ⚔ 00:41, 25 April 2013 (UTC)

The Note

Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/Cyberbot II 2. :p—cyberpower ^Chat_Online 15:47, 30 April 2013 (UTC)

Looks like Addshore is already handling it. Anomie ⚔ 21:03, 30 April 2013 (UTC)

News and notes

Hi, thanks for your comment. I've revised the wording. Let me know if it's clear now. Tony (talk) 15:01, 2 May 2013 (UTC)

Works for me. Anomie ⚔ 18:51, 2 May 2013 (UTC)

I had a look at my adminstats. The history tells me that it updated again. I didn't do anything to the code yet as I had a bad headache when you brought it up. I'm not sure what caused. Could be a toolserver database lag. Let me know if it stops again and then I can take a look.—cyberpower ^Chat_Online 12:13, 3 May 2013 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/IPLRecordsUpdateBot

Can you please look into my bot approval request here? I had created it about 48 hours back and no one other than myself has edited it till now. jfd34 (talk) 16:45, 8 May 2013 (UTC)

Scribunto Version

Cross post from User_talk:Dragons_flight

Thanks for the help. I'm using the regular 1.20 release from ExtensionDistributor of Scribunto. I'm not finding a README, but there was a "fadcbb6" in the filename (build?) I'm getting the same result on both a 32-bit and x64 Ubuntu VM. Both are based on the Bitnami LAMP stack with MediaWiki modules installed. Is there something like maintenance/update.php to rebuilt the mw table?C morgan2005 (talk) 23:23, 9 May 2013 (UTC)

Yeah, 1.20 is just too old. You'd have to upgrade MediaWiki; 1.21 ~~has been out for a while now, and 1.22~~ will be released soon. Anomie ⚔ 03:59, 10 May 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for the help. I upgraded MediaWiki to 1.21wmf12 and did a clone of the current Scribunto master, and the Lua code is now rendering. There's a bunch of CSS relics now, so I'm going to try out 1.22 next. Let me ask you from an engineering/insider perspective, is the move to using Lua premature? It just seems that if the current stable version of the platform (1.20.5) can't support the framework then the cart got in front of the horse. A user trying to setup his or her own wiki, doesn't want to (and probably shouldn't) be using bleeding-edge releases, but now in order to import and use any single article from Wikipedia proper, he would need to because {{reflist}} has been ported. Or maybe the question is, should Wikipedia and other MediaWiki-community sites use the latest stable release for production? But, anyway, I appreciate the assistance.C morgan2005 (talk) 17:45, 10 May 2013 (UTC)

Instead of 1.21wmf12, try the REL1_21 branch of core.

If Wikipedia and other MediaWiki-community sites were to use only the latest stable release, we'd probably be up to something like 1.20.6152 with all the bugfix stable releases we'd have had to make (most bugs are found by people trying something on Wikipedia or other WMF sites), and/or we might wind up back at the bad old days of it taking months for bug fixes to make it to Wikipedia. If someone wants to use articles from Wikipedia, it's likely they'll have to stick with a version of MediaWiki relatively close to what Wikipedia is running and to install a number of extensions that Wikipedia uses—soon the maze of Wikibase extensions will probably be needed, too, as articles start including data imported from Wikidata. OTOH, if someone wants to run their own wiki without importing much from Wikipedia, they're fine with using the stable releases. Anomie ⚔ 13:38, 11 May 2013 (UTC)

Daemon (computing)

Hello, I feel as though you're misinterpreting the sentence that you keep reverting in the demon article when you say "It's doubtful that BSD specifically adopted a Christian demon, just that the artwork is based on demons in Christian artwork". The Greek demon is not the same as the Christian demon and that is what's odd about the BSD mascot. By the cryptic wording about the "Christian artwork", you're forcing the reader to already know that the demons appearing in Christian artwork are not Greek demons. If you removed "although", readers would be led to believe that Christian artwork depicts Greek demons in some way that the BSD crowd found appealing. Your way of conveying information through unnecessary prior knowledge and the inducing of confusion really has no place in an encyclopedia and I'd like you to stop standing in the way of improving the article.Owen214 (talk) 14:11, 13 May 2013 (UTC)

On the other hand, your version saying that the BSD mascot is a Christian demon is quite simply false. Anomie ⚔ 01:55, 14 May 2013 (UTC)

Image is an inseparable aspect of persona. Owen214 (talk) 10:53, 18 May 2013 (UTC)

Performance

I sent you an email, but I thought I'd leave you a note too. I updated the performance numbers yesterday. Dragons flight (talk) 21:28, 19 May 2013 (UTC)

I saw on my watchlist, thanks! Anomie ⚔ 23:52, 19 May 2013 (UTC)

Flag of Brazil.svg

The file created is unnecessary because the file already exists in Wikimedia Commons. I suggest to delete the file. The duplicity hinders its use. --Rkt2312 (talk) 01:56, 22 May 2013 (UTC)

Did you bother to actually read the notification on the local version, or are you just blindly spamming messages like this around? Anomie ⚔ 10:26, 22 May 2013 (UTC)

Flag of the United States.svg

The file created is unnecessary because the file already exists in Wikimedia Commons. I suggest to delete the file. The duplicity hinders its use. --Rkt2312 (talk) 02:07, 22 May 2013 (UTC)

Did you bother to actually read the notification on the local version, or are you just blindly spamming messages like this around? Anomie ⚔ 10:26, 22 May 2013 (UTC)

Need a little help..

Hi Anomie, I think the blue colour on the Malaysian flag should be corrected as it appears not to be like a dark blue. The blue colour should be same like the British flag. Even the flag waving by the Minister of Malaysia on 2011 Malaysia Day also appears to be a dark blue. Cheers. ;) — иz нίpнόp^ʜᴇʟᴘ! 10:48, 23 May 2013 (UTC)

Template_talk:Reflist#Autodetecting_columns

See my much-belated reply on Template_talk:Reflist#Autodetecting_columns. Your opinion is sought, thanks. jhawkinson (talk) 15:23, 24 May 2013 (UTC)

Carly Schroeder

Hi,

Just wanted to let you know I reverted a change by your bot. The "official website" used to be dead[2] now it has since turned into a parked page in a foreign language when it turned back up in the article.

