User talk:BrownHairedGirl/Archive/Archive 069

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Nadia Tass[edit]

Hello BrownHairedGirl. My apologies for inappropriately using the {bare url} maintenance tag on Nadia Tass article (going by these edits). I would usually be very happy to just convert the bare URLs (in the Nadia Tass § Theatrical directing section) myself, but I am actually not sure how to approach these ones. There are about twenty, and they're definitely not (all) dead. Trouble is, they're not really what I would consider refs either, so I guess I just tried to duck the decision-making (to delete or move some to be "External links")! Any advice welcome. My thanks. AukusRuckus (talk) 01:56, 19 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Hi @AukusRuckus
Those are not inline refs, so the {{Bare URL inline}} should not be used. So I have reverted[1] your edit.
Those links should not be in the text like that. The available remedies are:
  1. remove them
  2. convert to <ref>...</ref>
  3. move to external link
I haven't reviewed them to suggest which is most appropriate. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 02:04, 19 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
I went by WP:CS:EMBED, and seem to have misunderstood what is (or is intended to be, at least) an inline ref. To me, that WP:CS page appears to be suggesting such cases do indeed qualify. "Not an inline ref" seems a pretty finely-drawn distinction, if the aim is to alert editors that there are deprecated forms of sourcing/links in the body of an article. I bow to your much greater experience, however.
I am going to convert what you have characterised as "not inline refs" to normal style refs, just for neatness' sake. I have misgivings about doing this, as they seem not quite right, but it will be difficult to recruit any assistance from others, if tagging is not appropriate. Thanks for your reply; much appreciated. AukusRuckus (talk) 02:31, 19 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Sorry, @AukusRuckus, but I think it's quite clear that this form of linking is not allowed.
{{Bare URL inline}} is not a generalised tag to alert editors that there are deprecated forms of sourcing/links. It is much more specific than that.
{{Bare URL inline}} is used by a bunch of bots and tools to identify bare URLs in <ref>...</ref> tags, and they won't touch URLs if they are not in <ref>...</ref> refs. So using the tag in that way just clutters up the cleanup lists.
Much better to convert the inline links to <ref>...</ref> -- provided tht they do actually support the assertion they are linked to. If not. just remove them. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 02:49, 19 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Am a bit lost. Totally and absolutely concur that this form of linking is not allowed on WP: Never for a moment thought otherwise... I think we may be be talking at cross-purposes, as that problem is what I was trying to fix, and what started this. I see your point about the bot problem, and had already conceded that I would convert the links to references and not use the bare url maintenance tag.
By referring to WP:CS:EMBED, I was merely trying to draw attention to the specific guidance on citing - that it includes the link style that appears on Nadia Tass as an example of a method of citation not to be used. The implication (or at least, my inference), being these would qualify for maintenance tags requesting that they are converted, as they are intended as inline refs (so, in effect, "treat them as any other faulty refs"). Not in any way saying the links should remain as is. Anyway, I seem to have got the wrong end of the stick all-round, so, once again, my apologies. Thanks for your patience. AukusRuckus (talk) 03:10, 19 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
No prob, @AukusRuckus. I think that the guidance on {{Bare URL inline}} should be clearer.
Anyway, it's great to see that article being cleaned up. Good work! BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 03:14, 19 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Patricia Huston article[edit]

I've just checked the link in Patricia Huston that you recently placed a "dead link" tag on, and it seems to be working fine. I've left the tag alone for now, to give you a chance to recheck it. IBDB is not a paysite, but the link does carry a secure server (https) designation that may be the problem.-- Saratoga Sam (talk) 14:55, 19 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Hi @Saratoga Sam
The https is not a problem, but sometimes some sites return a bogus 404 error, as happened here. I have filled and archived the ref. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 15:07, 19 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Self-closing tags[edit]

Hey BHG, noticed recent edits where you are adding the slash (/) to self-closing br tags. Please tell me you are not making this unnecessary edit using mass editing tools. Best, UnitedStatesian (talk) 14:35, 19 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@UnitedStatesian: per H:BR, it's not unnecessary. But it is minor, so I do it only as an adjunct to other changes. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 14:39, 19 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for letting me know. Learn something new everyday! UnitedStatesian (talk) 15:06, 19 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
That's the way of the place, @UnitedStatesian. The endless new things is part of what keeps me here. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 15:09, 19 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Greek Life improvements[edit]

Good morning, BrowhHairedGirl. I note your regular and ongoing contributions to articles within the Fraternity and Sorority Project. Your effort to improve them, especially the references you update, are always helpful to our readers. Thank you. Jax MN (talk) 17:25, 19 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

A barnstar for you![edit]

The Copyeditor's Barnstar
Great job! Editor2020 (talk) 23:21, 20 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks, @Editor2020! BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 17:14, 21 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Stalled archive job[edit]

Hi! Just a heads-up, your InternetArchiveBot batch job (#9491) has been stalled at 4018/4999 for most of a week now, and it's sitting there taking up one of the bot's three channels - might want to kill the job and queue up a new one for the remaining 981 pages on that list? Whoop whoop pull up Bitching Betty ⚧️ Averted crashes 22:34, 21 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, @Whoop.
I had assumed that it was still working on it intermittently, but I see that the last page it processed was on the 17th[2]
The next item on the list is List of Freedom of the City recipients (military), which is a monster with 891 refs. So I guess its best to skip that one and restart the remainder. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 22:42, 21 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Category:Schools on the National Register of Historic Places in Ohio has been nominated for deletion[edit]

Category:Schools on the National Register of Historic Places in Ohio has been nominated for deletion. A discussion is taking place to decide whether this proposal complies with the categorization guidelines. If you would like to participate in the discussion, you are invited to add your comments at the category's entry on the categories for discussion page. Thank you. MB 01:47, 22 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Gail Rubin[edit]

I meet Gail Rubin on the beach March 10, 1978 98.24.85.4 (talk) 04:21, 24 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Is Template:LocationParamUsageCheck still needed?[edit]

Is {{LocationParamUsageCheck}} still needed? It is on a report of templates with no transclusions, but I am unable to tell if it should be kept for future troubleshooting use. – Jonesey95 (talk) 03:27, 25 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Arnold van den Bergh[edit]

Hello BrownHairedGirl, would it be possible to clarify what the AWB-assisted Special:Diff/1072394012 edit was designed to accomplish. —Sladen (talk) 21:51, 18 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

?… —Sladen (talk) 13:45, 26 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
@Sladen: sorry for the slow reply. The main purpose was to use the canonical form {{cite news}} rather than the redirect {{cite newspaper}}. Secondarily, there were WP:GENFIXES.
Yes, this is a cosmetic edit, but it is huge help to a few tasks I am doing of cleaning up refs. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 13:50, 26 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Was the adjustment of the foreign-language quotation marks intentional? —Sladen (talk) 18:44, 26 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
@Sladen: that is part of WP:GENFIXES. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 18:47, 26 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Help with an archival link project?[edit]

A while back I made stubs for a few dozen Iowa Supreme Court justices, all sourced to biographies on the Iowa Judiciary website. Now I find that these are all bad links (as with, e.g., Frederic M. Miller), but archived versions of all of these pages exist in the Internet Archive. Do you perchance have a means to run your link-fixing script through these pages and get working archival links for the dead ones? BD2412 T 08:14, 26 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@BD2412: no prob, can do. I use InternetArchiveBot, but if you ain't familiar with that tool, I'd be happy to do them for you.
However, when I tried doing it on Frederic M. Miller, the IAbot did nothing, because the link is an external link. IAbot works only on inline references, i.e. <ref>...</ref>.
If we can use AWB to convert those extern links to inline refs, then I can deploy IAbot. If they are all as stubby as Frederic M. Miller, it's an fairly easy AWB job. If you make me a list of the relevant articles, I'll do the AWB job then deploy IAbot. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 11:10, 26 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
@BD2412 done (there are a small amount of cite webs still dead, you can run IABot on those). All the external links should be repaired though. Rlink2 (talk) 13:58, 26 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
@Rlink2: thanks (and thanks to BHG for willingness to take on the task, to which I did not respond quickly enough). BD2412 T 23:16, 26 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Some baklava for you![edit]

Thank you for updating my user page. Goodtiming8871 (talk) 00:19, 27 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Disambiguation link notification for February 27[edit]

An automated process has detected that when you recently edited Boeing 787 Dreamliner, you added a link pointing to the disambiguation page Bloomberg.

