Wikipedia

User:Pelagic/sandbox/j

< User:Pelagic | sandbox

Dear diary, ... no.

This is not a blog nor a general-purpose journal. It's just a list of wiki-related notes to myself in reverse chronological order. I'm hoping that using date-order will remove some barriers to recording things. More at #2019-08-04 #Rationale

May 2020

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Sunday 31 (kinda)

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Still dark outside, so I can get away with calling it Sunday, not Monday. (06:08 Mon 01, AEST)

OMG, there was an update about the WMF rename at meta:Requests for comment/Should the Foundation call itself Wikipedia#May Update. A new project page is at meta:Communications/Wikimedia brands/2030 movement brand project (talk).

There's a meta:MediaWiki Stakeholders' Group.

I might have to start watchlisting on other projects.

Tuesday 26

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Ideas from MW

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MMiller makes the distinction between personalized and customized at mw:Talk:Growth/Personalized first day/Newcomer homepage#"My work" [2].

iPad keyboards and wikitext

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English keyboard changed somewhere around iOS 11 or 12. [These notes could possibly be developed into a full standalone user page.]

There are still 4 modes, which I’ll call lc, caps, num, extras. Getting from letters to extras takes two taps.

When you hit space bar, it takes you out of the current mode back to lc. This is a royal pain if you have a sequence of numbers and symbols to enter.

The new keyboard introduced a drag-down feature where you pull down on a key to access an alternate. From lc and caps, you can pull down to get get nums (including common symbols); from nums you can pull down to get extras. But I find the swipe down mechanism hard to activate at speed: I tend to flick the key and not pull it far enough. Also, it’s clunky for doubled symbols like [[ – is faster to quick double-tap.

symbol(s) used for old new comment
= headings extras nums moved from upper-right to bottom middle
* bullet list extras nums
/* section in edit summary different modes (num–ext) same mode (num) easier to type in new

Sunday 24

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Seaside photography

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Visited the coastline yesterday, over an hours' drive, for a small photo session. As luck would have it, spitting rain and high tide when I got there, so only animals from the high-littoral and splash zone were accessible.

Challenge with the SLR was that my stock zoom lenses don't focus very close and aren't good for small subjects. I could get much closer with an iPhone, but inspecting the photos after the fact discovered they are a lot less sharp. Dodging the periodic waves and placing tripod added to the fun.

In future, some kind of glass-bottom container (or a dive mask in a pinch) might help with reflections for underwater subjects. Or a linear polarising filter.

Next challenge is identifying the species. There wasn't a lot of variety in the narrow range of depth on this exposed shelf. I didn't photograph all these, but here's a list of the common ones seen at high water:

 
Blue periwinkle, with coin to show scale.
  • Austrolittorina unifasciata, called blue periwinkle though I'd maybe say mauve. These tiny shells are common around Sydney, occurring in the highest stratum. I sometimes wonder how they get by, with many out-of-water above the high-tide mark. Couldn't find in Sea Shells of NSW, but found name due to [3]. It's kind of satisfying that the AG article is illustrated with a photo from Commons, less so that the en-wp article doesn't include photos which show the colour well.
    • My shots are photographically no better than the the ones already in Commons, though I did take some alongside a 10¢ coin for scale: . I like the close view, sharp focus and shallow DoF of this c:File:Austrolittorina unifasciata 003.jpg. Museums Victoria has a couple of very good photos that are CC-BY [4].
  • Nerita melanotragus. [5] has N. atramentosa. "According to Wikipedia", the two were formerly considered conspecific, but the on the east coast would be N. melanotragus I noticed a lot of tiny juveniles in addition to the adults. Didn't bother with photos because this species is dead common, but we don't have any live shots on commons.
  • Austrocochlea porcata, the zebra top snail.
  • Tenguella marginalba, the mulberry whelk. Have been working on the taxonomy of these and their relatives. One of the reasons I made the trip.
  • Red waratah anemone, Actinia tenebrosa. Spotted one green anemone, but the red ones were common. The existing photo on that article is heaps better than what I could achieve.
  • Various limpets. Barnacles on more exposed rock faces. A species with striped conical shell that I haven't yet identified. Briefly spotted a small crab but a wave came in before I could snap it. Some neptune's necklace, Hormosira banksii, that stuff washes up everywhere.

Friday 22

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Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Feedback currently has 35 sections and 6 replies. (07:35 Fri 22, AEST)

Thursday 21

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mw:VisualEditor/Feedback#Does VE munge white space?

Wednesday 20

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Comparing use of headings in discussion spaces

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@JKlein (WMF) Your phrase “more similar to email than comments” raises a thought that I'd like to unpack. I'm interested to know if it is something that your team has discussed?

It all depends which conventions you are used to:

  • Web forums almost always(?) have a subject/topic heading/title for a new post/OP/thread/topic/discussion in a category/board/discussion/topic. (“Topic” and other words are variable and overloaded, which makes it really hard to talk about the, ahem, topic in general terms. But that's a whole separate discussion.)

Usually the top post is a fairly plain question or observation with an unhelpful heading like “help needed”, but sometimes it could be a complete how-to, walkthrough or FAQ that has a different character from the plainer commentary posts that follow: compare news sites and blogs below. Apart from the heading, there's usually no software-enforced specialness about the top post, but social conventions attach to the OP (original post / original poster) within a thread.

  • On Twitter, at the other end of the spectrum, you just throw your 160 characters into the aether and hope The Algorithm shows it to somebody. Hashtags and at-mentions started as user conventions that were then turned into clickable search facets. Reply threading didn't really exist and there was definitely no concept of a coherent conversation to attach a heading or summary to.
  • News sites, blogs, YouTube have a separation between the main content and the comments. To what extent is The article/page definitely does have a subject heading (and by-line, date, etc.). Traditionally the comments appear ...

This is getting too long. I want to copy-paste what I've written to preserve it somewhere else, so that I can simplify this post and make it more readable. BUT I CAN'T COPY PASTE IN THIS GODDAM S.D. EDITOR ON AN IPAD! (In either visual or markup mode. IIRC, applies to Visual Editor also.) I'm going to have to commit this reply, then copy it, then come back and edit it. If you're reading this in the interim, hold off replying as this post will change.

(First save 06:33 Wed 20, AEST. Original post.)

Sunday 17

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Alt text

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The current WHATWG HTML Standard section 4.8.4 has guidance on using alt text when an image has a caption. In their case, it's HTML5+ figcaption, but the principle also applies to our [[File:|…|captions]]. Short answer: do provide a non-empty alt when a caption is present, even though the image might not require one if it was uncaptioned.

Lightbulbs

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Don't think I've seen Wikipedia:How many Wikipedians does it take to change a lightbulb? before. Of course there's a navbox Template:Wikipedia essays.

