User talk:Charles01/Archive 28

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Opting in to VisualEditor[edit]

As you may know, VisualEditor ("Edit beta") is currently available on the English Wikipedia only for registered editors who choose to enable it. Since you have made 100 or more edits with VisualEditor this year, I want to make sure that you know that you can enable VisualEditor (if you haven't already done so) by going to your preferences and choosing the item, "MediaWiki:Visualeditor-preference-enable". This will give you the option of using VisualEditor on articles and userpages when you want to, and give you the opportunity to spot changes in the interface and suggest improvements. We value your feedback, whether positive or negative, about using VisualEditor, at Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Feedback. Thank you, Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:29, 11 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

VisualEditor newsletter on 16 October 2013[edit]

VisualEditor is still being updated every Thursday. As usual, what is now running on the English Wikipedia had a test run at Mediawiki during the previous week. If you haven't done so already, you can turn on VisualEditor by going to your preferences and choosing the item, "MediaWiki:Visualeditor-preference-enable".

The reference dialog for all Wikipedias, especially the way it handles citation templates, is being redesigned. Please offer suggestions and opinions at mw:VisualEditor/Design/Reference Dialog. (Use your Wikipedia username/password to login there.) You can also drag and drop references (select the reference, then hover over the selected item until your cursor turns into the drag-and-drop tool). This also works for some templates, images, and other page elements (but not yet for text or floated items). References are now editable when they appear inside a media item's caption (bug 50459).

There were a number of miscellaneous fixes made: Firstly, there was a bug that meant that it was impossible to move the cursor using the keyboard away from a selected node (like a reference or template) once it had been selected (bug 54443). Several improvements have been made to scrollable windows, panels, and menus when they don't fit on the screen or when the selected item moves off-screen. Editing in the "slug" at the start of a page no longer shows up a chess pawn character ("♙") in some circumstances (bug 54791). Another bug meant that links with a final punctuation character in them broke extending them in some circumstances (bug 54332). The "page settings" dialog once again allows you to remove categories (bug 54727). There have been some problems with deployment scripts, including one that resulted in VisualEditor being broken for an hour or two at all Wikipedias (bug 54935). Finally, snowmen characters ("☃") no longer appear near newly added references, templates and other nodes (bug 54712).

Looking ahead: Development work right now is on rich copy-and-paste abilities, quicker addition of citation templates in references, setting media items' options (such as being able to put images on the left), switching into wikitext mode, and simplifying the toolbar. A significant amount of work is being done on other languages during this month. If you speak a language other than English, you can help with translating the documentation.

For other questions or suggestions, or if you encounter problems, please let everyone know by posting problem reports at Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Feedback and other ideas at Wikipedia talk:VisualEditor. Thank you! Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:02, 16 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Disambiguation link notification for November 1[edit]

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Message for you at Commons[edit]

Hi there,

Just to let you know I left a message for you at Wikimedia Commons.

All the best, CarbonCaribou (talk) 16:34, 3 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

November 2013[edit]

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  • = 4-speed manual with synchromesh o upper three ratios<br>floor-mounted gear change lever<

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VisualEditor newsletter for November 2013[edit]

Since the last newsletter, the VisualEditor team has worked on some feature changes, major infrastructure improvements to make the system more stable, dependable and extensible, some minor toolbar improvements, and fixing bugs.

A new form parsing library for language characters in Parsoid caused the corruption of pages containing diacritics for about an hour two weeks ago. Relatively few pages at the English Wikipedia were affected, but this created immediate problems at some other Wikipedias, sometimes affecting several dozen pages. The development teams for Parsoid and VisualEditor apologize for the serious disruption and thank the people who reported this emergency at Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Feedback and on the public IRC channel, #mediawiki-visualeditor.