(Opt-out instructions.) --DPL bot (talk) 06:05, 27 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

March editathons[edit]

Women in Red Mar 2022, Vol 8, Issue 3, Nos 214, 217, 222, 223, 224, 225


Online events:


Other ways to participate:

Facebook | Instagram | Pinterest | Twitter

--Megalibrarygirl (talk) 16:37, 27 February 2022 (UTC) via MassMessaging[reply]

Max W. Noah[edit]

I don't know if you are "responsible" for this [3], but aren't the access-dates wrong? Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 19:43, 27 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@Gråbergs Gråa Sång: I am indirectly responsible, in that I invoked InternetArchiveBot to run on that page. But the logic is all provided by IAbot.
I checked the first link in that diff[4] you supplied. The link is to http://www.history.army.mil/books/DAHSUM/1987/ch07.htm, and IAbot added to it |access-date=2014-09-22
I used WikiBlame to search for when that link was added, and it reports that http://www.history.army.mil/books/DAHSUM/1987/ch07.htm was already present in the oldest revision searched. So I looked at that earliest revision (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Max_W._Noah&oldid=626682656) and sure enough, the link is there in that revision dated 22 September 2014.
So, actually IAbot was not wrong. It did some cunning archaeology on the article to find when the link was added, and used that date. Very clever, eh? BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 20:01, 27 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Huh, I see now that the article was actually created in 2014, not about 2018 as I assumed. I stand corrected, and thank you for your time. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 20:09, 27 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
@Gråbergs Gråa Sång: you're welcome. Glad we resolved this. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 20:11, 27 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 27 February 2022[edit]

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 20:19, 27 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

deadlink tag[edit]

Hi! I noted frequently that via AWB you will tag a lot of Singaporean article with deadlink, example here. If I click on the link directly, I am actually able to access it. Perhaps this is due to Singapore government website (www.parliament.gov.sg) blocking automated checks? --Justanothersgwikieditor (talk) 03:03, 23 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Hi @Justanothersgwikieditor, and sorry for a slow reply.
Most websites which don't want to provide data to an automatic tool such as the Perl script I am using respond with HTTP 403 (forbidden). A small minority of sites return HTTP 404 (not found), which is not helpful. In my testing, my script seems to encounter this behaviour on less than 1% of URLs, and it seems that gov.sg is one of those sites.
I was initially worried about this. However, when I thought about it more, I realised that this same glitch would prevent those refs from being filled by tools such as Citation bot, WP:REFILL or WP:REFLINKS. The result is that those refs are going to need manual attention anyway, so the misleading tag does no harm. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 21:11, 27 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
No worries on the slow replies, I can understand that you get many notifications and it takes time to filter as such. Refill 2 actually managed to fill in the citation (not the best but decent) so hence the update here on your talkpage. I leave it to your discretion whether do you want to test more or just ignore the less than 50 false positive cases (which i noticed). Thanks for the script which actually helps a lot on fixing link rot! --Justanothersgwikieditor (talk) 01:17, 28 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

IABot stalled again[edit]

InternetArchiveBot batch job #9550 appears to have stalled on List of 2017 March for Science locations, presumably because the said article has 950 (!!!) references. Might want to skip that article maybe?

Just a heads up, Whoop whoop pull up Bitching Betty ⚧️ Averted crashes 23:16, 28 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the pointer, @Whoop. I killed it, and resumed after that huge page.
It's a pain in the neck that IAbot won't handle this issue more intelligently. That's about 4th such stall I've had in the last fortnight. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 23:24, 28 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
You're very welcome! :-) Is there a more intelligent way to handle this sort of situation, though? 950 refs - and presumably either 950 or close to 950 URLs to check (given that almost all coverage of something this recent is going to be online) - is going to take a huge amount of time no matter how it's sliced. Maybe someone could set up a clone of IABot (let's call it HugePageIABot) and have the original IABot transfer those occasional huge articles from its own queue to HugePageIABot's queue when it comes across them, so that HugePageIABot can slog through them in the background instead of having those hugies clogging IABot's queue? Whoop whoop pull up Bitching Betty ⚧️ Averted crashes 23:34, 28 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
@Whoop whoop pull up: these jobs includes plenty of articles with 200+ refs, which IAbot happily handles, so 950 isn't a huge leap. 9,000 would be a difft issue, but while 950 is high, it's not bonkers high.
My notion of a more intelligent way to handle this sort of situation is simply that the bot should not stall a whole job because it cannot handle one article on the list. It should skip that article and move on to the rest of the list.
There are various ways in which that could be achieved, e.g.
  1. start by counting the number of ref tags in the page. If it exceeds a threshold of say 500, skip the page
  2. start by counting the number of URLs in the page. If it exceeds a threshold of say 400, skip the page
  3. add a time limit for each page, so that when the bot has spent more than nn minutes on a page, it stops checking more URLs and saves what it has learnt so far
Option 3 might be complex, but options 1 or 2 would be trivially easy to implement, and add v little load.
I will file a bug report on Phab. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 10:04, 1 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Dead links[edit]

Confused about these. What you labeled dead link on Maa Annayya, this link is not dead and works fine. Similarly, this link on Rana Daggubati filmography is not dead either. Same with this link on Vishnuvardhana (film). All of these are bare urls but not dead. Maybe they are dead urls in your country? DareshMohan (talk) 01:25, 1 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Hi @DareshMohan
My script tagged URLs are dead only when the HTTP request returned HTTP 404 or HTTP 410, both of which indicate a page that does not exist. Unfortunately, a few sites return 404 in other cases.
Most websites which don't want to provide data to an automatic tool such as the Perl script I am using respond with HTTP 403 (forbidden) or HTTP 451. A small minority of sites return HTTP 404 (not found), which is not helpful. In my testing, my script seems to encounter this behaviour on less than 1% of URLs, and it seems that timesofindia.indiatimes.com is one of those sites.
I was initially worried about this. However, when I thought about it more, I realised that this same glitch would prevent those refs from being filled by tools such as Citation bot, WP:REFILL or WP:REFLINKS. The result is that those refs are going to need manual attention anyway, so the misleading tag does no harm.
If the ref is filled, it won't be touched by my script. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 12:58, 1 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – March 2022[edit]

News and updates for administrators from the past month (February 2022).

Guideline and policy news

Technical news

Arbitration

Miscellaneous

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 01:46, 2 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Nomination for deletion of Template:Month year events in countryname category header[edit]

Template:Month year events in countryname category header has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the entry on the Templates for discussion page. Gonnym (talk) 06:44, 3 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Category:WikiProject Atheism/Participants has been nominated for discussion[edit]

Category:WikiProject Atheism/Participants has been nominated for possible deletion, merging, or renaming. A discussion is taking place to decide whether this proposal complies with the categorization guidelines. If you would like to participate in the discussion, you are invited to add your comments at the category's entry on the categories for discussion page. Thank you. * Pppery * it has begun... 00:07, 6 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Just Read your Bio, So sorry about your education 😂[edit]

I am just so happy to send this message to one of the greatest editor of Wikipedia 😎. Pottereditor (talk) 13:54, 7 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, @Pottereditor. That's very kind of you.
It was a traumatic experience. I was left with no alternative but to spend 4 years at a prestigious place of higher education, learning how to think crictically. I have spent the subsequent decades struggling to regain a better state of being. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 14:02, 7 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Oh, I am really sorry. I just thought it was a joke. But Thank You for replying me. Pottereditor (talk) 14:39, 7 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry, @Pottereditor. It is a joke, and I was just continuing the same silliness.
My fault: irony travels poorly in plain text, so I should have added a smiley . BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 14:43, 7 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I knew it was 😎 Pottereditor (talk) 16:42, 7 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

And Hope you overtake Ser Amantio di Nicolao as number one. Best Wishes. Bye Pottereditor (talk) 16:45, 7 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Speedy deletion nomination of Category:COVID-19 pandemic in Scotland templates[edit]

A tag has been placed on Category:COVID-19 pandemic in Scotland templates indicating that it is currently empty, and is not a disambiguation category, a category redirect, a featured topics category, under discussion at Categories for discussion, or a project category that by its nature may become empty on occasion. If it remains empty for seven days or more, it may be deleted under section C1 of the criteria for speedy deletion.

If you think this page should not be deleted for this reason you may contest the nomination by visiting the page and clicking the button labelled "Contest this speedy deletion". This will give you the opportunity to explain why you believe the page should not be deleted. Please do not remove the speedy deletion tag from the page yourself. UnitedStatesian (talk) 04:23, 8 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

A bowl of strawberries for you![edit]