Wikipedia Library Card Platform

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meta:The Wikipedia Library/Building a Digital Library looks promising, until you realise the page hasn't been edited since 2017, and the talk page is a redlink. Did the things expected "within 6 months" ever eventuate?

Last year, Sam Walton wrote I’m happy to say that the more comprehensive solution to this problem is finally right around the corner! While the development on authentication-based access and the Library Bundle was unfortunately delayed for quite some time due to legal discussions, we’re now moving ahead with technical implementation and are currently scheduled to be up and running before the end of the year. (VPP at 18:19, 2 August).

Related links: https://wikipedialibrary.wmflabs.org, WP:TWL, WP:RX, phab project …

I created an account via OAuth, but still not clear if the bundle is available. phab:T235262 would suggest not. The main paywalls I would butt into from the Apply list would be Elsevier (waitlisted), JStor (avail), and maybe Cambridge (waitlisted).

More: external articles from the newsletter

Saturday 16

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HTML spec

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From section 2.1.8 Conformance classes:

Authoring tools are exempt from the strict requirements of using elements only for their specified purpose, but only to the extent that authoring tools are not yet able to determine author intent. However, authoring tools must not automatically misuse elements or encourage their users to do so.

<dd> for indenting, anyone?

Wednesday 13

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Annotations

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I've been reading about W3C Annotations (data model, protocol, etc.). An unfortunate limitation is they require standalone Annotations service that hands out JSON-LD. It would be cool if you could embed annotation data using HTML+RDFa. Note that an explicit aim of the recommendations it to not require complicated RDF graphs or inference and query engines.

By coincidence, I just stumbled on T149667 Amazing Article Annotations (2016–2017). Wouldn't it be awesome if Wikimedia had an Annotations project akin to Wikidata? It's not just about storing the annotations, but also a UI for creating and displaying them.

Who would police that for slander and other inappropriate content? Where would you draw the line between genuine criticism, calling bullshit for what it is, versus outright attacks? Would each person own (and be responsible for) their note content, or would the wiki way be that notes are community-created? Would the service host note-content or just annotation links? Even if the latter, you could still cause mischief by mis-linking a comment to a target not intended by its author.

Would you start fresh, or build it on top of MediaWiki, utilising WikiBase, namespaces, discussions, revisions, etc.?

Compare web snipping programs like Copernic or Evernote, where you're also capturing a snapshot of the content. For MediaWiki sites, you already have a permanent revision to link to, but what about the general case? Could you have a Annotation object reference both the live version and the Internet Archive copy? Or would you have one note body and two Annotion links to the two targets?

(04:12 Wed 13, AEST)

Mon 11

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Talk Pages project

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User testing
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  • T239175 Conduct a control test of as-is reply workflow Dec–Feb. 2 iterations of 5 subjects each. (a) 4 desktop, 1 mobile; 2/5 ESL; not logged in, sparse talk page. (b) 5 desktop; 1 ESL; talk page with many existing comments.
    • Unsurprisingly, signing & indentation were problems, and subjects viewed the history page as a confusing jumble. Interestingly, the test found that subjects had trouble finding their reply after they had published it.
  • T245798 Conduct a control test of as-is reply workflow (mobile). Planned, no action yet.
  • T236921 Nov–Dec. 5 desktop users.
    • Language used by subjects to describe the new reply experience was positive, in contrast with the history page. Surprisingly, still "Several participants took several minutes to find their reply on the page", despite the reply-in-place.
    • Several were unpleasantly surprised at having their IP address revealed. This raises a good point: once this makes it to prod'n, will logged-out users get the big scary warning?
    • Difficulties with history page are partly connected with the subjects not being logged in. I wonder if the other revisions had a good smattering of usernames, or just a sea of IPs? (Scrolling down, I see Pp suggested having them log in for future tests.)
  • mw:Talk pages project/replying#Usability testing

les Cafés

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French Wikipedia's Avenue of cafés & bistros has a table of .

They also have a jargon page translation. Wonder if we have an equivalent?

Reading their Bistro through machine translation is like viewing our fora through a distorted mirror. Despite being separate communities, we have so much in common.

Sun 10

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MediaWiki improvement projects

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The more I check my notifications, the more I digress into these areas.

Indenting with definition lists is evil

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Tue 5

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Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 180#New traffic report: Daily article pageviews from social media

Talk Pages

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Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 180#Parsoid's effects on talk pages post by WAID 10 Apr.

Dark themes

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Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 180#Excessive use of style attributes makes custom theme changes (e.g. dark theme) difficult-to-impossible 24 Mar.

Monday 4

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Zen Garden

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Is now live and linked from my sig.

Ideas:

  • René Magritte (page) is not René Magritte (Wikidata item), with pipe.
    • (update 06:28 Thu 14) Dammit, he died in 1967; the painting is unfree for another 17 years in countries that follow the Mickey Mouse law.
  • Blank page with just shortdesc "white space, raked pebbles".
  • Leonardo is not Michelangelo, with RDFa sameas assertion (lie).
  • Barbie knows Ken RDFa / FOAF claim, with photos as the visible content. Maybe "+" sign for knows, or to link to an RDF processor.
  • One hand clapping we will rock you.
  • Something about Isidore Ducasse?
  • Mu? Moo!
    • 💬 🐂
    • μ that makes moo or mew sound when clicked.
    • Seussy 1 mu, 2 moo, mew μ, moo μ; trout link to one fish two fish
  • Symbols: [6] ࿋

Approach: vary short descriptions; edit summary is title, same at commentary; vary display at Z; vary symbol/emoji in sig (for season or special occasion rather than target content, as sigs are subst'd); commentary permalinks to first occurrence, might rotate content back in.

(05:01 Tue 05, AEST / 19:01 Mon 04, UTC)

Echo chamber a.k.a. notifications overload

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I now have 44 notifications taunting me from the top of the page. I'm slightly afraid to click the icons to find out... (05:09 Mon 04, AEST)

Extended content

Details

  • Alerts
    • 2 from Sidebar RFC
    • 1 from VPT discussion tools
    • 1 from 6mo ago BLPN – is the "read" status stored locally on each device? Or did I intentionally leave this unread?
    • 4 "from 3 other wikis"
  • Notifications
  • 1 page reviewed
  • 1 thanks
  • 34 notices from MediaWiki – thanks, Structured Discussions!

Okay, over 3⁄4 of that is Structured Discussions from MediaWiki. Sigh. (05:25 Mon 04, AEST)

Sunday 3

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Misordered miscellany

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April 2020

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Friday 1 May

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Yeah, I know, I should start a new month.

Notifications

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Good grief, I have 29 notifications on mobile and 10+29 on desktop?? Except the mobile one changes after I open it even though I haven't read or ticked off any of the items? I wonder whether less than 80% of those come from Structured Discussions threads on MW?