There have been dozens of changes since the last newsletter. Here are some of the highlights:

  • Accidental deletion of infoboxes and other items: You now need to press the Delete or ← Backspace key twice to delete a template, reference or image. The first time, the item becomes selected, and the second time, it is removed. The need to press the delete key twice should make it more obvious what you are doing and help avoid accidental removals of infoboxes and similar (bug 55336).
  • Switch from VisualEditor to the wikitext editor: A new feature lets you make a direct, one-way editing interface change, which will preserve your changes without needing to save the page and re-open it in the wikitext editor (bug 50687). It is available in a new menu in the action buttons by the Cancel button (where the "Page Settings" button used to be). Note that this new feature is not currently working in Firefox.
  • Categories and Languages are also now directly available in that menu. The category suggestions drop-down was appearing in the wrong place rather than below its input box, which is now fixed. An incompatibility between VisualEditor and the deployed Parsoid service that prevented editing categories and language links was fixed.
  • File:, Help: and Category: namespaces: VisualEditor was enabled for these namespaces the on all wikis (bug 55968), the Portal: and Viquiprojecte: namespaces on the Catalan Wikipedia (bug 56000), and the Portal: and Book: namespaces on the English Wikipedia (bug 56001).
  • Media item resizing: We improved how files are viewed in a few ways. First, inline media items can now be resized in the same way that has been possible with block ones (like thumbnails) before. When resizing a media item, you can see a live preview of how it will look as you drag it (bug 54298). While you are dragging an image to resize it, we now show a label with the current dimensions (bug 54297). Once you have resized it, we fetch a new, higher resolution image for the media item if necessary (bug 55697). Manual setting of media item sizes in their dialog is nearly complete and should be available next week. If you hold down the ⇧ Shift key whilst resizing an image, it will now snap to a 10 pixel grid instead of the normal free-hand sizing. The media item resize label now is centered while resizing regardless of which tool you use to resize it.
  • Undo and redo: A number of improvements were made to the transactions system which make undoing and redoing more reliable during real-time collaboration (bug 53224).
  • Save dialogue: The save page was re-written to use the same code as all other dialogs (bug 48566), and in the process fixed a number of issues. The save dialog is re-accessible if it loses focus (bug 50722), or if you review a null edit (bug 53313); its checkboxes for minor edit, watch the page, and flagged revisions options now layout much more cleanly (bug 52175), and the tab order of the buttons is now closer to what users will expect (bug 51918). There was a bug in the save dialog that caused it to crash if there was an error in loading the page from Parsoid, which is now fixed.
  • Links to other articles or pages sometimes sent people to invalid pages. VisualEditor now keeps track of the context in which you loaded the page, which lets us fix up links in document to point to the correct place regardless of what entry point you launched the editor from—so the content of pages loaded through /wiki/Foobar?veaction=edit and /w/index.php?title=Foobar&veaction=edit both now have text links that work if triggered (bug 48915).
  • Toolbar links: A bug that caused the toolbar's menus to get shorter or even blank when scrolled down the page in Firefox is now fixed (bug 55343).
  • Numbered external links: VisualEditor now supports Parsoid's changed representation of numbered external links (bug 53505).
  • Removed empty templates: We also fixed an issue that meant that completely empty templates became impossible to interact with inside VisualEditor, as they didn't show up (bug 55810).
  • Mathematics formulae: If you would like to try the experimental LaTeX mathematics tool in VisualEditor, you will need to opt-in to Beta Features. This is currently available on Meta-wiki, Wikimedia Commons, and Mediawiki.org. It will be available on all other Wikimedia sites on 21 November.
  • Browser testing support: If you are interested in technical details, the browser tests were expanded to cover some basic cursor operations, which uncovered an issue in our testing framework that doesn't work with cursoring in Firefox; the Chrome tests continue to fail due to a bug with the welcome message for that part of the testing framework.
  • Load time: VisualEditor now uses content language when fetching Wikipedia:TemplateData information, so reducing bandwidth use, and users on multi-language or multi-script wikis now get TemplateData hinting for templates as they would expect (bug 50888).
  • Reuse of VisualEditor: Work on spinning out the user experience (UX) framework from VisualEditor into oojs-ui, which lets other teams at Wikimedia (like Flow) and gadget authors re-use VisualEditor UX components, is now complete and is being moved to a shared code repository.
  • Support for private wikis: If you maintain a private wiki at home or at work, VisualEditor now supports editing of private wikis, by forwarding the Cookie: HTTP header to Parsoid ($wgVisualEditorParsoidForwardCookies set to true) (bug 44483). (Most private wikis will also need to install Parsoid and node.js, as VisualEditor requires them.)