Category:Articles with bare URLs for citations from July 2021 is empty now, hurray! And thanks. Storchy (talk) 13:49, 21 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Hey @Storchy that's great! And thanks for the strawberries
We both made a big dent in that set, so it was a joint success. We should share the strawberries.
I began working on bare URLs in May 2021, tagging and filling as many as I could, and after 9 months that is the first of the monthly tracking categories to be emptied. It looks like August and October are not too far from emptying. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 14:07, 21 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Really? I assumed you'd already emptied several, at the rate you're going. Must be a fluke: Ireland tend to beat Wales at everything else.
I'll be off to August then, let's smash it. Storchy (talk) 14:17, 21 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
@Storchy: August it is then! BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 14:19, 21 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
@Storchy: between the pair of us, Category:Articles with bare URLs for citations from August 2021 is down from 354 pages yesterday, to 236 as of now.
Well done us! BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 19:10, 22 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
@Storchy: I am done for the day, but our joint effort have got Category:Articles with bare URLs for citations from August 2021 down to 46 pages. Nearly done! BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 20:24, 26 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
I've just done the last fifteen (wide awake with a sprained ankle), so August is now empty too, yay! Thanks. Wondering who did the other 31... Storchy (talk) 21:06, 26 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Very sorry to her bout the sprained ankle, @Storchy. I hope that it heals quickly.
I did those extra 31 myself, when I got second wind later on. Great work by you finishing it off. That's two categories emptied by our joint efforts.
I am now going to focus back on the larger May 2021 set, which is much bigger but has a high overlap with my topic interests.
The May and June categories were populated entirely by me, consisting almost exclusively of UK and Ireland topics.
If it's of any interest to you, I just ran two WP:Petscan searches for Welsh topics with tagged Bare URLs
Hope that helps. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 14:06, 27 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
I'd never heard of Petscan, thanks, that look quite helpful. And my left ankle thanks you for your good wishes! I'll get stuck into May as well then. Storchy (talk) 14:13, 27 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
@Storchy: we started with over 2,700 pages in Category:Articles with bare URLs for citations from May 2021. Now, this edit brought it down below the 2,000 mark.
Still a long way to go. but we are getting there.
BTW, if it is of any help, my script User:BrownHairedGirl/linkrot.js was originally written to add the {{Cleanup bare URLs}} tag, but I have upgraded it and it will now remove the tag if there are no remining bare URLs. I find that it helps save a few keystrokes, as well as providing a sanity check -- because it won't remove the banner if there are any remaining bare URLs. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 13:32, 9 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
We are getting there! Your linkrot script sounds very useful - I'll give it a go today. Storchy (talk) 14:07, 9 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • (talk page watcher) I'm tryiing to fix the ones which crop up on my watch list, and I'm sure I'm not the only editor doing so, so between us we're nibbling away at the to-do list. PamD 20:40, 22 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Partially undid your edit at B61 nuclear bomb[edit]

The ref pointing to http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/world/russia/kosvinsky.htm was converted from cite web to cite news, but globalsecurity.org is not a news site. I assume this is something funky with your scriptKylesenior (talk) 13:35, 9 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@Kylesenior: that's a quirk of the erratic script I use: WP:REFILL.
However, the choice of cite web/cite news makes no difference to the display or to metadata. So while your change is semantically correct, it offers precisely zero benefit to anyone. It would be better to use your time for just about anything else at all, rater than tweaking this. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 13:42, 9 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
I admit I didn't check the difference. Cheers Kylesenior (talk) 13:56, 9 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Really aggro, BrownHairedGirl. Weird. Isthistwisted (talk) 08:12, 12 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

How do you tag {{Bare URL PDF}} with AWB? + another AWB question[edit]

Hi there, I'm a new AWB user and I'm curious to know how you achieve edits like this with AWB. Do you use custom plugins?

Also, since you seem to be an experienced user I was hoping you could point me to some resources that I could use to tackle issues at Category:Pages with citation errors with AWB. There does appear to be some tasks on WP:GENFIXES (DuplicateNamedReferences, DuplicateUnnamedReferences), however when I create a list using that category (with one recursive level), I rarely get suggested edits that actually fix these errors. Am I using AWB wrong or should I be using a custom plugin such as what you use for tagging bare URLs? If you're curious what edits I'm hoping to achieve, these fixes are generally what I'm aiming for (especially with dupe refs). Thanks, Satricious (talk) 16:17, 12 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@Satricious: for some tasks, I use WP:AutoWikiBrowser/Custom Modules, which I write in C#.
But for this task, I just use a regex:
  • Find (?<=<ref[^>]*>)\s*\[?\s*(?<myurl>https?:\/\/[^ \[\]<>\{\}]*\.pdf)\s*\]?\s*(?=</ref>)
  • Replace with ${myurl} {{Bare URL PDF|date=March 2022}}
I have never looked into which (if any) of the issues categorised in Category:Pages with citation errors are covered by WP:GENFIXES, and I haven't experimented with the the scope of GENFIXES in that area.
However, if I did decide to try it, I would first try to write a regex to identify the pages I was interested in, and failing that write a custom module. I think that what you are doing my require a custom module, but I can't be sure because I am not clear exactly which type(s) of dup are involved or how they are categorised.
I have done some analysis of duplicate bare URL refs, and have the outline of a module to merge them, but I have other higher priorities right now.
Hope this helps. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 17:10, 12 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for the detailed reply! I've tried out your regex and it works (don't worry, I'm not stealing this from you, I just wanted to test it out). And I believe you are correct in guessing a custom module might be required for what I'm trying to do (usually complete refs are copied, one gets changed, leaving a named ref with different content).
I shall try to brush up my C# skills and attempt to create my own module. I'd probably approach it by comparing the named refs and keeping the one with the larger content which would probably have more parameters included in it. I wish you the best of luck with your work on dupe bare URLs and all your other priorities. Cheers! Satricious (talk) 18:19, 12 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Glad to have been of help, @Satricious. And no fear of stealing anything: all my work is Creative Commons licensed, so feel free to reuse, adapt etc.
C# is fairly easy for most jobs like this, so don't be put off by any initial barriers. My C# skill levels are low, but I can usually rustle something up. If I can be of any help, just ask. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 18:26, 12 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
That's great to know, I've adapted it with |date={{subst:CURRENTMONTHNAME}} {{subst:CURRENTYEAR}} and will be using it then.
I don't think C# would be an issue for me as it's similar to Java, but it's still reassuring to hear that it's going to be fairly easy to implement :^) Satricious (talk) 18:46, 12 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
@Satricious: see Wikipedia:Substitution. Subst doesn't work inside ref tags. That's why I hard coded the date. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 18:51, 12 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for the heads up. But that's strange, because the correctly substituted month and year ("March 2022") show up in the diff on AWB. I experimented (on WP) in my sandbox and you're right it doesn't substitute normally. In fact, if I add any text between the current month name and the current year (in AWB 'Replace with' field), I see the template with subst in it. However, if I put in precisely this, it works. Perhaps AWB detects this and replaces when preparing the diff itself? But that's still strange. Anyway I'm just letting you know since if it does in fact work for whatever reason, it might save you some manual work. Satricious (talk) 19:11, 12 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks, @Satricious. In my experience there are some situations where it works, but some where it doesn't, and I never got a full handle on all the permutations. That's why my reply to you simplified, and just sad "don't". So if you use it, be sure t0o watch it like a hawk.
Personally, I find it easier to just hard code the date, 'cos that way I can rely on it. But YMMV. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 19:16, 12 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Contact with William Bill Collins[edit]

Good Day. I am in process of trying to scout my father's college track and field teammates. He turns 70 and lives in the Bahamas. I think Mr. Collins may have even stood as best man at my parents wedding. Can you contact me please if you know his whereabouts or how to contact him?

Many thanks. 2600:1700:FB3:423F:4833:61E5:8D2A:5665 (talk) 03:19, 13 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

You are in luck!
I know all the friends and former acquaintances of everyone over 70 everywhere on earth!
Just pay me 1 million euro in used banknotes, and we can proceed. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 03:23, 13 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Nomination for deletion of Template:Usage checker for category header template[edit]

Template:Usage checker for category header template has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the entry on the Templates for discussion page. Gonnym (talk) 07:18, 13 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

"Austin Kyffin-Taylor" listed at Redirects for discussion[edit]

An editor has identified a potential problem with the redirect Austin Kyffin-Taylor and has thus listed it for discussion. This discussion will occur at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2022 March 15#Austin Kyffin-Taylor until a consensus is reached, and anyone, including you, is welcome to contribute to the discussion. Laterthanyouthink (talk) 08:41, 15 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Hi there,

Thank you for highlighting the orphan status of the page Park Lane Stables. The link finder URL is compromised - would you be able to amend this? Currently it links to https://edwardbetts.com/find_link?q=Park_Lane_Stables_Teddington which prompts a security warning.

Thank you

Meowrobotiks (talk) 19:14, 15 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Park Lane Stables orphan status link[edit]

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Hi there,

Thank you for highlighting the orphan status of the page Park Lane Stables. The link finder URL is compromised - would you be able to amend this? Currently it links to https://edwardbetts.com/find_link?q=Park_Lane_Stables_Teddington which prompts a security warning.

Thank you Meowrobotiks (talk) 19:18, 15 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Hi @Meowrobotiks
That link is automatically generated by {{Orphan}}, and I see no way of changing it. Also, I get no security warning. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 19:25, 15 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for getting back to me so quickly. I have added a link to Teddington for Park Lane Stables Teddington#Sport. Would you be able to remove the orphan tag? Meowrobotiks (talk) 19:29, 15 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
@Meowrobotiks: Park Lane Stables Teddington has only 2 links from other articles. I think that per WP:Orphan that is a bit low to justify removal of the {{Orphan}} tag. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 19:35, 15 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Hi again, I have added another link and please see the below from wikipedia, the rules seem to have changed.
It is now recommended to only place the {{Orphan}} tag if the article has zero incoming links from other articles. The template is only shown temporarily, under certain circumstances. Adding this template to any article is not strictly necessary, and many editors prefer to add it only when they believe that the article should be linked from many others.
A single, relevant incoming link is sufficient to remove the tag. Three or more incoming links will help ensure the article is reachable by readers. Editors may also remove the tag from any article if they believe that de-orphaning is unlikely to be successful, or if they have attempted to provide incoming links. Meowrobotiks (talk) 19:46, 15 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
@Meowrobotiks: I still would not remove it. Other editors may differ. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 19:48, 15 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
May you elaborate as to why specifically you would not as it wikipedia guidelines are quite clear. It is now recommended to only place the {{Orphan}} tag if the article has zero incoming links from other articles Meowrobotiks (talk) 19:52, 15 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Sorry, but I have given this enough time. Discussion closed. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 19:53, 15 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Disambiguation link notification for March 16[edit]

An automated process has detected that you recently added links to disambiguation pages.