According to google, this appears to look "official" but I don't have anything to back that up and not to mention the page states it was last updated in 2007 so I didn't put it in the article.

Regards, --Charitwo ^(talk) 04:52, 26 May 2013 (UTC)

I don't see an edit you reverted there. I do see where you missed some orphans, but it seems to be all sorted out now? Anomie ⚔ 06:05, 26 May 2013 (UTC)

i meant cause i missed the orphans it put the link back in the article. just wanted to let you know since i was undoing it's changes --Charitwo ^(talk) 06:58, 26 May 2013 (UTC)

That's exactly what you should do in that situation. So, good! Anomie ⚔ 07:13, 26 May 2013 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

	The Technical Barnstar
	For your innovative and nifty user scripts; including linkclassifier and useridentifier, both of which I find absolutely indispensable — *MusikAnimal* ^talk 16:13, 25 May 2013 (UTC)

Thanks! Anomie ⚔ 01:50, 29 May 2013 (UTC)

Help with script

Hi. We've never interacted (to my knowledge), but I use several of your scripts on my vector.js, and I notice that you're basically the god of all scripts on Wikipedia haha. I'm having a bit of trouble with one of my scripts, which updates all of the data on WP:NRHPPROGRESS, a project page for WP:NRHP. Basically it secretly (i.e. in a hidden div) loads about 3400 tabled lists (e.g. this one) in the background (synchronously, I might add, so it takes 1.5-2 hrs+ for me to run, limited by my internet connection) and extracts data about how many of the entries in each table are bluelinked and how many have images. When it's done, it updates the Progress page with the extracted data. The code itself is a product of about a month's work and is basically an amalgamation of several different routines of varying complexity that I developed since the Progress page's creation; it feels really hacked together compared to many of your scripts haha. (As a side note, if you have any tips to clean it up or make it faster, feel free to lecture me. I'm a novice at programming.) Regardless, it is functional, so I'm happy with it.

I was trying to add one thing to it, however, which kind of matches up with your linkclassifier script. The script counts up all the redlinks in a list by checking which links have class="new", but there doesn't appear to be a way to check for links to dab pages. I tried to check when class="disambiguation" (which is what your linkclassifier script adds), but because I'm not running your script after each background load, the dab class isn't added to links in the hidden div, so I can't find them. Can you think of any way to add the dab class to this background div? Maybe like a stripped down version of your linkclassifier script? I tried to decipher your code, but it's at a whole different level compared to my scripting ability haha. Any help would be appreciated! Thanks!--Dudemanfellabra (talk) 19:38, 27 May 2013 (UTC)

Your best bet is to figure out how to use the mw:API. Then a simple call to prop=categories with clcategories=Category:All disambiguation pages, like this, would give you the information you need: if the missing property is present it's a redlink, and if the category is returned then it's a dab page. Anomie ⚔ 00:47, 29 May 2013 (UTC)

I've had limited experience using the API. I use it in the code in question to fetch the wikitext of the progress page and again to edit the page with the updated wikitext the script spits out. So if I'm understanding you correctly, you think I should create a string of all the links in the tables on each county list and query them with those parameters, then count up the number of results that have the "categories" item in them and that will be the number of dab pages? I think I can manage that. Problem is, my code is set up to be synchronous while I'm pretty sure the way these calls would be set up is asynchronous. I might have to fool around a little while and rewrite some stuff to make it work. Hopefully it won't increase the run time of the script too much. Thanks for the help!--Dudemanfellabra (talk) 01:22, 29 May 2013 (UTC)

LUA

Hey! I had no idea it was you at the hackathon with the LUA sessions! I should have said hi! I want to try and create a version of {{Template:Multiple_issues}} that is nicer and has some lovely features, do you think the following would be possible with LUA? Order the templates that are displayed by the date that they have in their relevant parameter. Add a parameter to certain types of issue for them to be included outside of the regular MI box. Other cool stuff? :) If you think it is possible I will go and read everything in the next few days and try and figure out how :) Cheers! ·Add§hore· ^{Talk To Me!} 11:30, 28 May 2013 (UTC)

It would be tough. Lua gets the already-preprocessed text of the parameter, so it might be difficult to reliably find where one template ends and the next begins, and also difficult to find the actual date within each one. Maybe you could do it, if all the maintenance templates are wrapped in a <div> or table or something, by making a very simple parser to extract the top-level divs/tables. Anomie ⚔ 00:41, 29 May 2013 (UTC)

Is there any chance you could link me to one or two 'kind of complex' LUA templates for me to take a look at ? :) ·addshore· ^{Talk To Me!} 16:35, 29 May 2013 (UTC)

Try {{cite book}}, which invokes Module:Citation/CS1 directly, and there are two sub-modules, Module:Citation/CS1/Configuration and Module:Citation/CS1/Whitelist. --Redrose64 (talk) 17:22, 29 May 2013 (UTC)

He asked for "kind of complex", not terrifying. ;-) Maybe Module:Navbox or Module:String would be less intimidating. Dragons flight (talk) 20:52, 29 May 2013 (UTC)

My thanks to both of you! :) ·addshore· ^{talk to me!} 22:36, 29 May 2013 (UTC)

Thanks, talk page stalkers (: I'd also add Module:Easter. And I like Module:Template:On this day, but that's mainly because I wrote it. Anomie ⚔ 00:44, 30 May 2013 (UTC)

Link classifier

I would like to use your link classifier code (User:Anomie/linkclassifier.js and User:Anomie/linkclassifier.css) on Simple English Wikipedia. Would it work there? --Auntof6 (talk) 03:30, 14 May 2013 (UTC)

It should generally, but you'll probably need to change some of the categories and maybe the link for detecting intentional links to disambiguation pages (near the top of the .js file). Anomie ⚔ 12:35, 14 May 2013 (UTC)

Thanks, I got it working by making my own copy there. Let me know if making a copy like that is a concern to you.

