User:Retro/Article improvements

My subpages
Broad editing organization More specific projects
Article improvements Mental accretion Phrases to watch Templates Character encoding DKC organizing Footnotes Tooltips
If my subpages inspire you to carry out an idea yourself or you have any questions or concerns, I'm interested in hearing about it!

I plan to triage this into categories like "formatting change" and "research needed" later. I might sort it alphabetically within those categories.

Wider discussion

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  • Needs more citations for verifiability, particularly for that 1960 confirmed date.
  • This might be worthwhile for redirecting to a larger page, since the amount of potential content for a single unit of measurement is sparse. Hence my idea (repeated elsewhere... somewhere...) to redirect all metric unit prefixes to the metric system page.

Reorganizing

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Luxembourg

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  • Luxembourg wine, Beer in Luxembourg -> Alcohol in Luxembourg
  • Cricket
  • Culture of Luxembourg -> empty sections
  • Culture of Luxembourg +Luxembourg art

The lead is convoluted and confusing. Perception should be split into two sections: Definition and Perception. The old statistics section should be restored. It's possible this should be deleted, and I'll probably put it up for AfD, but I'd like to re-read the deletion policy before doing so. I don't know how much more content there is about stepchildren specifically that couldn't be covered in stepfamilies. Perhaps there is significantly more information that would merit a summary-style split, but the current volume of information does not appear to justify the forking.

  • The "COMAL Kernel Syntax & Semantics"[1] contains the formal definition of the language. Further extensions common to many implementations are described in
  • This sentence just cuts off. How odd. It was added in this edit, and the original url it cites is now dead because hosting was too expensive for the domain owner.

Imperfect

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The guideline above doesn't specifically address whether redirects from foreign names for grammatical terms are appropriate. However, my current view is that from a technical linguistics perspective, it's important that these redirects exist and are maintained because they're useful in uniquely identifying the specific language feature; they aren't just a foreign name for an English concept. In the matter of discussing language itself, it makes sense to retain foreign terms where appropriate so the concept in a specific languages can be distinctly referred to; languages are nuanced enough that the behavior of tenses considered the same will differ between languages.

On Imperfect#French:

  • To form the imperfect for French regular verbs, take the first person plural present tense, the "nous" (we) form, subtract the -ons suffix, and add the appropriate ending (the forms for être (we), whose "nous" form does not end in -ons, are irregular; they start with ét- but have the same endings)
  • This should mention the french name for the imperfect, l'imparfait. Perhaps if it was structured in a passive voice, it could do so more easily (it probably should not read like a how-to guide, as Wikipedia is not a manual.)
  • Other sections should probably refer to the their corresponding native names (and the other redirects should target sections accordingly).

Research needed

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I updated the employee count, but the real point here is contrasting their number of employees with other tech companies with similar numbers of users. For this, an independent source would be ideal.

  • The couple separated in 2013 and divorced in 2017; they have four children.
    • 20:00 of episode 11 of "Talk Nerdy" could provide a reference for the four children at least.

Triaging needed

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Citation issue could be easily fixed by just linking the citations to the bibliography.

The development section should be moved lower; normally it's lower for these types of articles. At the very least, the plot is normally first. But I need to read the guideline to have a clear rationale, and so I can look for other possible oddities using automated searching.

I would like to look into cross article consistency a bit more before changing this article, though, because it's probably a bit of a larger issue.

This is interesting. I wonder if such a merger could succeed today. I don't know enough about it, but it seems possible a merger with thetan may be ideal.

Might be good to add this source to Crowley's resignation, clarify that he apologized for his remarks, and also include the detail about Clinton praising his service following the submission of his resignation letter. I find the current phrasing of his resignation a big long, but also missing some details.

  • [1]
  • Ah, but this is a blogs post, not sure how accepted that, but I think it is cited somewhere already, so it may have to be replaced: [2]
  • [3], also blog?

Code injection is also used benignly in video game speedruns. Arbitrary code execution seems to already have some sources about this; perhaps they could be used to migrate further information over to code injection.