Wednesday 29

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Names

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The normal western approach of encoding names as ( given names, family names ) or even ( title, given name, middle names, family name ) is just terrible. It leads to situations where the payroll database with the subjects' legal / banking names is unmatchable to the general directory (e.g. AD) having their preferred display names for email and interpersonal use.

There was a defunct proposal for FOAF:

  • familiarName - the name used in familiar situations by friends, e.g. Ian
  • informalName - the name used when referred to in informal situations, e.g. Ian Davis
  • formalName - the name used when referred to in formal situations, e.g. Mr. Davis
  • fullName - the full name as expected to be used on an identifying document e.g. Mr Ian Robert Davis

I wouldn't put Mr in the fullName, and I'd use different labels, but this comes close to some common use cases. Consider a fictional Mister Tony Baloney (his nonna calls him Marco):

  1. Hi, Tony, …
  2. Dear Mr Baloney, …
  3. Pay to: Mark Anthony Baloney
  4. Regards, Tony Baloney
  5. Sincerely, M. Anthony Baloney, M.Sc., FRS, OAM

For a first-name sort, should he be ordered under M, A, or T?

The different forms start to increase when you consider fullLegalName versus longNameWithInitials. And accountName for banking could be completely different again.

A person's legal name in a particular country or jurisdiction might be mangled to local conventions, and be different to their culturally-aware full name. If Gabriel García y Márquez had lived in Australia, his legal name could have been plain "Gabriel Jose Garcia" (you can have middle names, but only one surname, and no accents, thanks). Would his familiarName be Gabriel or Gabo? Maybe nickName for the latter.

When we get into honorifics, things get more complicated. Is it Nanak, Guru Nanak, Shri Guru Nanak-Ji Sahib? Or some other subset of the last?

Then there are historical persons who may have a toponym like Leonardo of Pisa. Or they may have a geographical qualifier and a noble title, like one of my favourites, Bernard Lacepede, more properly Bernard-Germain-Étienne de La Ville-sur-Illon, comte de La Cépède.

And the type of properties you want for marking up display text may differ from what you'd use for, say generating a letter. "Dear Citoyen La Cépède"? "Dear M. le Comte"? <formal-name><honorific-pre>Shri<honorific-pre> <title>Guru</title> <mononym>Nanak</mononym>-<honorific-suffix>Ji</honorific-suffix> <honorific-post>Sahib</honorific-post></formal-name>?

Object vs literal properties in data

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OWL encourages vocabularies to avoid using a single named property in both 'ObjectProperty' and 'DataTypeProperty' styles. However earlier usage, notably in the Dublin Core community, does just this. Each FOAF property is either an Object Property or DataType Property. [8]

Tuesday 28

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Open tabs

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Essay

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Pete Forsyth, "Trusting everybody to work together", The Signpost 2020-04-26.[9] I've pulled out a few quotes that I particularly like.

Extended content

This element—facilitating reader insight into writers' actions and motivations—may at the time have seemed an ancillary benefit, secondary to the need to support a burgeoning community of writers and editors. But transparency to readers has become a key component of Wikipedia's identity, and as Wikipedia's star has risen, many of us have come to expect greater transparency from more traditional publications as well.

Diffs, history, and other "advanced" features aren't just for editors and involved community's members. They also benefit readers. — In addition, anyone consulting the encyclopedia also has access to this information. If a sophisticated reader familiar with the features outlined above sees something in an article that doesn’t ring true to them, he can learn something about how the text evolved to that point, including what the article's authors argued about, or what sources they considered but dismissed.

Veteran Wikipedia author Jim Heaphy published an essay outlining a number of reasons why he uses the desktop interface while editing with his smartphone, instead of the specialized interfaces created by the Wikimedia Foundation, later that year. [10]

In a traditional context, readers looking for data to inform trust were typically limited to familiarity with a publisher's or a writer's reputation. Did you read something in the New York Times? You could probably trust that was true. Did you read it scribbled on a bathroom wall? Not so much. Wikipedia, as a product subject to continuous editing by almost anybody, takes a different path; it does not aspire to the kind of reputational trust enjoyed by the Times, but the eight software features in this essay separate it from the wholly unaccountable bathroom wall.

A reader literate in the scientific method is better equipped to evaluate a scientific study than one who has to rely on external authorities; a television viewer well-versed in the techniques of video manipulation or rhetorical trickery will be less susceptible to deception.

To fully appreciate the value of Wikipedia, a reader needs to consult features like talk pages and edit histories. As Wikipedia has grown, and as MediaWiki and similar software has proliferated across numerous websites, an ability to work with these software features has become a core part of information literacy. They should be taught in our formal educational institutions, and curious readers should investigate them on their own.

Sunday 26

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Time functions

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{{Time}} has good doco for reference. Ideally I'd like to build something with magic words or parser functions that doesn't depend on a specific wiki's collection of templates. Magic words affect caching, so I'll focus on PFs instead.

Parser functions: #time, #expr.

{{#time: H:i D d}} 07:00 Tue 15
{{subst:#time: H:i D d}} 00:29 Sun 26
{{#time: xrY }} MMXXIV
{{#time: xNU}} 1728975658 seconds since 1970-01-01 00:00:00
{{#expr: {{#time: xNU}} + (10 * 3600) }} 1729011658 add 10 hrs
({{#time: H:i D d | @{{#expr: {{#time: xNU}} + (10 * 3600) }} }} AEST) (17:00 Tue 15 AEST) format
({{subst:#time: H:i D d | @{{subst:#expr: {{subst:#time: xNU}} + (10 * 3600) }} }} AEST) (10:29 Sun 26 AEST) subst
({{#time: H:i D d | +10 hours }}, AEST) (17:00 Tue 15, AEST) OMG, shortcut


Putting local time in sig

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For reference ~~~~ without custom sig. produces [[User:Pelagic|Pelagic]] ([[User talk:Pelagic|talk]]) 00:33, 26 April 2020 (UTC)

After customisation, this inserts as Pelagic (talk) – (14:13 Sun 26 AEST) 04:13, 26 April 2020 (UTC)

Sure, I could add logic for DST with a hard-coded start–end, but is it worthwhile compared to just editing the sig twice a year?