Now it doesn't seem to be working for me here on enwiki. I'm not seeing the different-colored links to things like dab pages, redirects, etc. Does your recent change to User:Anomie/linkclassifier.js maybe require that I do something different? --Auntof6 (talk) 01:05, 31 May 2013 (UTC)

As long as attribution is there, making a copy is fine. It's still working fine for me on enwiki; the recent change shouldn't have caused it to stop. Are you getting any JavaScript errors? Anomie ⚔ 12:59, 31 May 2013 (UTC)

On the topic of your link classifier, is there anyway for it to distinguish between a page that has been deleted and one that has never existed? Technical 13 (talk) 12:49, 14 May 2013 (UTC)

I can't think of any besides making a separate query to the API for each page to see if there are any deletion logs. Which is not good enough to actually do. Anomie ⚔ 21:55, 14 May 2013 (UTC)

Talklink

That's really useful, thank you! — Scott • talk 15:14, 1 June 2013 (UTC)

Question about a script

Greetings Anomie. I hope you don't mind me asking but I am having trouble with a script I am trying to make and I was hoping you might be willing to help me. The script is at User:KumiokoCleanStart/SimpleWPTab.js. Basically its a tab that links to Simple Wikipedia. The intention is if the page exists it will be blue and if its red it doesn't exist in Simple yet. I realize this isn't a perfect matchup because some of the titles are different but its easier than trying to search through the interwiki links. Anyway, I can't seem to make it turn red when there isn't a corresponding page. I'm starting to think it might not be possible. Any insight you can provide would be greatly appreciated. Kumioko (talk) 00:55, 24 June 2013 (UTC)

You're running into browser restrictions on cross-site requests, see mw:API:Cross-site requests. In this case, the jsonp method should be sufficient. Also, you should be using json output anyway rather than taking XML and then trying to pretend it is HTML, and if you were to continue using XML you should use jQuery.parseXML to do it properly. Also, a cleaner way to add a link to the sidebar is to use mw.util.addPortletLink. Anomie ⚔ 10:56, 24 June 2013 (UTC)

Thank you very much for the help. I'll take a look at those. I'm not the greatest programmer so it might take me a little time to decipher and fix. Kumioko (talk) 13:12, 24 June 2013 (UTC)

10.111.0.0/16

Hi Anomie,

There have been several recent unblock requests from anon users that did not appear to be blocked. The latest unblock messages say that their XFF address had been blocked by you. Since the addresses are private, unroutable address, I have unblocked the range to mitigate the collateral. If you think I've made a mistake, certainly let me know about it. Cheers —DoRD (talk) 20:57, 24 June 2013 (UTC)

Ahh...now that I have read WT:BOTPOL, I see that the /8 has been blocked. Please see this unblock request to see what I'm looking at. Interestingly enough, CU doesn't show an XFF address for the user. —DoRD (talk) 21:01, 24 June 2013 (UTC)

I'm unblocking the whole range, at least for now. Apparently if the user's ISP's proxy includes an XFF header with the ISP's use of 10.0.0.0/8, the block will pick that up. Ugh. Anomie ⚔ 21:45, 24 June 2013 (UTC)

Yes, the devs recently turned XFF blocking on for enwiki, so if whatever comes through in the XFF header is blocked, the user is effectively blocked. Thanks —DoRD (talk) 00:21, 25 June 2013 (UTC)

Thanks. See User talk:82.132.213.150. That seems to have worked.

Is it routine to checkuser innocent IPs asking to be unblocked? You've got my IP already - what more are you hoping to discover? I'm not sure I will bother making that edit after all. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.132.234.244 (talk) 07:03, 25 June 2013 (UTC)

mw undocumented feature

The Scribunto manual documents mw.language.getContentLanguage, but I accidentally discovered that "language" is not needed. From a debug window:

=mw.language.getContentLanguage():formatNum(123456.78)
123,456.78
=mw.getContentLanguage():formatNum(123456.78)
123,456.78

I mention that in case it is significant (have I missed something?).

By the way, Module:Convert has stalled for a couple of weeks while I try to support non-English wikis. I won't be able to use any of the mw functions for that because input has to be parsed to determine what precision was given (for example, "123.45" has two digits after the decimal mark), and output has to be formatted according to the options in the convert template (for example, by specifying the number of significant figures). Nearly done, I hope! Johnuniq (talk) 05:12, 2 July 2013 (UTC)

It's mentioned at mw:Extension:Scribunto/Lua reference manual#mw.language.getContentLanguage, but not drawn attention to. Anomie ⚔ 11:10, 2 July 2013 (UTC)

Ouch, don't know how I missed that. Thanks. Johnuniq (talk) 00:26, 3 July 2013 (UTC)

I just dumped my new code on bn.wikipedia, and it has a couple of bugs which I thought I should share. One I'll have to investigate later, but the other is because mw.ustring behaves differently from string.sub:

string.sub('abc', 1, 0) → '' (empty string)
mw.ustring.sub('abc', 1, 0) → 'a'

There is a good reason my code is using this feature of Lua, but I'll do it another way. However, you might like to tweak ustring.sub or update its documentation.

Another slight difference I bumped into is that tonumber(z) is nil if z is nil, but mw.language.getContentLanguage():parseFormattedNumber(z) is a runtime error.

In case you're wondering, I am aware that Module:Convert should be entered in Scribunto's version of the "Worst Abuse of the C preprocessor" competition, but Scribunto seems to keep working despite what I pile on. Johnuniq (talk) 12:48, 3 July 2013 (UTC)

The ustring issue sounds like a bug to me, ustring.sub and string.sub should work the same way for something like that. I'll have a look at the other, too; I'm not sure offhand whether the error is appropriate or not. Anomie ⚔ 12:51, 3 July 2013 (UTC)

I've submitted patches gerrit:71816 and gerrit:71820 to fix these issues. BJorsch (WMF) (talk) 16:06, 3 July 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for fixing the above. The second bug I mentioned is due to a problem using mw.ustring.gsub(s, '%d', t) where t is a table that should convert each Bengali digit (bn) in s to an en digit. If t is accessed from another module via require, it works. However, using mw.loadData causes the gsub to fail to find anything. Table t is in a nested table, so that makes it a bit more interesting (I have not tested the simpler case of t just being a table on its own; I'll do that if you don't feel like the pain of wading through the more complex code I'm using).

Testing shows that the table t is correct because displaying the contents of the table shows it is the same regardless of whether require or loadData is used. However, gsub works in one case, and fails in the other. My guess is that something that ustring.gsub does is being rejected by the mw.loadData dataWrapper(), and gsub then silently fails. Perhaps the PHP code writes to a field in the table?