Orthopraxy
added a link pointing to Ritu
Republicanism in Barbados
added a link pointing to Change

(Opt-out instructions.) --DPL bot (talk) 06:03, 16 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Une étoile pour vous ![edit]

L’étoile de la citation
Thanks for updating articles with barelinks URL. Anas1712 (talk) 16:21, 18 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks, @Anas1712! That is very kind of you. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 16:23, 18 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

FAR for Octopus card[edit]

I have nominated Octopus card for a featured article review here. Please join the discussion on whether this article meets featured article criteria. Articles are typically reviewed for two weeks. If substantial concerns are not addressed during the review period, the article will be moved to the Featured Article Removal Candidates list for a further period, where editors may declare "Keep" or "Delist" the article's featured status. The instructions for the review process are here. (t · c) buidhe 03:32, 19 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Username[edit]

Your username is pretty 💕 AKK700 07:00, 19 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Questions about edits[edit]

In this edit, why are "Cite" and "Reflist" being actively changed to lower case? And why was [[Local government in New Jersey#Unincorporated communities|unincorporated community]] changed to [[Unincorporated area (New Jersey)|unincorporated community]], which just ends up as a redirect back to the original link? Alansohn (talk) 13:35, 21 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@Alansohn: those are quirks of WP:REFLINKS. I find them harmless but pointless, and deeply annoying because they clutter up the diff. However, there is no way of disabling them, and I put up with them because Reflinks is the least-worst tool for the job for filling WP:Bare URLs. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 13:41, 21 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

A barnstar for your efforts[edit]

The Current Events Barnstar
Awarded for efforts in expanding and verifying articles related to the 2021–2022 Russo-Ukrainian crisis and 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. Awarded by Cdjp1 (talk) 7 March 2022 (UTC)
The Death Barnstar
Awarded for efforts in expanding and verifying the article Casualties of the Russo-Ukrainian War. Awarded by Cdjp1 (talk) 7 March 2022 (UTC)
The Working Wikipedian's Barnstar
Awarded for efforts in expanding multiple articles to the 2021–2022 Russo-Ukrainian crisis and 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. Awarded by Cdjp1 (talk) 7 March 2022 (UTC)
Hey, @Cdjp1, thanks! That is v kind of you. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 21:54, 7 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
It gives me some confidence about our coverage that you are one of the editors involved. It's a crappy detail, but I'm glad someone wikipedians trust is on it. BusterD (talk) 13:52, 21 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Hi, @BusterD. Long time no talk -- hope you are well.
Sadly my work on the Russo-Ukrainian War topic has been solely technical. As part of my ongoing focus on WP:Bare URLs, I have been giving the war regular run-throughs with the various ref-polishing tools I use.
My general view of en.wp coverage of topics such as this is that it is usually very problematic. In addition to the dep systemic biases, too few of the editors involved have the depth of expertise and experience to rigorously penetrate the vast propaganda barrages which ruthlessly assault — and often invert — truth from several directions. And that is before we factor in the problem that any topic as controversial as this inevitably draws in some editors who may just be POV-pushers.
But even given those problems, there is huge value in the references which such articles contain. It is often the best part of the articles, and I often use the articles by ignoring the text and just look at the sources. So I reckon that keeping the refs in good shape is a useful contribution to the work. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 14:14, 21 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Request for help with Edits[edit]

Hi @BrownHairedGirl, Hope you are well. I noticed you made some edits to Charlotte Valuer's page and I was wondering if you'd be interested in helping me with a project relating to her. Valuer founded a charity called "Board Appreitnce" which aims to end inequality in the boardroom by giving the next generation of business leaders experience on company boards. I'd written up the page and had ago referencing a draft of the page (it's in my sandbox) but I'm struggling. Do you have the capacity to take a look at it and help me get it up to scratch or point me to where I'm going wrong? m https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:MIAAccount/sandbox&redirect=no Thanks so much MIAAccount (talk) 14:55, 21 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

HI @MIAAccount
I just took a look at it, and I can see that you put a lot of work into this. However I am sorry to say that there are multiple layers of problems with it.
I suggest that you ask for help at the WP:Teahouse, where you will find editors who are better than me at assisting those getting started.
Best wishes BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 03:09, 22 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

April Editathons from Women in Red[edit]

Women in Red Apr 2022, Vol 8, Issue 4, Nos 214, 217, 226, 227, 228


Online events:


Other ways to participate:

Facebook | Instagram | Pinterest | Twitter

--Megalibrarygirl (talk) 22:44, 22 March 2022 (UTC) via MassMessaging[reply]

Category:Current Venezuelan Professional Baseball League team rosters templates has been nominated for renaming[edit]

Category:Current Venezuelan Professional Baseball League team rosters templates has been nominated for renaming. A discussion is taking place to decide whether this proposal complies with the categorization guidelines. If you would like to participate in the discussion, you are invited to add your comments at the category's entry on the categories for discussion page. Thank you. Happy Editing--IAmChaos 01:35, 23 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Disambiguation link notification for March 23[edit]

An automated process has detected that when you recently edited Orthopraxy, you added a link pointing to the disambiguation page Ritu.

(Opt-out instructions.) --DPL bot (talk) 06:05, 23 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Speedy deletion nomination of Category:Current Venezuelan Professional Baseball League team rosters templates[edit]

A tag has been placed on Category:Current Venezuelan Professional Baseball League team rosters templates indicating that it is currently empty, and is not a disambiguation category, a category redirect, a featured topics category, under discussion at Categories for discussion, or a project category that by its nature may become empty on occasion. If it remains empty for seven days or more, it may be deleted under section C1 of the criteria for speedy deletion.

If you think this page should not be deleted for this reason you may contest the nomination by visiting the page and clicking the button labelled "Contest this speedy deletion". This will give you the opportunity to explain why you believe the page should not be deleted. Please do not remove the speedy deletion tag from the page yourself. Gonnym (talk) 11:27, 23 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

McGarry Township[edit]

Thank you for your edits. 66.103.52.68 (talk) 22:11, 25 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

User talk:BrownHairedGirl/Archive/Archive 067#Category:Wikipedia vital articles by topic by class[edit]

Hi, would you mind checking over this? I've tried to clean-up the wikitext so it's more readable. ― Qwerfjkltalk 10:23, 20 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I'll add {{Vital article by topic by class}} if there are no objections, in a few days. ― Qwerfjkltalk 22:26, 25 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

McGarry Ontario[edit]

Your edit was reverted. I believe maliciously. 66.103.52.68 (talk) 06:50, 26 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Category:Wikipedians in Linthicum, Maryland has been nominated for discussion[edit]

Category:Wikipedians in Linthicum, Maryland has been nominated for possible deletion, merging, or renaming. A discussion is taking place to decide whether this proposal complies with the categorization guidelines. If you would like to participate in the discussion, you are invited to add your comments at the category's entry on the categories for discussion page. Thank you. * Pppery * it has begun... 15:35, 27 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 27 March 2022[edit]

  • Eyewitness Wikimedian, Vinnytsia, Ukraine: War diary
* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 20:49, 27 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

A cup of coffee for you![edit]

Hey, I am writing to say again that if you or anyone who know ever wants to write an opinion column for The Signpost then it is welcome. If you want more conversation then I am happy to meet you off wiki by voice or video chat, and you can record and republish the talk if you like. You had more questions, and if you want information then I would like you to have it. Thanks. Bluerasberry (talk) 11:42, 28 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Map references / Grid coordinates[edit]

Hi BHG. Your name often crops up on articles I work on, and I need a bit of help so I thought I'd ask. I am in danger of getting into an edit war over the coordinates for Plaistow, Newham. Can you point me towards any Wikipedia guidelines that cover coordinates and when they should be limited to just two decimal places? I am looking, but without success in respect of this particular sub-topic (so far). Many thanks. LenF54 (talk) 16:47, 26 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

(talk page stalker) @LenF54: Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Dates and numbers#Geographical coordinates? ― Qwerfjkltalk 16:53, 26 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Hi @LenF54
Thanks for seeking guidance rather than getting into an edit war. That helps make Wikipedia a nicer and more productive place for everyone.
Unfortunately, I am not a good person to ask about co-ordinates, because I have had very little involvement with them. But Wikipedia:WikiProject Geographical coordinates looks like a good place to find guidance pages, and possibly ask for input. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 16:56, 26 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Many thanks, BHG. LenF54 (talk) 13:28, 28 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

South African basketball players[edit]

Hey sorry to be a bother but where did you get the information used in your article about South African basketball players 41.246.128.110 (talk) 22:32, 29 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I do not know what you mean by your article about South African basketball players.
I personally have no such article. If by your article you mean some article somewhere on Wikipedia, then per our policy WP:V all the sources should be listed in the references section of the page. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 22:58, 29 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Category:Fort Lauderdale CF has been nominated for renaming[edit]