DST using only parser functions

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Month {{#time:n}}, {{#ifexpr:{{#time:n}} >= 4 and {{#time:n}} < 10 | Apr to Sep | Oct to Mar}} Month 10, Oct to Mar doesn't handle the period between first-of-month and first Sunday
Day of week = {{#time: w}} (Sunday is 0), day of month = {{#time: j}}, most recent Sunday = {{#expr: {{#time: j}} - {{#time: w}} }} {{#ifexpr: {{#time: j}} - {{#time: w}} > 0 | we are past the first Sunday of the month | we are before the first Sunday of the month }} Day of week = 2 (Sunday is 0), day of month = 15, most recent Sunday = 13: we are past the first Sunday of the month
1st April of current year = {{#time: Y-m-d D | 1 April}}, it is day {{#expr:1+{{#time:z}} of the year. 1st April of current year = 2024-04-01 Mon, it is day 91 of the year (0-based).
The first Sunday of April should be day {{#expr: {{#time:z|1 April}} + (7 - {{#time:N|1 April}})}}, which is {{#time:c| 1 Jan +{{#expr: {{#time:z|1 April}} + (7 - {{#time:N|1 April}})}} days }} The first Sunday of April should be day 97, which is 2024-04-07T00:00:00+00:00.
AEDT ends at 16:00 UTC on the day before, so this year ended {{#time:c| 1 Jan +{{#expr: {{#time:z|1 April}} + (7 - {{#time:N|1 April}})}} days -8 hours}}. AEDT ends at 16:00 UTC on the day before, so this year ended 2024-04-06T16:00:00+00:00.
Simplifying: {{#time:c| 1 April +7 days -{{#time:N|1 April}} days -8 hours}}. Simplifying: 2024-04-06T16:00:00+00:00. If it was the Nth Sunday, you'd do +(N*7) days. Since we're not coding a general case, we could replace "1 April +7 days" with "8 April". time:N ranges from 1 to 7, not 0 to 6, which is why we offset from 8 Apr not 7 Apr. But it doesn't like the first term being a subtraction or transclusion?
Daylight saving finishes on the first Sunday of April at 03:00+11 = 02:00+10, which {{#ifexpr: {{#time:U}} > {{#time:U| 1 April +7 days -{{#time:N|1 April}} days -8 hours}} |was|will be}} {{#time:c| 1 April +7 days -{{#time:N|1 April}} days -8 hours}}. Daylight saving finishes on the first Sunday of April at 03:00+11 = 02:00+10, which was 2024-04-06T16:00:00+00:00.
{{#ifexpr: {{#time:U}} > {{#time:U| 1 April +7 days -{{#time:N|1 April}} days -8 hours}} and {{#time:U}} < {{#time:U| 1 Oct +7 days -{{#time:N|1 Oct}} days -8 hours}} |AEST|AEDT}} AEDT

Saturday 25

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Anzac Day

 
Found this nice rendition of the logo at pt-wp.

Matcha

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According to this post, maccha powder is prepared into either usucha 'thin tea' or koicha 'thick tea'.

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Sidebar items for the 15 wikis having over a million articles (according to the list at the foot of en-wp Main Page). The focus here is what's included, not the order, grouping, or exact name.

Item en fr de nl sv es pt it pl ar ru uk zh jp vi Σ
Main page • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • 15
Contents / index • • • 3
Index A–Z • 1
Find an article • 1
Featured content • • • • • • • • 8
Current events • • • • • • • • • 9
Today • 1
Nearby • 1
Portals • • • • 4
Subjects • 1
Categories • • • 3
Recent changes • • • • • • • • • • • • • • 14
Related changes • 1
New pages • • • • • 5
Random article • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • 15
Browse offline • 1
About • • • • 4
Contact • • • • • • • • • • 10
Report a problem • • 2
Bug reports • 1
Donate • • • • • • • • • • • • • • 14
Shop • • 2
First steps • (5) • 3
Tutorial • 1
Help • • • • • • • • • • • • • • 14
FAQ • 1
Community portal • • • • • • • • • • • • 12
Policies (& guidelines) • • 2
Village Pump • • (1) • (3) (4) • (7) 8
Newsletter • 1
Noticeboard • (6) 2
Information desk (2) • • • 3
New pages ?
Improve articles • 1
Create article • 1
Upload • • 2
Sandbox • 1
Total 13 9 10 12 10 8 8 11 14 13 13 9 14 13 12

(1) "Bar"

(2) Italian sportello informazione looks more like our helpdesk rather than reference desk. Not sure about the Chinese one. I grouped Vietnamese "Help desk" here also.

(3) "Forum"

(4) "Tavern"

(5) "Introduction", not sure how similar this is to "first steps" on other wikis. It's also called "introductory course" on-page, looks a little like en-wp's "Wikipedia adventure"?

(6) "Announcements"

(7) "General discussion"

Articles (millions): sv 3.7, pl 1.4, jp 1.2, ar 1.0

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A couple of major regional languages for contrast. Items in bold are not present in the "top 15" wikis.

Item en id hi
Main page • • •
Contents / index •
Index A–Z
Find an article
Featured content • 1 •
Current events • • •
Today
Nearby
Portals
Subjects
Categories
Recent changes • • •
Related changes
New pages •
Random article • • •
Browse offline
About • •
Contact • •
Report a problem
Bug reports
Donate • • •
Shop •
First steps 3
Tutorial
Help • • •
FAQ •
Request 2
Community portal • • •
Policies (& guidelines) •
Five pillars •
Village Pump • •
Newsletter
Noticeboard
Information desk (2)
Embassy •
New pages
Improve articles
Create article
Upload
Sandbox • •
Total 13 15 14

(1) ''Artikel pilihan'', 'selected articles'.

(2) अनुरोध

(3) 'self education'

Articles (millions): id 0.5, hi 0.1

Friday 24

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Dark mode

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Aron Manning has some dark css mw:User:Aron Manning/Skin themes (perm). His page lists a bunch of other work, both CSS and server-side extensions.

There is also a "mild" light grey theme, and mention of a responsive Vector.

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Have spent a fair bit of time the last couple of days commenting and !voting at Wikipedia:Requests for comment/2020 left sidebar update. Glad I stumbled on that in a timely fashion; can't recall what led me there, might have been one of the Village Pumps.

Related: mw:Reading/Web/Desktop Improvements; Pune Desktop Improvements Study page, PDF (24 user interviews, 1 city in 1 country); Special:Permalink/950222091#Updating the left sidebar on VPI.

Sunday 19

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Discussion Tools

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Editing news 2020 #1 – Discussion tools is at VP(T).

Having them delivered only to User talk:Pelagic/Newsletters isn't working, as I don't check back there often. I'm thinking dual-delivery like with the Signpost would be better. [Update: I was also getting them at meta:User talk:Pelagic, but didn't see the Echo notification.]

I re-experimented with the Reply 1.0 feature at 

and at

. Posted at VPT with my inference on how it works. phab:T240640 discusses multiple sig's in a single post, and the decision to treat paragraphs as indivisible units.

Alternate talk markup is discussed at phab:T240640; Anomie mentions WP:LISTGAP.