A system to demonstrate the issue is at bn:User:Johnuniq/sandbox (it's at bn.wikipedia because that's where I am currently working, but I think the code would behave the same anywhere). When editing bn:Module:Convert/sandbox you can do the equivalent of the invoke lines as in these examples:

=p.translate('TEST', 'require')
=p.translate('TEST', 'load')
=p.translate('SHOW', 'load')

Johnuniq (talk) 11:05, 4 July 2013 (UTC)

Hmm, that is an issue. I'll try to have a look at it sometime soon. Anomie ⚔ 13:37, 4 July 2013 (UTC)

User:Anomie/Sandbox5

Unauthorized bot running under a user account? Or just a user not paying a whit of attention to what he is doing?
Been feelin' a lot like a bot, lately. I just categorized over 350 redirects that target the Main Page, some of them User pages and subpages. If I got outta hand, I apologize. – Paine Ellsworth ^CLIMAX! 03:26, 10 July 2013 (UTC)

Please try to pay more attention to the pages you're editing, to avoid silly things like tagging random user sandbox pages as "redirects from shortcuts" ;) Anomie ⚔ 03:30, 10 July 2013 (UTC)

Roger, wilco. Joys! – Paine Ellsworth ^CLIMAX! 03:40, 10 July 2013 (UTC)

(talk page stalker) Some years ago, I worked in a software company where "JOYS" was a commonly-occurring constant string in the source code. Why? we wrote software that worked in several languages; when prompted with a yes/no question, users could respond in the affirmative by typing the first letter for any of Ja/Oui/Yes/Si regardless of their own language setting. --Redrose64 (talk) 14:19, 10 July 2013 (UTC)

So effectively, I wrote "Roger, wilco, yes yes yes yes". Did I sound too eager? ;-) – Paine Ellsworth ^CLIMAX! 21:06, 10 July 2013 (UTC)

Thanks!

Thanks for keeping an eye on my talk page :) Hope all is well. Is AnomieBOT's CHUUCloser opt-in thingee malfunctioning? It didn't seem to want to sign for me earlier. If it's a pain to fix, don't worry about it too much, given we are in the twilight hours of renaming. –xeno^talk 21:43, 7 July 2013 (UTC)

Looks like gerrit:5288 changed the format of the log entries, so the bot wasn't finding the renamed-to name to be able to match it up with the CHUU page.

Fixed Anomie ⚔ 02:09, 8 July 2013 (UTC)

Most excellent. –xeno^talk 18:16, 8 July 2013 (UTC)

How much work would it be to have the bot sign for me at WP:CHUS as well? I'd ask Chris G but given that renames won't be done locally after August and you've already got most of the code in place I thought I'd start here. –xeno^talk 03:55, 12 July 2013 (UTC)
I could have a look, the page doesn't look too different. Although by the time it got through WP:BRFA it might already be August ;) Anomie ⚔ 11:33, 12 July 2013 (UTC)
I could approve it for an indefinite trial :) –xeno^talk 12:32, 12 July 2013 (UTC)
BRFA filed There were more differences than I had expected, but nothing too bad for doing just this one thing. Anomie ⚔ 21:03, 12 July 2013 (UTC)
Sweet, thanks. It's really a pain to do a bunch of renames from iPhone otherwise. –xeno^talk 22:38, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

Hm, sorry for making you do that extra coding for naught. Thanks again, –xeno^talk 21:18, 15 July 2013 (UTC)
It's ok, it wasn't that much work. Anomie ⚔ 21:25, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

GAR notification

Calvin and Hobbes, an article that you or your project may be interested in, has been nominated for an individual good article reassessment. If you are interested in the discussion, please participate by adding your comments to the reassessment page. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, the good article status may be removed from the article. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Interlude65 (talk • contribs) 03:29, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

Infobox floorball club

it seems that the TfD decision at Wikipedia:Templates_for_discussion/Log/2012 March 25#Template:Infobox floorball club, to merge and redirect, was never enacted. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 14:09, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

{{sofixit}}. There's only 24 mainspace transclusions, so it shouldn't take you too long. Anomie ⚔ 14:39, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

National colours of Australia

Hi. As you can see from looking at the edit history I just rejigged the sentences in the paragraph to make it read better and the left the content unchanged. Good point it would be good to know who - I'll add it in if I find something. --PinkAechFas (talk) 21:37, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

Invitation to join a discussion

Through this way, I inform there is a discussion about partially disambiguated titles, known as "PDABs". This subguide of WP:D was approved at VPP, in a discussion you participated. Note there was a discussion of PDAB at WT:D the last weeks (everything is explained in the RFC). You are welcome to give ideas about the future of this guideline at WT:D. Tbhotch.^™ Grammatically incorrect? Correct it! See terms and conditions. 05:36, 24 July 2013 (UTC)

Why has your bot blocked me?

It's not clear to me what my "disruptive edits" were? Please explain in enough detail that I know what the problem is. Newjerseyliz (talk) 18:31, 27 July 2013 (UTC)

In my Talk Page contributions, it says you put a block on my page. Coincidentally, at the same time, another user put a { block } tag on my Talk Page. It's not clear to me whether I was ever blocked by you but the edit summary says I was. Newjerseyliz (talk) 19:03, 27 July 2013 (UTC)

Bots do not block users. Anomie (talk · contribs) might block a user on occasion, but only with good reason, and always leaves an explanation. What actually happened is that Nopole64 (talk · contribs) added a {{block}} (which itself was out of order, since that user does not have the power to block), but {{block}} is designed to be substituted, so AnomieBOT (talk · contribs) (which is tasked with tidying up such mistakes) changed the {{block}} to a {{subst:block}}, and that action expanded the template to its underlying code. --Redrose64 (talk) 20:03, 27 July 2013 (UTC)

I appreciate the explanation, thank you very much, Redrose64! Newjerseyliz (talk) 09:23, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