Looking ahead:

  • VisualEditor will be released to some of the smaller Wikipedias on 02 December 2013. If you are active at one or more smaller Wikipedias where VisualEditor is not yet generally available, please see the list at VisualEditor/Rollouts.
  • Public office hours on IRC to discuss VisualEditor with Product Manager James Forrester will be held on Monday, 2 December, at 1900 UTC and on Tuesday, 3 December, at 0100 UTC. Bring your questions. Logs will be posted on Meta after each office hour completes.
  • In terms of feature improvements, one of the major infrastructure projects affects how inserting characters works, both using your computer's built-in Unicode input systems and through a planned character inserter tool for VisualEditor. The forthcoming rich copying and pasting feature was extended and greater testing is currently being done. Work continues to support the improved reference dialog to quickly add citations based on local templates.

If you have questions or suggestions for future improvements, or if you encounter problems, please let everyone know by posting a note at Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Feedback. Thank you! Whatamidoing (WMF) 22:29, 20 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Ford Taunus P1 (or Project 1): codenames do not exist[edit]

Hi Charles01! You have created the article Ford Taunus P1 that bases on German Wikipedia entry. At this time, the German Wikipedia entry included the codenames 'P1' or 'Project 1', so the English Wikipedia entry is containing them now, too. In German Wikipedia a discussion has started if 'P1' or 'Project 1' are correct codenames, check out here, here and here.

It's very likely that these codenames are no official codenames. On 5 August 2010 a user has added the codenames 'P1' or 'Projekt 1' without citing any sources. Unfortunately a lot of websites have adopted these codenames so that they appear to be established, just do Google queries for:

  • "ford 12m" p1
  • "ford taunus" p1
  • "ford 12m" "projekt 1"
  • "ford taunus" "projekt 1"

Now do the same Google queries by excluding results after 5 August 2010 (the date the codenames have become added to German Wikipedia). Surprisingly you will find almost no results! The only useful result you will find is this article by motor-klassik.de of 19 February 2007 (mentioning 'P1'). But considering this is the only result, it is probably containing a mistake done by the author. German car literature also doesn't know the codenames 'P1' or 'Projekt 1'.

In conclusion I can say that these codenames have very likely become invented by a German Wikipedia user on 5 August 2010. Afterwards these codenames have spread on other websites because they trusted Wikipedia so much that they didn't check Wikipedia articles for accuracy. (Unfortunately this is a phenomena you can see increasingly often in Germany because Wikipedia has gained a very high reputation there. As you can see, not always with good reason ...)