Friday 17

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All the editing things

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Got carried away and posted this at phab:T202921

  1. “Desktop” web
    1. Visual editing
      1. Visual Editor / VE / &veaction=edit
    2. Source editing
      1. New Wikitext Editor / NWE / VE in source mode / 2017 Editor / &veaction=editsource
      2. Classic editor(s) / non-Parsoid editors / &action=submit
        1. Toolbar / 2010 Editor / enhanced toolbar / box with JavaScript
        2. legacy (2006) toolbar gadget / small toolbar
        3. No-toolbar / 2003 Editor / plain box without JavaScript
          1. (optional CharInsert gadget combined with any of the preceding three)
  2. “Mobile” web
    1. Visual editing
      1. VE with limited toolbar; second page having: edit summary __not__ pre-filled with /* section*/, minor edit checkbox, watch page checkbox, preview changes button that gets covered by on-screen touch keyboard
    2. Source editing
      1. (hidden inaccessible form with discrete edit box, edit summary text box pre-populated with /* section */, minor edit checkbox, and watch page checkbox)
      2. full-screen wikitext editor; second page having: preview, edit summary box, invisible non-modifiable /* section */ component, and __no__ option to mark edit as minor (even with AMC enabled)
      3. talk page editor when not in "read as wiki page" view (similar to or same as App discussion editor, below?)
        1. new section experience
        2. reply experience
  3. mobile App (Wikipedias only)
    1. wikitext with syntax highlighting (articles only)
    2. discussion editor / line-break-preserving plain-text editor / wikitext-with-no-preview editor (user-talk only)
    3. embedded browser, see Mobile web (other namespaces)

TP karma

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Not wikipedia-related, but couldn't resist noting this one: https://thenewdaily.com.au/news/state/sa/2020/04/15/toilet-paper-refund/

The other kind of TP

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WAID has posted to VPT: Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)#Parsoid's effects on talk pages - to-do: follow-up

Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)#Editing news 2020 #1 – Discussion tools – thought I'd subscribed to that? to-do: read

Different editor UIs

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Phab:T202921 and Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)#Character substitution

Thursday 16

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a feasible approach would be if Flow is run in a separate namespace ("Flow"?); the Talk namespace is left intact, and "watching" an article automatically watches both it's "talk" page and "flow" board. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 01:11, 20 July 2013 (UTC) Wikipedia:VisualEditor/RFC#Comments (talk)

Saturday 11

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Depending on your inclination, this is either a fascinating read or dry as dust: Dubois, Alain (2005). "Proposed Rules for the incorporation of nomina of higher-ranked zoological taxa in the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature. 1. Some general questions, concepts and terms of biological nomenclature". Zoosystema. 27 (2): 365–426.

Taxonomy, nomenclature, and Wikidata

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I ran into an interesting issue this morning on Wikidata, trying to add Grystes salmoide (Lac. 1802) Cuvier 1829 as a synonym for Micropterus salmoides (Lac. 1802).

First some background. The concept of the largemouth bass as a species seems to have been fairly stable for a couple of centuries. But it has been placed in different genera at different times. These genera are distinct taxa, having different circumscriptions, but the species itself is the same taxon with different binomina. This is unique to species-series names, higher taxa have one-part names that depend on their children (the type taxa) but not parents. (Higher ranks do sometimes have different names for the same scope, but for other reasons.)

Property «synonym» takes an item, not a string as its object, so I need to create a new item for the synonym. This makes sense as biological names have some structure, though you could achieve something similar with qualifiers, and using qualifiers would be reasonable semantically. [add example]

So, whilst "largemouth bass" / Micropterus salmoides is an «instance of» «taxon», I wanted Grystes salmoide to be an «instance of» «scientific name». So far so good. But then I wanted statements for the author and year of the name. I tried «taxon author» and «taxon year» as the closest available concepts; after all, when we state the "taxon author" for a taxon, we're really talking about the first author of the corresponding name, not the taxon itself, which may change in extension or intension but keeps the original name. But I ran into a constraint warning: «taxon author» should only be used with subjects that are instances of «taxon» not «scientific name».

So either we have choices:

  1. change the definition of «taxon author», etc. to do double duty for both nomina and taxa i.e. alter the constraint
  2. create new "nomen author", "nomen year", "nomen rank" properties
  3. change the «scientific name» property so that it can only take as its object «scientific name» items, not strings, and change "taxon author" to "nomen author". This separates nomenclature from taxonomy: each «taxon» item has one or more separate «scientific name» items.
  4. change «synonym» to take a string, the way «scientific name» does
  5. do nothing and just use the broader «creator» and «inception» properties on the «scientific name» item
  6. give up and create the nomen as a 'taxon'
Update
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I tried (5) and it's still not great. «taxon synonym» wants its object to have a «taxon name», and «taxon name» wants its subject to be an instance of «taxon».

I'm not a fan of repeating the label, auth and year in a «taxon name» element, but it might be necessary to work around the item label being language-tagged: «taxon name» appears to be a language-neutral / multilingual string. Unless we can get people to agree that biological names should be tagged "la". Yes, they are arbitrary Latinate labels and not "Latin language", but so what?

…

I just checked the property proposal for P1420 «taxon synonym». Felix Reimann suggested just using P225 «taxon name» with a lowered status. There was much discussion about making it an item or a string, Brya was cognisant of the taxon-versus-nomen distinction:

Now Wikidata is more or less limited to giving all the accepted taxa their own item (and failing at achieving any kind of minimum quality). With datatype item, Wikidata would be engaged in getting any name ever published its own item. It would become (lots) worse than CoL.

[Sunday, circa 09:00 AEST]

Sunday 5

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François Péron

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Some reading about the expedition of Baudin, Péron, [[Charles-Alexandre Lesueur|Lesueur], & Petit. Unfortunately Leseur's illustrations don't seem to have made it into a free repository that I can find.

  • Péron and the birth of the science of invertebrates, by Dr Gabriel Bittar
  • Charles-Alexandre Lesueur: Biography. Design & Art Australia Online. Sophie G. Ducker, 1992.
  • Terre Napoleon: A History of French Explorations and Projects in Australia by Ernest Scott. 2ed. Methuen, London. Project Gutenberg Australia. [11]
    • Not so much about the scientific aspects; does go into depth about the charts of Freycinet and the imprisonment of Flinders. (added 23:19, 4 April 2020 (UTC))

March 2020

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Tuesday 31

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Foreign names in footnotes

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I like what they've done for the lead sentence of North Macedonia, putting the other-language names in footnotes.

Monday 30

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Comparison of Ostreidae taxonomy

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Harry p. 153 has a summary table of his taxa.

Older Harry 1985 [12] Salvi, Macali, & Mariottini [13] Comments
Subfamily Lophinae Merged into Ostreinae.
Tribe Lophini
Genus Lopha

Monotypic, L. cristagalla

Incubates larvae (Wada 1953 via Stenzel, Harry)
Genus Alectryonella

One living species, A. pliculata. Rare and localised, from Madagascar to Philippines, Ryukyu, and western Carolines. Type specimens of O. dubia and O. solida are actually juvenile and white-shelled (respectively) A. pliculata.