Module pages and tab characters

This is to report a minor issue when saving a module that contains tab characters—the first tab is sometimes changed to four spaces. It is not a problem and doesn't worry me, but I thought I should let you know in case you run out of things to do! The gargantuan Module:Convert/data is generated by running a script on my computer. It reads data from a file, and outputs the Lua script needed for the module. The output uses tab characters to reduce the size of the file. To change the module page, I run my script, copy its output in a text editor (Ctrl-A, Ctrl-C), then do Ctrl-A, Ctrl-V in the module edit page. Over an extended period (months, I think) I have noticed that sometimes the first tab is converted to four spaces. I see that because I occasionally use wget to download the wikitext of the convert pages, so I can remind myself what differences my local files have. I just noticed it again, at bn: where I am currently working: diff (edit 31 July 2013). If you felt like having a look at the Bengali wiki, links to the modules are here, however I have seen the same thing at en.wiki, although not for a while. One complication is that I usually have scripting disabled in my browser, but sometimes it is enabled. I'm pretty sure I have seen the first tab get changed to four spaces with scripting disabled; not sure about enabled. Johnuniq (talk) 03:40, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

I'd expect the opposite, that the first tab would get changed to four spaces when you paste into CodeEditor (which would require JavaScript be enabled). The best thing to do here would be to figure out exactly how to reproduce it and then file a bug about it so it's less likely to be forgotten. Anomie ⚔ 10:22, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

I haven't been able to reproduce it, but you're saying it would happen with scripting enabled, so maybe I did have it enabled on the occasions that it has happened. I might play at test2. Thanks. Johnuniq (talk) 11:05, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Thank you

For helpful comments here. --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 11:06, 12 August 2013 (UTC)

Debian and Coding

Hi, you've made some excellent scripts, may I ask, where did you learn to code?.

Is in your opinion Debian a good operating System? <-- feel free to ping me! --> Original Authority (talk) 18:12, 16 August 2013 (UTC)

My JavaScript is self-taught. I prefer Debian above any other distro I've tried, although for Linux newbies something like Ubuntu might have an easier learning curve (or at least more forums to ask for distro-specific help). Anomie ⚔ 21:01, 16 August 2013 (UTC)

Self taught? you obviously used resources? Original Authority (talk) 22:53, 16 August 2013 (UTC)

Probably. No idea which ones, if they even exist anymore. Anomie ⚔ 22:56, 16 August 2013 (UTC)

Super NES article question.

Hey Anomie. I hope you're enjoying your vacation right now, and I hope you won't get this until you return ^^. I was wondering about your opinion on CaseyPenk's total restructuring of the SNES article. I wasn't sure about it, since it was a featured article and the changes were so drastic. I didn't want to just revert them without a discussion, but it seems like many of the Wiki'ers from the past are gone, and no one has responded to my talk page question.--SexyKick 22:29, 16 August 2013 (UTC)

Just looked. Haven't read it in depth to see if the reorganization of what's left makes sense, although at a glance I'm skeptical that it still flows. I really don't care for having a "hardware" subarticle, that's just begging some deletionist to come along and claim the subtopic doesn't meet WP:N and then we lose it entirely, which would be a shame considering how much of the 16-bit console war was posturing about hardware capabilites. Anomie ⚔ 01:14, 17 August 2013 (UTC)

A kitten for you!

Thank you for your BOT doing good work!

Mad phil84 (talk) 13:34, 22 August 2013 (UTC)

I came here to say the same. Your AnomieBOT just corrected a stupid mistake I made when I accidentally deleted the primary citation for a reference. Thanks for creating this, it's a great service. --MelanieN (talk) 14:54, 22 August 2013 (UTC)

User:Anomie/previewtemplatelastmod.js

Hi, User:Anomie/previewtemplatelastmod.js no longer works in MonoBook skin. Is there any possibility of fixing it? --Redrose64 (talk) 21:16, 29 August 2013 (UTC)

It's working for me, I use Monobook (and FireFox 24.0, currently). Note you have to open the collapsing box to see the template list now. Are you getting any JS errors? Anomie ⚔ 10:32, 30 August 2013 (UTC)

It's working now that I've found out how to avoid forced https. (btw: MonoBook, Firefox 23.0.1) --Redrose64 (talk) 17:33, 30 August 2013 (UTC)

I've used HTTPS Everywhere ever since I passed RfA, and it has always worked fine for me. Error messages would be helpful to try to actually fix whatever the problem is instead of just avoiding it. Anomie ⚔ 19:33, 30 August 2013 (UTC)

I didn't see any error messages. I knew that it wasn't working because the "Pages transcluded onto the current version of this page:" list, after expansion, was displayed exactly the same as it does when previewtemplatelastmod.js is not enabled: alphabetic by namespace & page name, each entry consisting of page name, edit link, prot level. --Redrose64 (talk) 23:02, 30 August 2013 (UTC)

PUF closer in one edit?

Hey Anomie, would it be possible to have the PUF closer try and close all the discussions that it can on a page in one edit? Right now I get quite a few echo notifications every time I delete a file :P If it's possible, that would be great. Thanks, Legoktm (talk) 07:16, 30 August 2013 (UTC)

It does already: it runs once per hour, and closes anything that was deleted more than an hour ago. So unless you take a long time to delete things or you get unlucky and delete some files just before the bot's "hour" and some just after, it should already be one edit.

For example, this morning AnomieBOT closed 4 discussions in one edit on Wikipedia:Possibly unfree files/2013 August 6 and 3 in one edit on Wikipedia:Possibly unfree files/2013 August 7. It would be nice if they'd fix T52393 though. Anomie ⚔ 10:42, 30 August 2013 (UTC)

My bad, you're right. Seems like its a bug in echo since I got a notification for each mention, even though they were in the same edit... Legoktm (talk) 21:11, 30 August 2013 (UTC)

Filed as bugzilla:53607. Legoktm (talk) 22:43, 30 August 2013 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

	The Barnstar of Good Humor
	Awesome!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Automaniac14th (talk) 00:36, 4 September 2013 (UTC)

Albert Coons

I am the author of the above-cited article. Your bot recently inserted a statement that a section of the piece was unreferenced, whereas it does contain several references and always has done so. I do not think the bot label is warranted.

Thanks.Mrwick1 (talk) 17:04, 7 September 2013 (UTC)

@Mrwick1: Comments belong on user talk pages, not user pages.