Turing machine

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  • However, certain concepts—e.g. machines with "reset" states and machines with repeating patterns (cf. Hill and Peterson p. 244ff)
  • I doubt they want cf here. I think they meant see. But possibly... I should consult with the original author of the sentence, if they're still active.

Could use improvement. I find the mention of the Chinese Room Argument and whether computers can think somewhat dubious in the section on criticism, but it also seems like a plausible perspective.

  • {{nowrap|5/2 == 2.5}} - this block is a bit dubious; ideally there would be a more specialized template that already does this.
  • Perhaps all division examples should settle to 5/2, for consistency, and to avoid the messiness of base ten not representing 7/2 as a decimal in a finite number of digits.

Should say "for other uses of converse, see Converse (disambiguation)". I will need to investigate disambiguation guidelines to ensure this edit is valid.

  • "allegedly" tried to assassinate Vladimir Lenin is bad phrasing. It's probably already an issue of contention though, so I might want to check the talk page. I probably will want to avoid touching this, unless I gain a better understanding of Wikipedia's broader use of the word "alleged". But I understand the issue; it arises in the controversy section. The real question is are those who doubt accepted by the historical community, or are they receiving undue weight by having a section. If the former, then perhaps the whole article should be rephrased, though that's complicated.
  • [4] - dubious source, and there appears to be close paraphrasing from it.
  • {{{1}}}
    • Should have quotation marks around it.
  • which is commonly used everywhere, for example in newspapers.
    • Little bit outdated, maybe generalize to science reporting.

Some criticism of the Donna Strickland extended to the fact that her male collegue, who at the time had a Wikipedia page with about the same amount of content, while a draft about her was rejected.

Hawaii is inconsistently spelled. This page is poorly formatted. Article content should not be hidden.

Better Formatting, less redundancy (don't need to specify HTML codes, since they are entirely derived from the Unicode character points.)

  • It takes a stronger stance than the Sagan standard ("Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence"), instead applying to even non-extraordinary claims.
  • I don't see how it can take a stronger stance when Sagan has *extraordinary evidence*, which is stronger than just *evidence*. Possibly original research.

This section is bad because it does not highlight the shared belief of the intellectual dark web early enough. It would be more clear if this idea was introduced earlier.

Red color accessibility

  • A federal investigation that followed convinced President Dwight D. Eisenhower to sign an Executive Order on April 29, 1953, that barred homosexuals from obtaining jobs at the federal level.
  • Verify the citation, the source does not seem to match the claim.

Picture could be updated with his stanford.edu homepage picture, instead of using his old blurry B&W student picture. (Assuming the license requirements are met.)

L = {"a"}* = {"a"n}

  • I am skeptical that the Kleene star is being used properly here.
  • The solution to the LCS problem for two arbitrary sequences, X and Y, amounts to constructing some function
  • But that's not what it amounts to, that's what it actually is.

Needs independent sources.

Should link to Wiktionary as disambig or some other such. At the very least, a Wiktionary link is needed, even if it remains an article.

Could add that line segments geometrically are in the symmetry group D_2.

  • TeX and LaTex should probably be removed from List of programming languages, because they are markup languages, not programming languages.
  • But they do have components of programming languages... I wonder how they are categorized on Wikipedia. Probably both as markup languages and programming languages.
  • Look up how the term "Programming languages" is used.
  • Is Hamilton C shell a programming language or a language utility?
  • Look up if the sources about the Hamilton C shell call it a "scripting language"

Need to add in information about them coming back to this episode after they've revised their views. I think they made a new later episode that has ManBearPig. This should be mentioned in the lead.

All the nitty-gritty specifics could be split into a separate article; those reading the article on Mastermind are unlikely to appreciate a step-by-step dissection of a few of the algorithms. The structure is lacking with regards to algorithms.

  • but that was mistakenly rejected as too complex to implement.
    • I'm confused: to be clear, it was *not* too complex to implement, but they accidentally thought it was too complicated to implement? Clearly I will need to do some digging into the history of MP3 to understand the true story.

should disambig link to "Shell" on top. Or should it? I don't really know how disambig hatnotes are supposed to work.