So I would like to ask you if you could move the site Ford Taunus P1 to another page name, delete the redirect page Ford P1 and remove the codenames 'P1' and 'Project 1' out of this article and out of other articles, in which these codenames are mentioned? Regards from Germany, --217.227.69.178 (talk) 01:20, 22 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Interesting
The Ford Taunus was not officially sold in Britain, and few made it to North America, so only a few people with (1) interest in cars and (2) knowledge of west European car market are interested in this in English wikipedia. From a Wikipedia viewpoint, it makes sense to follow the lead of German language wikipedia.
There are MANY cars that have different names in retrospect from the names they had at the time. The Opel Kadett B (late 1960s) was sold in North America in large numbers badged simply as The Opel. People who read English who remember the car at all are mostly in North America and will have read of the car - or known the car - simply as Opel. But it would be confusing to rename the article for the Kadett B as Opel. Many in Germany remember the Opel Rekord D as the Opel Rekord II because Opel avoided the letter D in case people expected all the cars to have diesel engines. You have Audis from the early 1960s which were known simply as Audi but retrospectively we have learned to call them Audi 75 or Audi F103. If you are older you will remember DKWs from the 1930s - some of the top selling small cars in Germany - that came with a wide range of names, and only became F1, F2, F3 etc./usw. in retrospect. I can give you many examples of similar things with British cars and French cars, but I think you are interested in Germany. You could start with Mercedes Benz where (again) works numbers are used in retrospect (and sometimes inconsistently) that were seldom heard outside the factory (and the manufacturer's suppliers, and the dealers, and those of us who spoke with them, and ... and...) when the car was being produced.
BUT it is a bigger issue than simply the name of the Ford Taunus. Cars acquire names in retrospect that differentiate themselves from earlier and later cars because in retrospect a long line of history becomes available that was not in evidence for Zeitgenossen. The designations P1, P2, P3 are NOT invented by Wikipedia: they are created by the manufacturer, Ford. Maybe more people find out about them from wikipedia, because people learn more about the Ford Taunus from wikipedia than they ever knew before. That's good, surely.
But back to my initial point, if I would discuss the matter in German Wikipedia I would be a Befürworter for the use of P1, P2, P3 usw unless someone had another idea that was clearly (1) clearer, (2) less ambiguous and (3) more widely agreed. Here I discuss the matter in Enlish wikipedia, and we should not pre-empt changes in the language where FAR more people know what a Ford Taunus is than they do in the Anglosphere (ie where we mostly speak as a mother tongue English)
Regards Charles01 (talk) 06:59, 22 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Talkback about Ford Taunus[edit]

Hello, Charles01. You have new messages at SamBlob's talk page.
Message added 07:56, 22 November 2013 (UTC). You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{Talkback}} or {{Tb}} template.[reply]

December 2013[edit]

Hello, I'm BracketBot. I have automatically detected that your edit to James Orr MacAndrew may have broken the syntax by modifying 1 "()"s. If you have, don't worry: just edit the page again to fix it. If I misunderstood what happened, or if you have any questions, you can leave a message on my operator's talk page.

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  • [[Royal Flying Corps|Royal Flying Corps (RFC)]] in 1917 and was severely wounded in France in 1918 (by which time the RFC had morphed into the [[Royal Air Force|RAF]].<ref name=WhosWho1938/>