Category:Fort Lauderdale CF has been nominated for renaming. A discussion is taking place to decide whether this proposal complies with the categorization guidelines. If you would like to participate in the discussion, you are invited to add your comments at the category's entry on the categories for discussion page. Thank you. Joeykai (talk) 00:49, 31 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

A barnstar for you![edit]

The Tireless Contributor Barnstar
Thanks for all your help. Denisarona (talk) 13:00, 31 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you, @Denisarona. That is v kind. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 13:16, 31 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

A barnstar for you![edit]

The Tireless Contributor Barnstar
Another one.. Noticed your tireless efforts in improving Wiki Volten001 ☎ 14:06, 31 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Johnny Owen[edit]

I looked at the FAQ for the record table, but there was no information. What reason do you have for this one article breaking the consistency of professional boxing records? How does it being a featured article exempt it from the lay out of every other boxing record on Wikipedia? Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Dates and numbers: Under formats. The month of each fight is breaking this rule too. There is also no note of his death from the result of his final fight.CaPslOcksBroKEn (talk) 02:37, 2 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@CaPslOcksBroKEn: Why are you asking me about this? BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 02:40, 2 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
I got confused by the revision history, sorry.CaPslOcksBroKEn (talk) 02:41, 2 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Just leave it be, seriously[edit]

At this point you've voiced your concerns enough. Stop responding in the DRV thread. This isn't a debate competition where you need to respond to all criticisms by the other side. Just stop commenting there. You may not see it but your tone and continued responses are encouraging people to address you in an increasingly negative manner. Additionally, DRV is not the proper place to discuss user conduct so I have no clue what you think you'll get by "defending yourself". Honor for honor's sake is useless. Either report the conduct at ANI or be the bigger person and let people complain if they want to. I hope this message doesnt sound dismissive but it's just sad to see you fall repeatedly for petty acts of incitement. The dispute is over, just let it be :) A. C. Santacruz ⁂ Please ping me! 07:30, 2 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I am horrified that so many editors defend the hijacking of Wikipedia's community newsletter for partisan political propaganda. Our core value is NPOV, not providing a platform for soapboxing.
I am appalled that some editors (I could name two off he top of my head) have explicitly rejected the whole principle of NPOV.
I am shocked the after EpicPupper rewrote his editorial as an excellent neutral piece, with a solidly principled reason for doing o Smallbones intends to overrule him and revert to partisan politics. There are multiple layers of deep wrongness there.
And I am disgusted that the use of outright smear tactics against me seems to be acceptable. How on earth can we honestly build an honest encyclopedia when some editors just lie and smear prolifically to try to silence a voice they don't like? This is not the first place on en.wp that I have seen such awful disregard for truth, but it is the worst.
Your advice is well-intentioned, so thanks you. But your advice is tactical .. and for me, there are too many fundamentals at play here for me to play tactics. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 07:54, 2 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Nix family[edit]

@BrownHairedGirl: wondering why you changed the "cite newspaper" into "cite news". Thank you for your time. Lotje (talk) 06:12, 3 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Hi @Lotje.
It is because being able to rely on the canonical form makes it radically easier and more effective to run various ref-cleanup processes. For example, a regex search through the web interface is time-limited, so if I include all the redirects, the more complex regex makes the job time out. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 06:18, 3 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you ever so much. I will keep this in minde. Lotje (talk) 06:20, 3 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
You are welcome, @Lotje.
I must stress that there is nothing wrong with using any of the aliases for a template: they work just fine, and the display is exactly the same as if the canonical name was used.
However, the difference comes in using semi-automated processes to cleanup or improve articles. That's where the canonical form helps, which is why AWB converts many templates to the canonical form as part of WP:GENFIXES.
I would never reproach any editor for using one of the aliases for {{cite news}}. The important thing is adding the ref, and using the cite template. If using one of the redirects suits your workflow, then please use the redirect. But if it is convenient to use the canonical name, that does help us ref-polishers. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 06:37, 3 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Speedy deletion nomination of Category:1988 establishments in Mizoram[edit]

A tag has been placed on Category:1988 establishments in Mizoram indicating that it is currently empty, and is not a disambiguation category, a category redirect, a featured topics category, under discussion at Categories for discussion, or a project category that by its nature may become empty on occasion. If it remains empty for seven days or more, it may be deleted under section C1 of the criteria for speedy deletion.

If you think this page should not be deleted for this reason you may contest the nomination by visiting the page and clicking the button labelled "Contest this speedy deletion". This will give you the opportunity to explain why you believe the page should not be deleted. Please do not remove the speedy deletion tag from the page yourself. Qwerfjkltalk 17:04, 7 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Speedy deletion nomination of Category:El Salvador–Turkey relations[edit]

A tag has been placed on Category:El Salvador–Turkey relations indicating that it is currently empty, and is not a disambiguation category, a category redirect, a featured topics category, under discussion at Categories for discussion, or a project category that by its nature may become empty on occasion. If it remains empty for seven days or more, it may be deleted under section C1 of the criteria for speedy deletion.

If you think this page should not be deleted for this reason you may contest the nomination by visiting the page and clicking the button labelled "Contest this speedy deletion". This will give you the opportunity to explain why you believe the page should not be deleted. Please do not remove the speedy deletion tag from the page yourself. Qwerfjkltalk 17:04, 7 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators' newsletter – April 2022[edit]

News and updates for administrators from the past month (March 2022).

Guideline and policy news

Technical news

  • Access to Special:RevisionDelete has been expanded to include users who have the deletelogentry and deletedhistory rights. This means that those in the Researcher user group and Checkusers who are not administrators can now access Special:RevisionDelete. The users able to view the special page after this change are the 3 users in the Researcher group, as there are currently no checkusers who are not already administrators. (T301928)
  • When viewing deleted revisions or diffs on Special:Undelete a back link to the undelete page for the associated page is now present. (T284114)

Arbitration

Miscellaneous

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:12, 7 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

A barnstar for you![edit]

The Defender of the Wiki Barnstar
For speaking out against the inappropriate article on Ukraine at the Signpost. Thank you. Scorpions13256 (talk) 17:47, 8 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

We are both looking at the same beautiful sky today![edit]

What day to be alive! And still kicking. Or keeping my good boots out of the freakin' mud. Wet spring in Northern Illinois. We had an hour of wet snow last night. Our Huskies were thrilled.

Internet Archive Scholar. This is likely old hat for you, but I just cracked the tome last night. This is the beginning of what Benkler promised us in his address at Wikimania 2006: eventual online access to everything ever written. Because my writing focus still tends towards dead people, having access to searchable 19th and 20th century journals is a boost to finding RS secondaries. This is like walking the closed stacks and discovering books in your narrow interest just because they're filed on the shelf together.

Enjoying the Scholar made me think of you, and how you once said your account had been given access to an Irish newspaper archive, and then at some point the access was removed. I'm guessing newspapers.com doesn't catalog this. Is there some other way we could get you access to this newspaper(s)? I'd love to see you puttering along writing lots of little Irish politician stubs... BusterD (talk) 15:33, 9 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Citation fixes[edit]

In this edit, Citation bot, at your "suggestion" fixed the bare urls. However, the links are actually broken and it didn't recognize that. Now the article has multiple useless links to a generic page. I'm not sure if this can be improved in anyway. These links should probably be marked with {{dead link}}. MB 16:10, 10 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Hi @MB, and thanks for the pointer.
It's a GIGO situation: the website doesn't deliver a proper HTTP 404 error, and its soft 404 is so badly constructed that Citation bot didn't detect it. Probably not much to be done except to trout the website owner, but I will ping Citation bot's maintainer @AManWithNoPlan just for info.
Meanwhile I have tagged[5] those refs as dead. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 16:22, 10 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
There appear to be about 100 articles affected in the same way. Is there an automated way to handle those? MB 16:34, 10 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks, @MB. At a quick glance, it looks like it will be easily fixable with a pair of AWB runs: one for the archived links, one for the others.
I will do it to tomorrow. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 16:39, 10 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
az central seems to block most things, including wayback. archive.today is not AManWithNoPlan (talk) 20:08, 10 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks, @AManWithNoPlan.
@Rlink2 has some cunning tools which can add links to archive.today URLs. I know that Rlink2 is v busy right now but maybe when I have cleaned up mangled filling of the refs, Rlink2 might be able to handle adding |archive-url=archive.today etc. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 00:17, 11 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Step away from the keyboard[edit]