L./O. cristigalli, A./O. pliculata, D./O. folium form a clade within Ostrea. D. frons is sister to this clade.
Included in Lopha by … Genus Dendostrea

Three species: D. folium (type), D. frons, D. mexicana. First two are known to be larviparous, breeding strategy for the last is unknown.

Dendostrea is paraphyletic to Lopha and Alectryonella. The similar features are probably convergent.
Tribe Myrakeenini (tribus novum)

Named for malacologist A. Myra Keen. Pp. 138–141

Genus Myrakeena (genus novum)

One known species, M. angelica.

Not sampled.
Genus Anomiostrea

One species A. coralliophila Habe 1975 (nom nov) = Ostrea pyxidata Adams & Reeve 1850 not O. pyxidata Born 1778.

Subfamily Ostreinae p. 141

"Those species of which the reproductive habits are known are larviparous."

Mostly tropical, a few warm temperate, Ostrea cool temperate.

"The Ostreinae show a close relationship to the Lophinae in the completely closed right promyal passage and larviparous habit …"

Expanded Ostreinae. Ostrea–Lophia clade, includes all larviparous species, c.f. Saccostreinae and Crassostreinae which are broadcast spammers.
Tribe Ostreini (ex Ostreidae Rafinesque 1815, trib. nov., nom. trans. Harry 1985)
Genus Ostreola
Genus Ostrea

Subgenera:

Ostrea – O. (O.) edulis and denselamellosa

Eostrea – one species O. (E.) puelchana, junior synonyms O. chilensis, O. angasi, O. algoensis, O. lutaria. Circumpolar, 35–50°S.

Genus Neostrea (gen. nov.)

Type O. deformis Lamarck 1819 not O. deformis Lam. 1806. N. exigua Harry nom. nov.

Genus Planostrea (gen. nov.) p.

One species Planostrea pestigris, junior synonyms O. rivularis, O. paulucciae, O. palmipes.

Philippines, north Borneo, Formosa, Thailand. Low tide to 100m.

Tribe Cryptostreini trib. nov.

Three new monotypic genera, all larviparous.

Cryptostrea permollis. Lives embedded in bread sponge Stellata sp. Gulf of Mexico and N. Carolina. C. permollis had a small genetic distance from O. puelchana.
Teskeyostrea weberi. Named after Margaret Teskey, "for many years Secretary of the American Malacological Union". Florida keys, West Indies, Yucatan. 16S sequence only. Sister to group containing Dendostrea, Lopha, Alectryonella, and O. algoensis.
Booneostrea cuculli. Jun. syn. Ostrea sedea. Named for Constance E. Boone, malacologist and Secretary of the American Union. Not sampled.
Tribe Undulostreini, trib. nov., p. 146

One species Undulostrea megadon gen. nov.

Tribe Pustulostreini

One species Pustulostrea tuberculata, gen. nov.

Subfamily Crassostreinae
Tribe Striostreini Subfamily Saccostreinae. Though if Striostrea is included, Striostreinae would have precedence.
Genus Saccostrea

S. cucullata and S. palmula

Genetic distance supports S. scyophylla, kegaki, cucullata, palmula, echinata, glomerata as separate species.
Genus Striostrea

Subgenus Striostrea: S. (S.) margaritacea (west to South Africa), S. (S.) circumpicta (south Japan), S. (S.) prismatica (tropical eastern Pacific).

Subgenus Parastriostrea, subgen. nov., p. 151: one species S. (P.) mytiloides. Samoa through Philippines, Indonesia, NW Australia to India and Zanzibar. Usually found adhering to roots of mangroves.

Striostrea unresolved, only one gene sequenced. Clustered weakly with O. denselamellosa.
Tribe Crassostreini (ex Crassostreinae Torigoe 1981, nom. trans., trib. nov.) monotypic Subfamily Crassostreinae.
Genus Crassostrea. Native distribution mostly N hemisphere, estuarine.

Four species: C. angulata, C. virginica, C. columbiensis, C. gigas.

Reduced genus Crassostrea (Atlantic species only). C. virginica, rhizophorae, brasiliana (latter includes C. gasar).
New genus Magallana (Pacific species). M. belcheri, nippona, ariakensis, hongkongensis, gigas, sikamea.


Sunday 22

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Fuck

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FUCK. Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck FUCK! Visual Editor just made me lose hours of work. Piece of shit software.

Technically, it was the switching back-and-forth between visual and source mode that killed it, but the only reason I was jumping back to source is because VE wouldn't let me add a wikilink with specific spelling.

Oysters again, wikidata incinsistencies

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[need to rewrite this from scratch, or maybe I can't be bothered]

Oyster articles

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Might be able to use some of this info in our articles.

  • "Molecular taxonomy of cupped oysters (Crassostrea, Saccostrea, and Striostrea) in Thailand based on COI, 16S, and 18S rDNA polymorphism." Klinbunga et al., 2005. Marine Biotechnology. [14]
  • "The oysters of Hong Kong (Bivalvia: Ostreidae and Gryphaeidae)." Lam & Morton, 2004. The Raffles Bulletin of Zoology 52(1): 11-28. [15]
  • "Molecular phylogenetics and systematics of the bivalve family Ostreidae based on rRNA sequence-structure models and multilocus species tree." Salvia, Macali, & Mariottini, 2014. PLOS One 9(12): e116014. [16]
  • Littlewood, DTJ, 1994. "Molecular Phylogenetics of Cupped Oysters Based on Partial 28S rRNA Gene Sequences". Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution 3(3):221–229. Found that the Atlantic Crassostrea were related to the Pacific Saccostrea: "topology (Mytilus edulis (Ostrea edulis ((Crassostrea rivularis (C. belcheri, C. gigas))(C. virginica, C. rhizophorae, Saccostrea cuccullata, S. commercialis))))"

Wednesday 18

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All teh datas

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Been trying to get my head around RDFa, microdata, microformats and other linked-data topics. Not that I hadn't heard of RDF and μformats, but it's been a long time since I paid any attention to them.

Some of these I haven't read yet or haven't finished reading.


Saturday 14

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Zoo pics

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Availed myself of the free ticket and visited Taronga Zoo, Taronga Zoo Sydney yesterday. Rather than shooting the photogenic big cats and primates, I spent more time on the birds, reptiles, amphibians and lesser known or endangered species. Some on smartphone and some on DSLR, depending on conditions.

Done:

To do:

Maybe:

  • Some decent binturong photos, but that article already has a good one.

Still to check:

Sunday 1

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New reply interface for talk pages

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https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discussion_utilisateur:Pelagic/Brouillon?dtenable=1

On iOS 9, 10, 12, after I press the Reply button I get "Could not find the comment you're replying to on the page. It might have been deleted or moved to another page. Please reload the page and try again."

mw:Talk:Talk pages project/replying and mw:Talk pages project/Updates.