If you look closely at AnomieBOT's edit, you'll see that all the bot did was add |date=September 2013 to the tags that were added by 70.134.228.107 (talk · contribs) in the previous edit. You'll want to talk to that person about it. Anomie ⚔ 18:03, 7 September 2013 (UTC)

Of timelines and admonishments

True enough, o wise master of my second-favorite bot, and the general thrust of your closing comment is well taken. I must say I found the wording you used a little disproportionate, however. Last I checked, admonishment is the sort of thing that Arbcom does to habitual problem users they're not quite ready to ban, not the routine response of one longterm editor to another after an atypical misstep. My reply to the IP was intended only to be gently ironic, and I'm dismayed that it may have come across as bitey or belittling. I don't believe anyone has ever suggested that about anything I've written on a talk page before, so either my judgment has suddenly gone south and I need to apologize (hard to do now that you've closed the thread) and take a wikibreak or else you're reading into my words a tone and/or an intent that wasn't there. I wish I knew which it was. In either case, you may be assured that I regret letting my perfect façade down and being all too human, if only momentarily. I'll certainly think twice next time. Rivertorch (talk) 04:32, 14 September 2013 (UTC)

I'm sorry if I read into your comment something that wasn't there, and for using the word "admonish" in the sense of its general English definition without considering the specialized definition used on-wiki at ArbCom which was not my intention at all. I've made plenty of ill-considered comments in my time too (and I'm sure I will again, as hard as I try). I do think you came across harsher than you intended there, though.

As for closing the thread, after the second comment there I decided it was unlikely to gather any constructive discussion and I wanted to prevent a pile-on. Anomie ⚔ 12:40, 14 September 2013 (UTC)

I have struck my comment—a procedural no-no but (I hope) a lesser evil than leaving it in place. Thank you for your measured reply. Rivertorch (talk) 05:34, 15 September 2013 (UTC)

The Progressive Barnstar

		The Progressive Barnstar
		I couldn't find a barnstar that would adequately thank those involved in making the template editor user right RFC a reality, so I created this new one. The Progressive Barnstar recognizes those courageous enough to work towards a vision for change at Wikipedia. Anomie, thank you for your insights into the technical feasibility of this proposal. I consider it a success at this point, no matter what the eventual outcome, and I thank you. equazcion ^(talk) 06:28, 18 Sep 2013 (UTC)

Thank you! Should it pass, I may well end up putting together the configuration change to implement it, too. Anomie ⚔ 00:44, 19 September 2013 (UTC)

My pleasure, and that would indeed be awesome of you, if it does pass (I don't want to jinx it :) ) equazcion ^(talk) 01:05, 19 Sep 2013 (UTC)

Template sandbox (gerrit:83389)

It's been a week since gerrit:83389, just so you know. Jackmcbarn (talk) 21:50, 18 September 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for reminding me. Anomie ⚔ 00:40, 19 September 2013 (UTC)

Linkclassifier bug

The links Template:Helpme, Template:R from an incomplete name, and Template:R from full name get the "deletion" class added to them. Why is this? My first thought was it was all template redirects, but Template:db-userreq doesn't get it. Jackmcbarn (talk) 18:55, 28 September 2013 (UTC)

Apparently the job queue is behind in processing this edit, so the API is still returning Category:Templates for deletion for Template-namespace pages using that template. Anomie ⚔ 19:07, 28 September 2013 (UTC)

I take it https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&meta=siteinfo&siprop=statistics is wrong then? (It claims 0 jobs.) Jackmcbarn (talk) 19:34, 28 September 2013 (UTC)

(talk page stalker)Yes. The job queue has been horribly broken for months. - The Bushranger _{One ping only} 19:37, 28 September 2013 (UTC)

Not the same thing, probably. Anomie ⚔ 19:42, 28 September 2013 (UTC)

Yes. Looks like that's already filed as T52635. Anomie ⚔ 19:42, 28 September 2013 (UTC)

PERtable not updating

Hi again. I just noticed that User:AnomieBOT/PERTable hasn't been updated since 16:37 yesterday. Any idea what the matter is? (And also, it looks like I am becoming a repeat customer here - just goes to show how much I miss AnomieBOT on the rare occasions that it goes out of commission. :) — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 09:41, 11 October 2013 (UTC)

Looks like it's started up again now. — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 13:07, 11 October 2013 (UTC)

First there was scheduled maintenance on Tool Labs that took far longer than anticipated (see the mailing list thread starting at http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/labs-l/2013-October/001748.html). Then when the maintenance was over, there were some hiccups that caused some of AnomieBOT's tasks to not automatically restart. Anomie ⚔ 13:23, 11 October 2013 (UTC)

Wow, those are some impressive numbers... thanks for sorting it out. — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 13:38, 11 October 2013 (UTC)

Wow...

I didn't even realize you were still around until I got that thanks from you. How have you been, Anomie? Red Phoenix ^{build the future...}_{remember the past...} 02:50, 7 October 2013 (UTC)

Heh, I was writing a message for you on your talk page when I saw the Echo notification. ;) So I'll just reply here.

I've been good. I pretty much quit working on video game articles a few years ago, after it seemed clear that no one else cared about a handful of editors pushing unreliable sources and OR with a pro-Genesis POV. I hope your edit sticks. As for myself, I took a few wikibreaks, became much more of a WikiGnome, an exciting new job, and generally been much more in the background. As far as VG articles go, all I really do anymore is update the sales figures for Nintendo consoles when they release their quarterly reports and occasionally revert obvious vandalism (this edit is what made me look at the Genesis article, BTW). How've you been?

Once you're finished with Genesis, maybe you should take a look at the SNES article. Personally I think it was gutted back in July, although there were POV edits even before then. Hell, there were POV edits even back when I was still caring about it (i.e. someone would make an edit based on unreliable/misinterpreted sources or SYN, I'd object, and we'd usually end up with something half reliably sourced and half based on poor sources; see talk archives). OTOH, I make no claims to being a particularly great content writer either, either today or 6 years ago (wow, that long?). Anomie ⚔ 03:51, 7 October 2013 (UTC)

Yeah, six years... wow. I retired mid-2008 after Wikipedia caused my grades in college to take a hit... let's just say it's not good when you spend six hours a day working on a Wikipedia article and having those same arguments and waiting for their replies instead of doing your homework. I just came back in May of this year, graduated from college a year ago and now have a job completely irrelevant to my field. Congrats on getting a job with the Foundation, that's pretty awesome. Lately, I've still been very focused on Sega articles when I have time on Wikipedia, and completely gutted and rewrote Sega v. Accolade, Sega CD, Sega 32X, Sega Game Gear, and spent most of my weekend doing that with Sega Genesis... the entire article I pretty much redid in the last 48 hours, so it's not just one edit I'm hoping sticks. I also wrote and self-published a fantasy fiction novel, and I'm writing a second, so that's pretty exciting.