Everything is water under the bridge between you and I. I value you as a wikipedian precisely because several times we disagreed with some passion and earnestness. Today, I'm late to the party, and I'm largely in your camp. For my part, I think your original objection to the editorial was important and your stridency in effecting a change was a worthy effort. Now I urge you to chase up some chai and find some personal peace. Something about the language or subject matter seems to have struck something discordant in you which brought an urgent need to be heard and your position acknowledged. Message received. You owe none of us an explanation for your strong feelings. But please do yourself a favor and go get a change of scenery. Your recent edits give you the appearance of a powerful tractor spinning its wheels in deep mud. And many of us love you. I urge you to step back from your keyboard for a time. BusterD (talk) 08:09, 2 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, @BusterD. I know you mean well, and I thank you for your support on the core issue.
You are right that something changed for me. Three things, actually:
  1. Discussions in which several editors explicitly rejected the whole principle of NPOV. For them, it essentially means upholding liberal democracy and opposing those who they see as bad guys. This is not NPOV; it's a form of ideological supremacism which is the polar opposite of NPOV, and it is evidently much more widespread than its most crass exponents.
    NPOV is NPOV: it can't be sliced or squeezed into an extended version of someone's own worldview, but it seem that hardly anyone in the community has any desire to accept the obvious fact that the ideological supremacists are WP:NOTHERE.
    It was also clear that those NPOV-rejectionists relied to some extent on the sad fact that the principle of NPOV has long been sold out in respect of some topics where the anti-FRINGE brigade have established a long-standing practice of using a whole swathe of articles as vehicles for suppressing one POV rather than upholding NPOV. The poison of that approach seems to to be much more pervasive than I had feared.
  2. Several discussions in which there were multiple instances of editors using outright mendacity as a device to try to suppress views they dislike. I have encountered this before, and it was a central issue in my Arbcom case at the end of 2019 ... but it is very clear that Wikipedia has created a grotesque internal culture in which the concept of "personal attack" has been distorted beyond recognition to mean not just "criticism of the person", but "any criticism even of conduct, no matter how civilly expressed or how well evidenced". That led yet again to the revolting situation of editors who post outright lies getting no reproach, but me being attacked for challenging the falsehoods. I know where that leads, and it is Kafkaesque: I have seen far too many occasions where editors repeatedly lie and lie, but the wrath is directed solely at the person who calls them a liar.
  3. And finally, my discovery late last night that the progress made earlier in the week was illusory: far from having learned from the debacle a week ago, the Signpost is set to double down on its pursuit of political partisanship, even to the extent of overruling EpicPupper's revision towards neutrality.
So yes, I can see why it looks like spinning wheels in deep mud. It seems that I am much more out-of-tune that I had realised with a significant number of the more vocal editors on the drama boards, and I am deeply shocked to find that the situation is so much worse than I had thought. I am in the process of assessing how much stench I can put up with, and how far Wikipedia has diverged from the project I joined 16 years ago. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 15:27, 2 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • I've noticed all the work you do in the barelinks dep't. I don't always agree, but wanted to say thanks. --evrik (talk) 04:54, 12 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

The Scouting Barnstar[edit]

The Scouting Barnstar
For all the work you do that positively affects Scouting-related articles. --evrik (talk) 04:56, 12 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks, @Evrik.
Scouting is not one of my areas of interest, but my bare URLs cleanup covers all topics. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 05:08, 12 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Category:CS1: long volume value has been nominated for deletion[edit]

Category:CS1: long volume value has been nominated for deletion. A discussion is taking place to decide whether this proposal complies with the categorization guidelines. If you would like to participate in the discussion, you are invited to add your comments at the category's entry on the categories for discussion page. Thank you. Hog Farm Talk 17:18, 12 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

"Use dny dates" and "DATES to dmy"[edit]

I noticed that you added a "Use dmy dates" template to a page on my watchlist; your edit didn't change any dates on the page, so I used the "DATES to dmy" tool that appears in the sidebar under "Tools" to convert all dates on the page to DD Month YYYY format. That tool will add a {{Use dmy dates}} template if it doesn't have one, and will update the date on the template if it does; it will also convert all dates to DD Month YYYY format. There's also a "DATES to mdy" item for Month DD, YYYY format. Guy Harris (talk) 05:50, 11 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, Guy. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 05:53, 11 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
BTW, the page for those scripts is Wikipedia:MOSNUMscript (well, it's really a redirect to that page, but maybe the redirect is there in case the page moves); you might have to do something to add them. I'd forgotten about that, but the edit message it produces links "script" to that page, and I'd looked at the edit message for my edit to respond to somebody who asked about the message, and was reminded of it. Guy Harris (talk) 18:30, 12 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Template:Foo-Bar relations if exists[edit]

Hi, this template of yours for bilateral relations categories, Template:Foo-Bar relations if exists. Is this supposed to do something Template:Foo–Bar relations category doesn't? — Preceding unsigned comment added by WikiCleanerMan (talk • contribs) 12 April 2022 at 20:29 (UTC)

@WikiCleanerMan: {{Foo-Bar relations if exists}} is designed to be used with subst, That way it adds the category if it exists, otherwise does nothing.
I use it in AWB jobs. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 20:50, 12 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
I see. Thanks for clarifying. --WikiCleanerMan (talk) 22:26, 12 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

List of people with synesthesia[edit]

I'm afraid that I messed up the formatting on this. Can you please help? Many thanks. Bearian (talk) 14:33, 12 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Hi @Bearian
Tables can be exasperatingly finnicky! I did two edits to clean things up a bit: [6][7]
Has that helped? BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 14:40, 12 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, many thanks! Bearian (talk) 14:19, 13 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

A barnstar for you![edit]

The Technical Barnstar
Thanks for fixing the table that I mixed up! Bearian (talk) 14:20, 13 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
You are v welcome, @Bearian. Glad to help.
And thank you for the barnstar. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 14:44, 13 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Category:User latn has been nominated for discussion[edit]

Category:User latn has been nominated for possible deletion, merging, or renaming. A discussion is taking place to decide whether this proposal complies with the categorization guidelines. If you would like to participate in the discussion, you are invited to add your comments at the category's entry on the categories for discussion page. Thank you. * Pppery * it has begun... 16:39, 13 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Use dmy dates?[edit]

What is with all of these 'Use dmy dates' edits? Are these being applied to European/non-American articles or something? Mainly coming here in regards to Dancing with the Stars (American season 30) (and seemingly all the other American DWTS articles), this shouldn't be getting changed on these articles, especially when most (if not, all) of the citation dates are in the exact opposite format, due to this being related to the American version of the series- [8] Thanks. Magitroopa (talk) 06:15, 13 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Hi @Magitroopa, and thanks for the headsup. I will first do a quick cleanup, then come back to you with an explanation. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 06:46, 13 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Update: @Magitroopa, I found 29 other similar errors, which I have fixed in these 29 edits. I have removed ~30 other false positives from my article list.
What happened is that as you guessed, I have been tagging articles related to Ireland and and/or Great Britain ("IGB") with {{Use dmy dates}}. My main motivation for this that the presence of the template causes the CS1/CS2 templates to render all the dates (publication date, access-date, archive-date, orig-date etc) consistently in the "DD Monthname YYYY" format, rather than in the mishmash of formats in which they have been entered. It's a simple, lightweight method of cleaning up refs.
To do this, I have done a lot of WP:Petscan searches to make the lists. With each lists, I did a lot of checks to avoid including non-IGB topics. That included narrowing the initial scope, and adding exclusions until the category lists came up clean.
One of the lists I made was of topic related to the BBC and ITV and Channel 4. Unfortunately, I missed the categories foreign spin-offs, which are not well grouped.
Thanks again for bring this to my attention so promptly and with such civility. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 09:11, 13 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Hey BHG, a related question to this. Why are categories (like Category:Rome (TV series) episode redirects to lists‎) being tagged? No dates are used here at all. Gonnym (talk) 15:20, 13 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
@Gonnym: 'cos I must have screwed up in which namespaces were included when making one list.
No harm done by that, but tagging categories for date format is nearly always superfluous. So I have set my AWB job to filter out non-mainspace pages.
Thanks for the headsup. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 15:26, 13 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Overall, I'm glad to see these edits. I attempted a similar thing with U.S. articles, but it ran into opposition. I'd suggest reviewing the discussion here to see some potential pitfalls. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 21:04, 13 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for that pointer, @Sdkb.
I hope that I have avoided most of the pitfalls by being cautious in scope. For example, I have not simply taken everything tagged with {{WikiProject Ireland}}. Instead I have taken clumps of categories, and excluded those which are likely to include topics that are not predominantly Irish. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 21:10, 13 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Category:User mul has been nominated for discussion[edit]

Category:User mul has been nominated for possible deletion, merging, or renaming. A discussion is taking place to decide whether this proposal complies with the categorization guidelines. If you would like to participate in the discussion, you are invited to add your comments at the category's entry on the categories for discussion page. Thank you. * Pppery * it has begun... 21:12, 13 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

One question[edit]

Enough of this folly.--BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 10:51, 14 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Hello. The page I wrote on Wikipedia, Does not appear in Google search. What is the reason?! — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2A01:5EC0:2804:BFE0:AF5A:9598:61E2:2715 (talk) 18:49, 13 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I have no idea. And since you don't say what page you are referring to, nobody can know. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 18:53, 13 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]


What difference does it make?


You do not answer. This question is not relevant to you — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2A01:5EC0:2804:BFE0:6743:6B81:3A00:1548 (talk) 05:34, 14 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Category:Winter Olympics by year stubs has been nominated for discussion[edit]

Category:Winter Olympics by year stubs has been nominated for possible deletion, merging, or renaming. A discussion is taking place to decide whether this proposal complies with the categorization guidelines. If you would like to participate in the discussion, you are invited to add your comments at the category's entry on the categories for discussion page. Thank you. –LaundryPizza03 (dc̄) 21:09, 14 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Speedy deletion nomination of Category:Years of the 21st century in the Crown Dependencies[edit]

A tag has been placed on Category:Years of the 21st century in the Crown Dependencies indicating that it is currently empty, and is not a disambiguation category, a category redirect, a featured topics category, under discussion at Categories for discussion, or a project category that by its nature may become empty on occasion. If it remains empty for seven days or more, it may be deleted under section C1 of the criteria for speedy deletion.