The NZ macron battle is back

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Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (New Zealand) (this is from last month, but noting it here)

Goat mutton

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Apparently goat meat is called mutton in Australia? WTH?

Talk:Goat meat#Not mutton in Australia

Supply shortage:

  • Getting the goat: Australia struggling to meet soaring demand for goat meat. 21-Jan-2019 By RJ Whitehead. [17]

Substitution of hoggett for lamb

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Commonwealth of Australia, Senate Inquiry into Meat Marketing Interim Report 2008, Chapter 2: Lamb branding and marketing. [18]

February 2020

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Saturday 15

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misapprehending the editorial community as basically a userbase playing a game/forum the "company" is publishing

Brilliant turn of phrase from SMcC, though I’m not sure how much the Foundation, in its love affair with Affiliates and GLAMs, sees itself as a software company.

Saturday 1

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An excursion into Wikidata taxonomy

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Well, I created d:Q83949475 Claremontiella (genus novum) and d:Q83950882 Claremontiella nodulosa (comb. nov.), but along the way I had to make items for people and journal articles and other taxa, oh my! Definitely not straightforward. d:Wikidata:WikiProject Taxonomy has lists of properties to use with taxa, and other guidance.

Meanwhile over at Wikispecies

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species:Ergalataxinae is being updated by a bot, it already has entries for Claremontiella and Lauta. But 23 of 24 genera are redlinks or mislinks.

Compare d:Special:WhatLinksHere/Q5385781, which shows 12 items for genera in the subfamily. en-WP Ergalataxinae has 20 genera, but all are blue. fr-WP has 4/19 blue, and nl-WP has 19/19.

January 2020

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Saturday 25

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Winkles and oysters alive, alive-o

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Have been working on a couple of groups of molluscs. This all started because I was looking to see what species of culinary oysters exist, then discovered that the mulberry whelk, that I am so familiar with from the Sydney and Central Coasts, feeds on Sydney rock oysters. The article title for the whelk is Tenguella marginalba but the taxobox and references say Morula marginalba, and there is a page for King Tenguella but not for Tenguella (gastropod), so down the taxonomy rabbit-hole I went.

And now I find Central Coast (New South Wales) needs work, too.

December 2019

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For mobile editing, list December subpages. Or, edit December master

Sunday 28

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Darkiñung

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Revisiting the °Darkinung / Darkinjung / Darkinyung / Darkinyung language / Darkinung people issue.

Found an academic thesis that may well be the most definitive source: Ford, Geoffrey Eric (2010). Darkiñung Recognition: An Analysis of the Historiography for the Aborigines from the Hawkesbury-Hunter Ranges to the Northwest of Sydney: [commonly written with English characters as 'Darkinung', Darkinyung or Darkinjung]. University of Sydney..

According to Ford, Darkiñung country extended as far south as Eastern Creek near Blacks Town, and that many peope now identifed as 'Darug' ancestry actually have Darkiñung ancestors.

See also Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Indigenous peoples of Australia and Wikipedia:WikiProject Languages/Confirmed language names at AIATSIS. I was inclined to follow Ford in spelling it Darkiñung, but will defer to Kwami's suggestion that we use AIATSIS spelling Darkinyung.

I want to put this on one of the articles' talk pages, but not sure which one:

Wednesday 24

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Recent activity

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Old tabs

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November 2019

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For mobile editing, list November subpages. Or, edit November master

Saturday 16

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User:Pelagic/sandbox/j/2019/11/16

Wednesday 6

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Old tabs

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https://m.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk_pages_project#Updates

https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/feed/query/NjUWUwyQjovg/#R owc2020

https://meta.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/VisualEditor/Newsletter/Archive

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Pelagic/Newsletters

https://meta.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Community_Tech/Watchlist_Expiry

https://m.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Topic:V80prgjfx6mk3y6r&topic_showPostId=v8rsnypp5tksdcn5&fromnotif=1&markasread=1016288%7C1016287&markasreadwiki=mediawikiwiki#flow-post-v8rsnypp5tksdcn5 Dark mode and other colour themes

https://m.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Reading/Web/Advanced_mobile_contributions

https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T123694 Allow mobile web edits to be marked as minor

https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/search/query/tyaaxNb7ra9d/#R query edit summary section mobile

https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T55217 VisualEditor: When editing a section, don't wait for loading to be complete before scrolling to the section

https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/tag/mediawiki-watchlist/

https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T234982 Varying approaches to section names in edit summaries (mobile vs desktop and visual vs wikitext) – authored by Pelagic

https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T215717 When section editing, do not build whole CE tree

https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T233058 Mobile section editing no longer works (it always edits whole article)

https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T209987 Isolate Section Editing

https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T223793#5557864 On non-SET wikis (two edit tabs), links to new pages (red links) should open the user's preferred editor (last used)

https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T223619 Prepare for Growth experiments at Basque Wikipedia

https://m.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Growth/Personalized_first_day/Newcomer_homepage

https://meta.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Wishlist_Survey_2019/Results

https://meta.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Community_Tech/Dark_mode

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/VisualEditor_on_mobile

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Preferences

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:TheDJ/responsiveContent

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template_talk:Ambox

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Reading/Web/Projects/Mobile_Page_Issues

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Recommendations_for_mobile_friendly_articles_on_Wikimedia_wikis#Making_page_issues_(ambox_templates)_mobile_friendly

Short description test

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This is a daily personal notes page.

See {{Short description}}, {{Annotated link}}

Sunday 3

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Sri

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Sri has gone downhill since I was last there. Good news at least there is talk of moving it to Shri.

Rupee denominations

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British India (1862–1947) coins at https://en.numista.com/catalogue/india-35.html#c_inde_britannique244.

The small-denomination copper (later bronze) coins are marked as "1⁄12 ANNA" (not written as "1 pie"), "1⁄2 PICE" (equal to 1+1⁄2 pies), "ONE QUARTER ANNA" (not as "1 pice"), and "HALF ANNA" (not as "2 pice" nor "6 annas"). There is a late holey coin from 1943–1947 marked as "1 PICE" rather than "half anna".

Victorian copper weights are 2.1, 3.0, 6.1–6.4, and 12.7 grammes, and so scale roughly with value at 2 g/pāī.

The mid-denomination coins are variously silver, cupro-nickel, and nickel-brass. They are marked "1⁄2 ANNA", "1 ANNA", "2 ANNAS", "1⁄4 RUPEE",[a] "HALF RUPEE", ONE RUPEE". Gold coins were "FIVE RUPEES" and "ONE MOHUR" (Victoria) or 15 RUPEES" (George).

Aside — the Danish Indian lead and copper coins are literally "cash money": 80 cash (kas) = 1 royalin.