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Hi Charles01. Would you care to give an opinion on the value or otherwise of this latest edit? Thanks, Eddaido (talk) 00:08, 4 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Well, both captions answer the question "What is it?" which seems to me the most important thing about a caption except, perhaps, where the answer is self evident even for readers who know nothing of the subject.
(I do believe quite strongly that where you write something you should have a reader in mind, and where you write something for wikipedia the reader you have in mind should be intelligent and interested but deeply lacking in relevant background knowledge. The way I, as a reader, might approach an entry on a Japanese railway station (I have never been to Japan) or a medieval bishop.)
The earlier caption also makes a start on the more subtle question "Why has someone put this image here?" That sometimes needs answering, especially (at least in my case) where I'm not entirely sure that adding an image in the first place was a good judgement, and I want to invite others to form a view on that matter.
I suppose the earlier caption also begins to answer the question "What else does this picture tell me?" and that may or may not be important, depending on the context and the importance of the message. In this particular case, if I try as best I can to discount the extent to which it may be part of this desperately depressing mutual hate campaign involving Sam and yourself, I do not have much preference either way, though to the extent that it's a matter of style, I can see that your style and his are very different. Thank God Wikipedia is not all written in a single style: that way lies terminal boredom.
I have no great appetite for "Wike-rules" in these cases, and I am sure that the great Jimmy himself would tell you that rules should be applied where they improve the entry, and cheerfully ignored or defied where they do not. (I would probably attempt to be more rule-based if my German or Dutch were better and I was contributing more on German, Dutch or even French wikipedia, but among the anglophones there is a cultural tradition of trusting to one another's judgement in matters of writing style which I like, provided it doesn't lead to total anarchy.)
To the extent that I have a passionate view, I passionately wish that you and Sam would devote your obvious (his too) talents, energies, and enthusiasm to something more constructive and uplifting for the rest of us than passionately hating each other in public.
Regards Charles01 (talk) 11:03, 4 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Good morning Charles,
Any comments on my efforts there earlier this morning? All the best! — | Gareth Griffith-Jones |The WelshBuzzard| — 11:07, 4 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Good morning Gareth. 1. I am not a literary critic, 2. If I were a literary critic, I'm not sure I'd apply myself to criticism of wiki-photo-captions and 3. I have faith in YOUR judgement, and HIS and HIS. Also it looks fine to me and a reasonable compromise in the context of the different approaches of the previous two contributors to the caption. And they're quite good pix, too (tho I'm not sure about the copyright stuff lurking on the cobbles....but presumably it helps make a necessary message hard to miss)
And yet and yet, if I were being hyper-critical I think I would avoid "over-domesticated". Either spell it out despite making the caption longer as you do it or else don't go there. Why so? If I had read the entire entry, I'd probably see the point of the phrase, but I haven't, at least not recently, though I think in this case I can probably see the point, based on my general knowledge (as a car enthusiast, that is). And lots of people simply like to go to an entry and look quickly at the pictures while the coffee cools down a bit (which I guess is an argument for putting a bit more information in that captions. Sometimes.). Also I've traveled a bit. I can see the phrase working just fine in England or Australia, probably also in New Zealand (where I've never been) and Wales (where most of the folks I meet seem to be English). But I remember my former colleagues in Illinois - the ones who insisted on calling me "Chuck" and laughed mercilessly when being driven by me in Australia and I told them I just loved "hooting my hooter". (They were too chicken to take a turn with the driving themselves because in Australia they drive on the "wrong" side of the road.) I'm not sure how those guys would have handled the concept of "over-domesticated" though they had plenty of rich and vivid syntax of their own, some of which I find I have adopted. Then I think of German and Dutch speakers with whom I've worked, proud of their English, and you'd be ten minutes into the conversation before remembering that English is not their mother tongue. And yet, those guys might have trouble with the concept of "over-domesticated". But this is a very long para concerning what seems to me a vanishingly trivial thought.
Best wishes Charles01 (talk) 11:39, 4 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Excellent, detailed response — thank you! I am only an old man, who loves MGs and is trying to give a helping line or two. Cheers! — | Gareth Griffith-Jones |The WelshBuzzard| — 19:13, 4 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Hmmmm. Tks. Which if you're really an old man you'll maybe recognise as being the way we used to sign off on the telex, when every character counted. How constraining it all felt ten years later. And now (from what I hear on Radio 4) message restriction is right back in vogue again. My wife even does something called texting, but I'm afraid I resist mobile telephones: I don't trust the "providers" to invoice me honestly or even comprehensibly, after a bad experience with one of them back around 1999. And if I want to telephone someone I want to do it - preferably at a time of my own choosing - sitting at a table or desk from which I know how to reach a pen. Yikes, I sound about 105 to myself. well, you started the "old man" thing. Best wishes. Charles01 (talk) 17:44, 6 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Would appear to be amicably resolved ..? — | Gareth Griffith-Jones |The WelshBuzzard| — 10:51, 6 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Yup, I hope.
Thought this
Although this MG is showing a Dutch number-plate — it is, like mine, a RHD — and, apart from the ghastly, door-mounted overtaking mirror, it is exactly like my 1970 MG MGB GT
would amuse you.
Cheers! — | Gareth Griffith-Jones |The WelshBuzzard| — 11:57, 6 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Post script ... purchased in 1970 ... and still sailing through every annual MOT test and running well.
I like the angle of the picture, too, of that MGB GT. It's a stylish little thing. I think I adhere to the school that says the big wheels and fairground bumpers that they put on in the 70s rather ruined the look of it. That Dutch guy takes very good car picture, I think, or at least he takes many of his pictures more or less the way I'd like to be able to take them. I'm afraid I spent a lot of my life sitting on the "wrong" side of the car. Six months after buying my first ever new car - a Passat (sensible car: I'd just qualified as an accountant) - in Cambridge I relocated to somewhere near Amsterdam, making some ugly discoveries about "Value Added Tax" in the process. And it was only about five years ago that we finally sold our 20 year old lhd Polo, back here in England, by which time he was on his fourth license plate (you get a new one every time you move countries or even, in the case of Germany (or Switzerland and, I suspect, back then also France) towns. Best wishes Charles01 (talk) 17:44, 6 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Just a line to thank you for the three replies this evening. As always, you provide entertaining reading. With best wishes, — | Gareth Griffith-Jones |The WelshBuzzard| — 19:29, 6 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Disambiguation link notification for December 6[edit]