If you think this page should not be deleted for this reason you may contest the nomination by visiting the page and clicking the button labelled "Contest this speedy deletion". This will give you the opportunity to explain why you believe the page should not be deleted. Please do not remove the speedy deletion tag from the page yourself. Liz Read! Talk! 04:57, 15 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Is this an error?[edit]

I just noticed this edit and wondered if it’s an error. I’m asking because I’ve seen similar occasionally. The edit summary refers to a date format correction which it isn’t. On my screen at least, I can’t actually see what the change to the page numbering in the reference is. The “change” doesn’t appear to change anything. Does the edit have a purpose or is it an AWB error? Thanks DeCausa (talk) 06:22, 14 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Hi @DeCausa: please look again at the summary: add {{Use dmy dates}}.
The edit summary links to Template:Use dmy dates, which explains the purpose of the template: To promote consistent date formatting.
Note that the edit summary does not claim to be correcting the date format. Instead, it notes what the appropriate date format for that article, so that other tools can implement it. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 11:23, 14 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Sorry I missed that! Thanks. The reason I missed it is that, on my screen, in the diff, for some reason it colour highlighted as changed some page numbers in a citation. But I couldn’t in the highlighted text see any difference in the ‘before’ and ‘after’. DeCausa (talk) 07:17, 15 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Aya Uchiyama date format[edit]

Hi BrownHairedGirl. I'm curious at to why you keep adding {{Use dmy dates}} to Aya Uchiyama. The date format that's been used in the article since it was created has been "mdy" and there's really no MOS:DATETIES issues for articles related to Japanese persons since both formats are commonly used in Japan. My guess is that it's because Ushiyama was born in Belfast, but she's a Japanese national and her parents are both Japanese nationals; my guess is that she was born in Belfast while one or both of her parents were on company assignment or perhaps studying. However, her family seems to have returned to Japan when she was quite young, and all of her education appears to have been in the Japanese school system as far as I can tell. -- Marchjuly (talk) 04:50, 15 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@Marchjuly: She was born in Belfast, so she gets included in the lists which I build.
I am building the lists in various overlapping ways to minimise false positives, so she ends up in multiple lists. If the tag is removed before I run the next batch, it gets added again.
I think that I have almost finished tagging Ireland-related articles, so she shouldn't appear in any further lists. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 10:54, 16 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you for explaining things. — Marchjuly (talk) 12:32, 16 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Charles D'Almaine[edit]

Hi BrownHairedGirl! I see you're doing some of the thankless tasks for a WikiProject. I was wondering if adding dmy to Charles D'Almaine is the correct thing to do. He was born in England, but his entire career, anything which brings him notability, was done in the United States. I'm not sure what protocol is on this, I know there's been some back and forth on Bob Hope, but consensus is he was known as an American so we use the American date system. Would the same apply here? Thanks for you input! All the best, 78.26 (spin me / revolutions) 02:25, 17 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Hi @78.26. Thanks for your mag and your friendly tone.
You are absolutely right about Charles D'Almaine. I have corrected that article to {{Use mdy dates}}.
I have been using a variety of techniques to try to exclude emigrants, but they have not been 100% successful. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 02:33, 17 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Yeah, that makes sense. And per usual 99% of what gets done around here gets ignored, but the one time something doesn't work you're sure to get noticed immediately. Anyway, so here's a big thanks for that other 99.5%. 78.26 (spin me / revolutions) 02:53, 17 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Bless you, @78.26. You get the wiki-politics of this precisely. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 02:59, 17 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Watch list filter?[edit]

Hallo BHG, I've got no complaints about your addition of the DMY dates template to my article creations, a lot of which are UK-based, but, belatedly, I wonder if you know any easy way that I can hide your edits (while this project continues), or your edits with that particular edit summary, from my watch list? They do tend to dominate it and make it less easy to spot other edits in which I might take more of an interest! All the best, PamD 18:35, 16 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Hi @PamD
The best I can do is to mark them as minor, so that you can exclude minor edits from your watchlist. I was about to note that I was doing that already, but checked first ... and found that this afternoon's batch of English local topics had been done without the minor-edit flag set.
Oops! I have now turned that flag back on. Sorry for the inconvenience. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 19:15, 16 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Hmm, I don't usually exclude minor edits because so many newbie editors flag every edit as minor whether it is or not, like this until I asked her not to! But I might try it selectively. Thanks. PamD 19:22, 16 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
PamD: Someone recently added this functionality to the backend but it hasn't been implemented in the interface. I'm not sure where to add requests that it be considered.----Pontificalibus 11:35, 17 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for the pointer, @Pontificalibus.
Am I right in thinking that patch would allow use of the watchlist to exclude edits by tag (e.g. the "AWB" tag), but not to exclude edits by a particular editor? BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 11:40, 17 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Something went wrong[edit]

Hi there. Something went wrong with this edit. I fixed it, but you might want to have a look at what caused it. --Muhandes (talk) 08:17, 18 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Hi @Muhandes, and thanks for fixing it.
If you look more closely at the diff of my edit, you will see that it was in fact a GIGO situation, i.e. "garbage in, garbage out".
AWB encountered this markup <ref>{{|title= Sólo éxitos: año a año, 1959–2002 |url= http://www.mediafire.com/view/x263f6daopkswo8 |edition= 1st |date= September 2005 |publisher= Fundación Autor-SGAE |location= Spain |isbn= 84-8048-639-2|access-date=20 September 2018}}</ref>
The text between the ref tags looks more like a malformed table than a cite template, so AWB's WP:GENFIXES moved it outside the ref tags.
The markup there should have been as follows, with my addition in red: <ref>{{cite book |title= Sólo éxitos: año a año, 1959–2002 |url= http://www.mediafire.com/view/x263f6daopkswo8 |edition= 1st |date= September 2005 |publisher= Fundación Autor-SGAE |location= Spain |isbn= 84-8048-639-2|access-date=20 September 2018}}</ref>
I see that you fixed this is a later edit. Thanks! BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 10:17, 18 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
I see what you mean, an odd one indeed. --Muhandes (talk) 10:25, 18 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Another barnstar for you![edit]

The Music Barnstar
Dear colleague,
Thank you for inserting the {{Use dmy dates}} template in the articles I created for the albums released by Andy Irvine and associated projects. Your helpful assistance is greatly appreciated; thank you so much!
With kind regards;
Patrick. ツ Pdebee.(talk)(become old-fashioned!) 20:04, 18 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Many thanks, @Patrick. That is v kind of you.
It's particularly nice that it was you who wrote the articles on Andy Irvine's work. I love his music, and he is also a very nice human being. I recall a fun evening where and his collaborator on Parallel Lines were musing about doing another album, throwing out various titles "Concentric Circles", "Overlapping Squares" etc. Sadly, the bottom fell out of the album market, so the album never got made.
I have almost finished adding {{Use dmy dates}} to all albums by British and Irish musicians, and am moving on to the musicians themselves. Sorry if that leads to your watchlist getting beaten up ... BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 20:21, 18 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you for your lovely reply, above. Yes, I can imagine Andy (and Dick Gaughan) regaling an audience with such banter, having had the pleasure of seeing him in action on quite a few occasions over the decades. I’ll continue to admire your handy work via my watchlist, and many thanks once again for all your contributions to our encyclopaedia!
With kind regards;
Patrick. ツ Pdebee.(talk)(become old-fashioned!) 20:56, 18 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Category:User siyi-1 has been nominated for discussion[edit]

Category:User siyi-1 has been nominated for possible deletion, merging, or renaming. A discussion is taking place to decide whether this proposal complies with the categorization guidelines. If you would like to participate in the discussion, you are invited to add your comments at the category's entry on the categories for discussion page. Thank you. * Pppery * it has begun... 02:54, 19 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Modern Jazz Quartet[edit]

Hi BhG, you added the DMY dates template there, but they're very much American. Am I correct that you added it because it's in Category:Apple Records artists? (That was a minor part of their career/output but I digress). All the other DMY additions you did that I've noticed on my watchlist were OK. I reverted your edit to the Modern Jazz Quartet page then added an mdy tag. Graham87 03:39, 19 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Hi @Graham87, and thanks for your message.
I guess it probably was Category:Apple Records artists that brought Modern Jazz Quartet into my list, but I am not sure how that cat became part of my selection tree. Grrr -- I spent a lot of time polishing the set of musical groups to tag, using wikidata and various other attributes, so it's annoying that one slipped through. There were thousands of groups, so it's still a v low error rate, but on that set I had hoped for zero errors.
Anyway, thanks again for the fix, and for being so nice about it. Here's some great music to accompany your good works. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 03:52, 19 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks; lovely! An interesting meld; you can never get too much of the Chieftains. I actually ended up with Paddy Moloney's article on my watchlist because of this so I knew vaguely about this project before but I hadn't heard the results previously. I've taken the liberty of fixing up my message above so it makes sense ... and you can have one of my favourite tracks from the Modern Jazz Quartet in exchange, even though I think vibraphonist Milt Jackson would be rightly offended by Youtube's autogenerated summary. Graham87 07:09, 19 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Hi there (Doctor Who)[edit]