I'm not too sure where I'm going to go next except that I'm pretty sure my edits have all but made the Genesis article FA-worthy, save for sourcing on the Korean version (imagine how hard that is to find, ha ha), so a GA nomination and FA candidacy for that are next. For an FA, I looked at the SNES article, and... yeah, I'm a little concerned, too. As it stands, it definitely needs to be sured up. I'd love to try and expand out of video games some, too, but I'm not really too sure where I'd go from there. Red Phoenix ^{build the future...}_{remember the past...} 04:15, 7 October 2013 (UTC)

@Red Phoenix: Congrats on the GA. I'm disappointed to see that the WP:SYN sales numbers are back in the article, though. That "detailed history" adding North American sales to 20.4 is exactly what I was referring to in this comment, and I still think it's funny we assume every major US source somehow picked up sales figures from some obscure German magazine and supposedly never looked for more up-to-date numbers since. Oh well. Anomie ⚔ 21:55, 11 October 2013 (UTC)

Now, if you think I'm done with this article, you're wrong, Anomie. This is one of the factors already on my hitlist on the pathway to a FA, which I don't think we're too far away from. My list is at Talk:Sega Genesis, and we'll still be working on this article, including opening the name debate one more time (fun!) with the intent that we finally have the article to settle it once and for all, and at least break the 50/50 tie that keeps resulting. Sales figure issues are not a forgotten issue on this, mark my words. Red Phoenix ^{build the future...}_{remember the past...} 22:03, 11 October 2013 (UTC)

BOT

Hello, I need help from you. After making a bot account for test, I have checked it & it worked well using clean_sandbox.py & editarticle.py & clean_sandbox.py on ar.wikipedia.org. Now Im trying to create articles using pagefromfile.py, but I dont know how to use imported data to EXCEL 2007 for do it. look at this:[3], Explanation not clear to me. If you have some time to Shed some light on the subject I will be very Grateful. Thank you alot --عراقي1 (talk) 06:20, 16 October 2013 (UTC)

Sorry, I don't know anything about pywikipedia, and I don't speak/read Arabic. Anomie ⚔ 11:34, 16 October 2013 (UTC)

AnomieBOT question

Could you go to the "NRIS-only pages" section of User talk:Dudemanfellabra and offer a comment? Dudemanfellabra is curious how the bot knows where to find references for edits such as this one; he's not saying that your bot has made a mistake. He's been talking about trying to write a bot on an unrelated task, so perhaps your comment would be able to help him. Thanks! Nyttend (talk) 20:05, 20 October 2013 (UTC)

Done Anomie ⚔ 20:46, 20 October 2013 (UTC)

Thanks a lot for the help! Nyttend (talk) 01:14, 21 October 2013 (UTC)

New REFBot

There is a suggestion on Wikipedia:Bot requests#New REFBot for a new REFBot working as DPL bot and BracketBot do. I beg politely for consideration. Please leave a comment if you wish. Maybe you could work on it like you did it with other projects? That would be fine. Thanks a lot in anticipation. -- Frze (talk · contribs) 10:18, 22 October 2013 (UTC)

Bot counting error?

What in the world happened here? Supposedly the guy has -1 deleted edits (according to the bot: 117 live edits, -1 deleted, so 116 total), so I suspect some sort of error; if it's correct, I'd love to know how one can get negative numbers of edits :-) Nyttend (talk) 02:18, 28 October 2013 (UTC)

The bot doesn't actually have access to the count of deleted edits. The edit count reported in Special:Preferences (which is also retrievable for any user via the API) includes both deleted and non-deleted edits though, so the bot can take that number and subtract the number of non-deleted edits (and also adjust for the dummy edits added by page moves and such, which don't increment the Special:Preferences count) to estimate the number of deleted edits.

In this case, probably what happened is that he made an edit between when the bot fetched his total edit count and when it counted his visible edits. Anomie ⚔ 16:55, 28 October 2013 (UTC)

Thank you - task 71

Many thanks for the great job your bot is doing, creating talk page redirects for template documentation, etc. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 16:27, 7 November 2013 (UTC)

T: template redirects

Hi, you participated in Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2010 December 29#T:, some of which I have relisted at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2013 November_18#T:WPTECH. Please come along and share your thoughts .. ;-) John Vandenberg ^(chat) 15:39, 18 November 2013 (UTC)

wikt:Wiktionary:Grease pit/2013/November#Module:languages

Hi anomie,

If you have the time and inclination, your input would be welcome at wikt:Wiktionary:Grease pit/2013/November#Module:languages, where we are discussing reorganizing our language metadata. (Qgil named you and Ori.livneh as good people to ask "about modules and performance".)

Thanks in advance!
—Ruakh_TALK
22:20, 19 November 2013 (UTC)

It seems like you all have it well in hand there: putting "stable" widely-used languages in one module and the "unstable" less-widely used languages in another (or multiple others), so editing one of the unstable language's modules doesn't add 92% of the pages on the wiki to the job queue, is a great idea. Feel free to ping me if you want code review of a prototype implementation, or if you get stuck on something and need suggestions. Anomie ⚔ 02:30, 20 November 2013 (UTC)

Thanks! I've passed that on. —Ruakh_TALK 21:04, 20 November 2013 (UTC)

watchlist-change-style-selector

Hello Anomie,

I have been trying to figure out why the green bullets for changed entries would not display in my watchlist, and I finally figured out that the "Group changes by page in recent changes and watchlist" setting in my preferences was the cause. I stumbled upon your script and hoped that it would allow the display of bullets on that version of the watchlist, but no, they still won't display unless I change my preferences. Do you know of any way to enable the bullets with the enhanced watchlist? (I'm using Vector.) Thanks! —DoRD (talk) 17:28, 22 November 2013 (UTC)

The problem there is that there isn't a bullet to turn green. You could try targeting table.mw-changeslist-line-watched .mw-collapsible-arrow.mw-collapsible-toggle-collapsed and table.mw-changeslist-line-watched .mw-collapsible-arrow.mw-collapsible-toggle-expanded to turn the arrow green instead; you might want to propose that at MediaWiki talk:Vector.css since there are probably other people with your issue. Anomie ⚔ 21:36, 22 November 2013 (UTC)

You are proudly presented with...