The post-independence, pre-decimal Indian coins [19] have their denominations written in English and Hindi: "ONE PICE" (एक पैसा ‘ek paisaa’), "HALF ANNA" (आधा आना ‘aadha aana’), "ONE ANNA" (एक आना ‘ek aana’), "TWO ANNAS" (दो आना ‘do aana’), "1⁄4 RUPEE" (चार आना ‘chaar aana’ lit. four annas), "1⁄2 RUPEE" (आधा रुपया ‘aadha rupaya’), "1 RUPEE" (एक रुपया ‘ek rupaya’).

  1. ^ Exceptions to "1⁄4 RUPEE": "4 annas" George V 1919–1921 and "quarter rupee" George VI 1946–1947. The latter is also marked पाव रुपया ‘paav rupaya’.

British East India Company coins (1770–1862) attested at numista are much the same denominations as the later British India coins: "1⁄12 ANNA", "1⁄2 PICE", "ONE QUARTER ANNA", "HALF ANNA", "TWO ANNAS", "1⁄4 RUPEE", "HALF RUPEE", "ONE RUPEE", "ONE MOHUR".

Proxies and IP blocks

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Was going to post this at Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2019-10-31/Community view, but am reconsidering...

Why not make accounts IP-block-exempt by default? If you've taken the small effort to register, and haven’t done anything bad, then who cares if you use a proxy, or T-mobile, or a shared school address? Checkuser activities would be harder, since users would have more options for varying their address. Would a cool-down delay (IP block for xx days after account creation) be enough to prevent rapid-fire socks? Or would savvy people just queue up a whole bunch of sleeper accounts and let them ripen? Perhaps WMF could develop an IP-hopping service where they retain visibility into the users' source info, but good luck trying to stay one step ahead of a state-level antagonist.

Timeless report

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meta:Grants:Project/Timeless/Post-deployment support/Final

October 2019

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For mobile editing, list October subpages. Or, edit October master

Wednesday 30

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Apostrophe

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Changes from Unicode version 2.0 to 2.1 …
Significant clarifications or modifications to character semantics include the following:
Apostrophe. Because the character U+0027 APOSTROPHE is very ambiguous, the preferrred character for apostrophe was documented as either U+02BC MODIFIER LETTER APOSTROPHE or U+2019 RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK.[1]

It’s always bothered me that we don’t have a clear way to encode a semantic distinction between apostrophe and single-close-quote. Different glyphs would be great: straight only for apostrophe and raised comma only for quote. (Good luck trying to convince anybody else to adopt that convention.) But ASCII 27 has so many meanings, using it for just one of them seems fraught. Compare hyphen-minus, where we have explicit hyphen and minus as alternatives.

Now I learn that "modifier letter apostrophe" is actually meant to represent the punctuation mark and not some obscure diacritic? Le sigh. Wonder if that stance was reversed in later versions? 

U+0027 ' APOSTROPHE U+02BC ʼ MODIFIER LETTER APOSTROPHE U+2019 ’ RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK

Aside: hyphen-minus, hyphen‐hyphen, hyphen⁃bullet. 

U+002D - HYPHEN-MINUS, U+2010 ‐ HYPHEN, U+2043 ⁃ HYPHEN BULLET 

Saturday 26

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Tamil character encodings

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Performance

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Am having issues on both iPads. Is it some gadget or option I've enabled, or too-many-tabs syndrome, or a bad third-party site?

Sunday 13

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It’s been a different kind of week; couple of days off work, jumping around various wiki-places but not taking notes. Kids go back to school on Tuesday.

Wikisource

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Started reading and re-verifying the Preface to MacCauliffe's   The Sikh Religion. Hope I’m not messing up too badly; it’s been a long time since I was last on WikiSource.

URAA and the shorter term

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Soft hyphens

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Soft hyphen mentions that there are two conflicting semantics.

  To do: read ref's 1–3.

Test.

Shys with ex­ plicit line­ -breaks in wiki­ text. (Inserts spaces because newlines are whitespace.)

Shys without ex­plicit line­-breaks in wiki­text.

Shy be­
fore BR. (As expected, nothing special happens here.) 

PRE with ex-
plicit line-
-breaks.

Round-trip through VE: shys were preserved.

Clocks

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Apple emoji keyboard: 🕘 (24 time variants), ⏱ ⏲ ⏰ 🕰 ⌛️ ⏳

Pictogram voting wait series
Yel Blu Grn Red Org
Image          
20px  C {{Await}}, takes a size param.   Reviewing request. {{Reviewing request}}
18px   Later,   Pending

{{Later}}, {{Tobedone}}

17px   Discussion ongoing...
,   Doing...,   [[User:|]] is doing...

{{Discussing}}, {{Doing}}, {{Isdoing}}

  Reviewing...
16px   Checking... {{Checking}}
Others
Crystal Gnome Oval
Image      
20px   Proposal on hold

{{ProposalOnHold}}

  Pending approval {{PendingRequest}}
16px   Started,   In progress

{{Started}}, {{Inprogress}}

  {{Icon}} GAH, takes a size param.
15px   On hold,   On hold until

{{OnHold}}, {{OnHoldUntil}}

Emote

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sMirC and other wp:emoticons

Saturday 5

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TEEL paragraphs

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Stumbled on Schaffer paragraph and then found we don't seem to have anything on the PEEL or TEEL paragraphs that are taught in Australian schools.

User:Pelagic/Incubator/Article idea – TEEL or PEEL (paragraph structure)

Friday 4

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Phab items

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Was searching for something in Phabricator, and along the way found these interesting.

  • T179356 Minerva should not alter or hide edit icons when not operating on mobile-formatted content. (Resolved Nov 2017)
  • T229440 [EPIC] Refactor icon sizing in MF/Minerva to achieve consistency.
  • T208102 Improve compatibility of desktop VisualEditor with desktop Minerva skin. (Resolved May 2019, MW 1.34)
  • T162503 VE in Timeless makes cactions non-responsive, trapping users forever. ("Cactions" means content actions, apparently.)
  • T124168 Show Navbox templates in mobile skins. (Interesting ideas here. Started 2016, no comments since Dec 2018.)
  • T174119 Fix several design features of WikiEditor and CodeEditor to match the general style, and T223155 WikiEditor uses Apex-like styling in Vector for the toolbar; change this to WikimediaUI-style. (OOUI, Apex-like, Wikimedia-UI, oh my!)

Whole-page editing in mobile view

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Was going to create a Phab task, but there already are some:

Adding sections in mobile view

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Other gripes

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  • Mobile editor: page title / tab caption doesn't change to "Editing:…" Given how small the tabs are in Safari, this is a mixed blessing. Maybe it should just be "E:" or ">".

VE as default on mobile

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section

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Older

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September 2019

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For mobile editing, list September subpages. Or, edit September master

User:Pelagic/sandbox/j/2019/09

August 2019

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List August subpages.

User:Pelagic/sandbox/j/2019/08

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