I see your a Doctor Who fan how do I set up a Wikipedia for my roles on the show and acting ? Can you help? Richard Price 2A04:4A43:4B7F:D94C:3D05:D1DA:EF7E:37C3 (talk) 07:36, 19 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Richard
I am not a Doctor Who fan. This website is an encyclopedia, which I help to edit. It is not a vehicle for self-promotion.
I cannot verify whether you are actually the Richard Price listed at https://www.imdb.com/name/nm3764470/, but that doesn't matter. Whoever you are, if you want to start a new fancruft website using wiki technologies for Doctor Who, then go to a site called Fandom, at https://www.fandom.com/ There is probably already a sub-site there for fans of Doctor Who, who may or may not welcome your self-promotion; you will have to ask them. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 11:09, 19 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

A short video of Andy Irvine in performance... ;-))[edit]

Dear friend,
I thought you might enjoy this video of Andy performing "Braes of Moneymore", which I filmed—with his permission—so that I could learn to play it. I also added the song’s lyrics at the video’s description page. Hope you’ll enjoy it!
With kind regards;
Patrick. ツ Pdebee.(talk)(become old-fashioned!) 15:43, 21 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Use dmy dates[edit]

My watchlist is full of your edits. Can't a bot do it so I can filter them out (no, filtering out edits marked as minor is no use as that hides a lot of vandalism), and are the edits really necessary? Will you be doing the same with mdy for American articles? DuncanHill (talk) 13:53, 20 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@DuncanHill! Long time no speak. Hope you are well.
No I won't be doing mdy dates. Too big a job, not my area of interest.
Yes, this job could be done with a bot flag, which would have some advantages. However, BAG is deeply dysfunctional in several ways, so I am not going to file a BRFA for this. More hassle than I can cope with.
As to really necessary, I am not sure than any edit to Wikipedia is really necessary. They all try to help make wp a bit better, but the world will go on without any of them.
These templates help in two ways:
  1. as a guide to editors
  2. as a flag for CS1/CS2 citation templates to render all dates in dmy format
The latter feature is in my view a very valuable way of improving refs, and that is what prompted me to start adding {{Use dmy dates}}. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 14:05, 20 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Yeah, my watchlist has similarly been bloated with these edits, even though I only keep track of a few dozen England-related articles. Many of these articles don't need the template at all, because they don't have any dates: articles about places, for example, don't normally mention specific dates in the prose, while their sources don't often include the sort of text where exact publication dates are commonly given. BrownHairedGirl, this really is at most a bot job. – Uanfala (talk) 14:40, 20 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
@Uanfala: even if an article doesn't normally mention specific dates in the prose, the refs should at least have accessdates. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 14:47, 20 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
The refs should have access-dates if they're webpages. Many articles don't have webpages as refs. – Uanfala (talk) 14:55, 20 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
For examples of the above, see Bethesda Urban District, Best Peak, Betley Common, and Bertrab Glacier – these are 4 of the 5 consecutive edits I've just checked. The fifth one, Berw Fault, did have a single instance of a date in the access-date field of a citation, but then your added template didn't result in any change to the visible text, because dmy is already the default setting for the citation templates. – Uanfala (talk) 00:32, 21 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
@Uanfala: the list I am currently working through consists almost entirely of stub articles, including a lot of v poor South Georgia stubs.
See WP:STUB: the whole point of a stub article is that is capable of expansion. I see no point in waiting until after expansion has passed some threshold to add a std tag about the style in which that should be done, let alone in complicating the tagging process by adding some sort of check for the existence of dates.
Also, please note that dmy is not the default setting for citation templates. Without an mdy or dmy tag, the citation templates use the date as written, with no reformatting. In that case, the date is written in dmy format, which is why it is displayed that way. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 01:06, 21 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Ah, thank you for the clarification. Still, the addition of the template doesn't result in a change to the visible output. – Uanfala (talk) 01:07, 21 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
@Uanfala: not yet. But it will help when more refs are added, and since it's a WP:STUB, we hope that they will be. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 01:09, 21 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

BrownHairedGirl, would you mind stopping, please? When people have come to your page sharing their doubts about the need for this task as well as about the way it is being done, it's at least a bit rude of your to ignore the feedback and just plough on. Also, you really should know about WP:MEATBOT. If you're going to undertake a (semi)automatic task that's going to affect thousands of articles, you should go through WP:BRFA first. – Uanfala (talk) 00:48, 21 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@Uanfala: lots of people have come to my talk page a bout this, and all have been supportive. I have also had many thanks notifications. You are the only person to ask me stop, and I don't think that your voice overrides all the others.
See above for why I won't be doing a BRFA. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 00:54, 21 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
So you're not interested in BRFA because you believe the process is "deeply dysfunctional". Care to elaborate? – Uanfala (talk) 00:57, 21 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
@Uanfala: I am too tired to write that up tonight, but I will reply properly in the morning. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 00:59, 21 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

BrownHairedGirl, please stop. You told me you were going to explain alter and you went back to making mass edits. – Uanfala (talk) 01:43, 21 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@Uanfala: as promise, I will explain in the morning. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 01:45, 21 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
So what is the explanation going to be like? You don't want to apply for bot approval because you expect people would point out WP:COSMETIC and you'd get refused?
Whatever the reason, this is disruptive. You know that BRFA isn't an optional step that people who start bot tasks may choose to follow or ignore as they like. – Uanfala (talk) 01:48, 21 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
@Uanfala: No, it's not about WP:COSMETIC.
As promised, I will explain in the morning. Please can you be a patient? BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 01:50, 21 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
I would have been patient if you hadn't kept going again and again. I've brought this up at WP:ANI#BrownHairedGirl and bot-like editing. – Uanfala (talk) 01:57, 21 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
I dunno why you couldn't wait until the morning, rather than starting an ANI drama . BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 02:11, 21 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Thankfully, that ANI drama closed relatively quickly with a clear consensus that there is no problem. Here is a permalink to the ANI discussion as closed.

However, from the stress and hassle of a nothingburger created at my bedtime, I lost a good chunk of my night's sleep, and wasted a lot of time ... all because Uanfala decided to a) try to browbeat me into adopting their own offbeat idea of the purpose of {{Use dmy dates}}, rather than the purpose described on the template's guidance page, and b) to assume that I was acting in bad faith.

That conduct is not WP:CIVIL and it is not collaborative. I do not see why I should have to put up with it. So I am minded to close this discussion with a request to Uanfala to stay off my talk page ... but I will leave it open for a little longer to give @Uanfala an opportunity to make the serious amends needed to avert a cutoff, if they want to do that. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 10:40, 21 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I wouldn't be holding my breath for Marquess of Queensbury rules, BHG; indeed, far from being persuaded by the ANI close, another front has been opened. SN54129 16:51, 21 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Many thanks for the headsup, @SN54129.
As it happens, there are actually two new fronts:
I had spotted the first one thanks to a ping by another editor, and then checked Uanfala's contribs, by which found the other one. I am utterly fed up with so much of my time being wasted by Uanfala's dramas, and after an hour of diff-farming I have just opened an ANI discussion at WP:ANI#Sneaky_forum-shopping_by_Uanafla.
And @Uanfala: your sneaky forumshopping is too much, making it impossible for me to hold any residual assumption that you were acting in good faith. So my offer of 10:40 is withdrawn. Get the hell off my talk page, and do not return. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 17:37, 21 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

A kitten for you![edit]

hi BrownHairedGirl, jus a little thankyou kitty to accompany you while carrying out the necessary (but apparently thankless if the above messages are anything to go by:)) task of adding dmy to articles, keep up the great work!!

Coolabahapple (talk) 05:04, 22 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Bless you, @Coolabahapple! That's very kind, and well-timed.
The last few days have been a bit of a mauling, and it's not over yet. It is too long since I lived with a kitten ... so the pic brings back very happy memories of some wee monsters who I loved to bits.
Long time no speak. I hope that you are keeping well. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 08:55, 22 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Potential bug[edit]

I noticed while looking through some articles that the AWB edits you made here accidentally caused a double "|" to appear, even though it did the same fine later down the edit. Im not sure how AWB works, but i thought I'd let you know this was occuring anyways, as im not sure where else i would report this or whats caused it. Aidan9382 (talk) 10:31, 22 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Hi @Aidan9382, and many thanks for that headsup. This was my edit, so this is the right page to report a glitch.
You are right: this is a bug.
I checked my AWB settings, which consist of about 200 regex replacements to fix unsupported cite parameters. The reason I started this ref-param-cleanup task last year was to fix the unsupported |deadurl= parameter, and my settings file is named "Deadurl" (now on version 62!). So this fix of a |dead-url=no was handled by one of the first regexes in the list.
One stray character in the regex caused the glitch. I have now fixed that regex, and tested a copy of that page in my sandbox, where it did the job properly[9].
Many thanks for cleaning up after my error, and for kindly notifying me so that I could fix my tool. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 11:02, 22 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
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