The Einstein Robot Barnstar of Genius

I hereby award this to Anomie, not just for being very clever and for helping me fix Module:Random, but also for the tireless work he does helping people with technical issues around the project, for his outstanding bot work with AnomieBOT and friends, and for his skillful contributions to the MediaWiki software. You are a great benefit to this project - thank you! — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 11:02, 26 November 2013 (UTC)

The Einstein Robot Barnstar? Wow! Thanks! Anomie ⚔ 01:22, 27 November 2013 (UTC)

I thought that you needed a new barnstar, seeing as you have most of the others already. :) — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 03:10, 27 November 2013 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

	The Minor barnstar
	Thanks ever so much for User:AnomieBOT. It's most awesome in its rescuing of orphaned refs! :) — Cirt (talk) 06:22, 20 November 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for the barnstar! Anomie ⚔ 02:57, 21 November 2013 (UTC)

Edittools on commons

Hi Anomie, and thanks for the help at the Pump! Now I'm going to get greedy, so please wave me off if you're not feeling indulgent...I recently tried to add a tool in Commons by creating a custom JavaScript page there and mimicking the code from my page here on en.wp. But I don't have to swim out far to be over my head, and I can't get the tool to appear. Would you have any idea if my approach is valid on Commons? Thanks in advance. Eric ^talk 14:36, 4 December 2013 (UTC)

I don't have any idea if anything similar exists on Commons, or how it might work if it does. Sorry. Anomie ⚔ 18:01, 4 December 2013 (UTC)

No prob, thanks again for your help! Eric ^talk 20:59, 4 December 2013 (UTC)

Re: SNES audio

I told my friend about what you said, then he remembered, and said that while the SNES was capable of producing 16-bit audio, many games downsampled it to 8-bit to save on cartridge space. Thanks for the information! 24.144.170.57 (talk) 19:53, 8 December 2013 (UTC)

File:File-WikiProject Medicine - Dermatology task force - Articles created.svg

Can you add {{esoteric file}} to the code placed by the bot when this file is updated?Sfan00 IMG (talk) 00:11, 9 December 2013 (UTC)

AnomieBOT appears to have stopped editing

Hi Brad - hope you're doing well. Just letting you know that AnomieBOT seems to have stopped editing as of about an hour ago. Any idea what the problem is? — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 13:41, 10 September 2013 (UTC)

It appears that all of Tool Labs is down; there is mention on the mailing list that NFS is having trouble of some sort. Anomie ⚔ 13:52, 10 September 2013 (UTC)

Template sandbox user script

Now that my changes to template sandbox went live here, I threw together a script to use the features. It's at User:Jackmcbarn/advancedtemplatesandbox.js if you have any interest. Jackmcbarn (talk) 03:40, 13 December 2013 (UTC)

I'll try to have a look at it later. Anomie ⚔ 13:43, 13 December 2013 (UTC)

Super Nintendo Entertainment System

This article needs improvement. There have been random changes that may affect the page's Featured Article status. Soon I'll nominate it for FA Review if issues aren't resolved. George Ho (talk) 07:35, 27 November 2013 (UTC)

Why don't you wait until people are done with Sega Genesis and see if they want to help? Even though one of them is responsible for me giving up on the SNES article, by pushing various pro-Sega edits. I've already suggested to ‎Red Phoenix that that would be an idea for his next project.

BTW, I disagree with your concern that the current article's title is "too precise". We have redirects from the various abbreviated titles people tend to use. Anomie ⚔ 13:08, 27 November 2013 (UTC)

Now that Sega Genesis is now the FA, SNES should be reworked. --George Ho (talk) 06:57, 19 December 2013 (UTC)

Let people enjoy the holidays. Anomie ⚔ 11:54, 19 December 2013 (UTC)

Merry Christmas from Cyberpower678

—cyberpower _Online^{Merry Christmas} 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.

—cyberpower _Online^{Merry Christmas} 22:49, 24 December 2013 (UTC)

WikiProject Brands and AnomieBOT

New CAPTCHAs

Templates

Tlx

Discussion at WP Brands – Lists compiled for project banner tagging using AnomieBOT

More info at User talk:AnomieBOT

Sorry for this

Auto-substitution help

Moving forward with auto-tagging for WikiProject Brands

Your counsel sought

Using bot for replacing full stop (.) with comma (,) to separate thousands at the number of employees field of the company infoboxes

Romanian Character Correcting

WP Brands tagging

Thanks again

User:Lgfcd

Scribunto

Template:Infobox television season

More article archival needed

module sandbox

Hey talk page stalkers

Your signature

PERTable and SPERTable

AnomieBOT BRFA Status Updater Not Working?

Proposed bot and Main Page cacheing

ElphiBot

Soccer ball.svg

Restricted-use media list

What links here self-ref

Your user script

Replacing table.concat

Monitoring protected edits

Regarding template userboxbreak

Template:Userboxbreak is broken without my modification.

Talkback: you've got messages!

AnomieBOT is down

Daan Roosegaarde

IFD closer format question

Your input is requested

Stumped trying add functionality to Template:Userboxtop

Removing the tags on section controversy on article Believers Church

Vandal taking advantage of your bot

The Note

News and notes

Scribunto Version

Daemon (computing)

Performance

Flag of Brazil.svg

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Need a little help..

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Help with script

LUA

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10.111.0.0/16

mw undocumented feature

User:Anomie/Sandbox5

Thanks!

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Infobox floorball club

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Thank you

Debian and Coding

Super NES article question.

A kitten for you!

User:Anomie/previewtemplatelastmod.js

PUF closer in one edit?

A barnstar for you!

Albert Coons

Of timelines and admonishments

The Progressive Barnstar

Template sandbox (gerrit:83389)

Linkclassifier bug

PERtable not updating

Wow...

BOT

AnomieBOT question