Hi. Thank you for your recent edits. Wikipedia appreciates your help. We noticed though that when you edited Paul-Marie Pons, you added links pointing to the disambiguation pages Hotchkiss and Louis Renault (check to confirm | fix with Dab solver). Such links are almost always unintended, since a disambiguation page is merely a list of "Did you mean..." article titles. Read the FAQ • Join us at the DPL WikiProject.

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CIH[edit]

Skåne
Sweden

Finally there is an article here: Opel Cam-in-head engine. I haven't finished yet but am going to sleep, I hope you have content and I know that you have at least one excellent source waiting. Cheers, now let's go fix all those links to the German entry...  Mr.choppers | ✎  06:36, 8 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Seriously thank you. That fills a gap that has cried out to be filled for as long as I can remember (probably much longer: it's earlyish here at least for a Sunday). For what it's worth, I like what you've done here, and have no immediate thoughts of anything to add. But no doubt, in the way one does, I'll come back to it over the years and maybe think of things to "improve": maybe not. Savage change of subject: in Britain a switch from blue to red could be taken to imply a swing from the political right to the political left. I suspect you may be too thoughtful to be mindlessly either, but the change nevertheless caught my eye. Parent-taxi duty for one of the kids beckons in ten minutes. Regards. Charles01 (talk) 08:20, 8 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Cheers, I have observed you tangentially wrestling with the absence of this article over the years so I figured you'd like to know. As for blue/red, in Sweden and most of the world red means left, but here in the US they have for some reason decided on the opposite. Go figure. I have always been pretty far on the left (inasmuch as one can be so easily categorized, I hope I have more depth than that) but in this case it simply symbolizes my accentuating my Scanian over my Swedish heritage. Cheers,  Mr.choppers | ✎  19:15, 8 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Disambiguation link notification for December 13[edit]

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Thumbnails[edit]

I have recently added short galleries to some articles like here. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? Regards, Eddaido (talk) 02:16, 16 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Well, I like it. People all see things in different ways - it's less about how the light hits your retina and more about what the brain does with the resulting image, I am told, than we intuitively understand. So if you try for a consensus on almost anything involving almost any pictures .... probably not worth trying too hard. Be that as it may, for me, some of the pictures wiki-available are too fussy or for other reasons unsuitable for being put on display in a very small "thumbnail" format. The scale of the small picture (and even smaller, I guess, on a telephone screen) is simply too different from what the photographer saw before he even got out his camera, or subsequently through his camera lens (or on his camera screen - though here maybe less so). BUT - and again this a is a personal view but not necessarily a general one - the pictures that look best when info box size are probably also the ones that look best when gallery-thumbnail size. If, however, a reader is then moved to click on the image and blow it up to full screen resolution, some of the ones which looked fantastic when they were info-box size can begin to look a tad blurry.
So you won't get any "rules for all times" from me, but where you use the necessary levels of judgement in what you select and what you do with it - and I think you generally do, as do many of us - I think it a good thing. Which - roughly speaking - goes for all (well, most of) our contributions to wikipedia, be it pictures, text or datatables. Each time one finds a good source (and often, alas, even when one doesn't) one finds huge wads of missing information that need to be added cogently, succinctly, selectively, clearly ... all the usual stuff. Not sure why pictures of cars should be different from anything else in this respect. Best wishes Charles01 (talk) 06:48, 16 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

VisualEditor newsletter • 19 December 2013[edit]

Since the last newsletter, the VisualEditor team has worked on some toolbar improvements, fixing bugs, and improving support for Indic languages as well as other languages with complex characters. The current focus is on improving the reference dialog and expanding the new character inserter tool.

There have been dozens of changes since the last newsletter. Here are some of the highlights:

  • Rich copying and pasting is now available. If you copy text from another website, then character formatting and some other HTML attributes are preserved. This means, for example, that if you copy a pre-formatted suggested citation from a source like this, then VisualEditor will preserve the formatting of the title in the citation. Keep in mind that copying the formatting may include formatting that you don't want (like section headings). If you want to paste plain, unformatted text onto a page, then use Control+⇧ Shift+V or ⌘ Command+⇧ Shift+V (Mac).
  • Auto-numbered external links like [1] can now be edited just like any other link. However, they cannot be created in VisualEditor easily.
  • Several changes to the toolbar and dialogs have been made, and more are on the way. The toolbar has been simplified with a new drop-down text styles menu and an "insert" menu. Your feedback on the toolbar is wanted here. The transclusion/template dialog has been simplified. If you have enabled mathematical formula editing, then the menu item is now called the formula editor instead of LaTeX.
  • There is a new character inserter, which you can find in the new "insert" menu, with a capital Omega ("Ω"). It's a very basic set of characters. Your feedback on the character inserter is wanted here.
  • Saving the page should seem faster by several seconds now.
  • It is now possible to access VisualEditor by manually editing the URL, even if you are not logged in or have not opted in to VisualEditor normally. To do so, append ?veaction=edit to the end of the page name. For example, change https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random?veaction=edit to open a random page in VisualEditor. This is intended to support bug testing across multiple browsers, without requiring editors to login repeatedly.

Looking ahead: The transclusion dialog will see further changes in the coming weeks, with a simple mode for single templates and an advanced mode for more complex transclusions. The new character formatting menu on the toolbar will get an arrow to show that it is a drop-down menu. The reference dialog will be improved, and the Reference item will become a button in the main toolbar, rather than an item in the Insert menu.

If you have questions or suggestions for future improvements, or if you encounter problems, please let everyone know by posting a note at Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Feedback. Thank you! Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:49, 19 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Evelyn Beatrice Hall[edit]

I don't disagree with your edit, but you might like to add your thoughts to the article talk page discussion, where the 1956 date and other possible death dates have been considered before. Ghmyrtle (talk) 18:46, 26 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Noted. Thanks. As you presumably inferred, I had not spotted the deliberations on the talk page.
What I thought when I entered the year of death was that it was the right combination of names and dates and so, on the overwhelming balance of possibilities, the "right" EBH. I think I still think that. Evelyn is quite an unusual name in the twentieth century, and if you go back as far as the 1860s it's a very unusual name indeed, especially when given in conjunction with a middle name. I suppose if someone wanted to spend the time and money to order a death certificate, that might (though also it might not) move >98.5% confidence to >99.5% confidence. Though in my rather jaded experience/opinion >99% confidence is as good as it's going to get >99% of the time..... And of course in the wikipedia context you might find that a death certificate is construed as a primary source. Though since any death certificate issued today about a death reported (either verbally and/or else on a separate less formal document) would be a copy of a copy of a copy I guess one could have a (rather tiresome) argument either way on that.
If I find - or think of - anything relevant to contribute on the EBH talk page I will do so. But you appear to have given the matter a lot of thought, and if at present you do not share my judgement of the matter please do feel free to substitute something else.
Regards Charles01 (talk) 20:08, 26 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]