"Born" gives the weird impression that his first name is literally "P". But that might just be me. Still, if his name hadn't changed, why have a separate name in born. Perhaps this is a case of the original article author matching the article title and creating redundancy in the lead therein.

  • PDF was standardized as an open format, ISO 32000, in 2008, and no longer requires any royalties for its implementation.
  • Did one ever have to pay royalties to implement it? (Yes, that's probably how capitalism works.)

This needs to incorporate latest version front and center.

  • A future release "Rhea" (3.2.x) will be made January 7, 2017.
  • Out of date; contradicts [probably their blog?]

Whatever the case, it seems possible that this action saved the composer's life: during this time Shostakovich feared for himself and his family.

I would like more citations and detail here.

[5]

Something more clear needs to be written about the eminent domain lawsuit

  • On small images, GIF can achieve greater compression than PNG
  • [But it contradicts the later part]: ...
  • These explanations need cleanup, which I can probably provide after doing some research.

Should have its own page, but the ideal title will need to be clarified.

  • https://www.codesimplicity.com/post/what-is-a-bug/
    • "Okay, most programmers know the story—way back when, somebody found an actual insect inside a computer that was causing a problem. (Actually, apparently engineers have been calling problems “bugs” since earlier than that, but that story is fun.)" - interesting, I wonder if the Wikipedia page discusses this in detail. Also, it's undue weight to feature a random 2016 US report in the "history" section of the article.

Include details about some outlits characterizing the show as imperialist and fascist. But I suppose it might be too fringe.

I definitely know a bit about the rules for this game.

This article has several problems, which are somewhat related:

  • The scope of this article isn't clear. It seems it may want to be a list of disparate Latin character sets. Otherwise, the notability of this topic is somewhat questionable, and it may be ideal for this to be merged into ISO/IEC 8859-1
  • The lead is one big self reference, especially with the italicized addition.

Special:Diff/838420362

  • Inconsistency between pages:
    • The Disaster Artist
      • named after Ripley actor Matt Damon (whose name Wiseau had misremembered).
    • The Room (film)
      • Ripley actor Matt Damon, whose first name Wiseau had misheard
  • Some quantitative studies have been done on the subject
    • And? What were the results?
  • Sorely lacking in references and inline citations.
  • One thing I can think of is the Stallman story (it's on the FSF website, but the author might be Stallman), that's a parable about free software. But I've got to ensure it has the cultural impact I thought it did.
  • Fibre Channel fabric functionality to Fibre Channel devices over an IP network.
  • This is indeed too technical to understand; the lead has excessive undefined jargon.
  • Haskell used to use this exact model for its Boolean type, but at the time of writing, most Haskell programs use syntactic sugar "if a then b else c" construct which unlike ifThenElse does not compose unless either wrapped in another function or re-implemented as shown in The Haskell section of this page.
  • This could probably be moved to a disambiguation from football, unless it's overwhelmingly commonly referred to as such. Even as a programmer myself, I don't think it's correct to consider the programming term the primary or popular usage of the term, and it's not even the origin of the term. But maybe the "rule" suffix adds something (but I don't think so).
  • Infinite_list
    • Bad redirect; no longer existing section.
  • Is "delayed evaluation" different from lazy evaluation?
  • I had some mathematical doubts here, but I don't have enough expertise in this area to justifiably dispute it.
  • xy (xXyX) ⇒(xRyyRx ).
  • x, yX (xRyyRx )
  • There are serious contradictions in this article. (I wish I had given examples when I originally wrote this.)
  • The citation needed are erroneous.

Would more appropriately belong on physical attractiveness, rather than attractiveness.

The section on "Science" is not my taste; ideally science can be spread throughout an article, without requiring an explicit "science" section. There are exceptions; largely philosophical topics may merit a science section for the associated cognitive science to keep discussion focused.

This also may not merit its own article, or it needs serious renovation; most of the article discusses physical attraction.

I would like to add The release video game of the Lemmings video game in 1991 continued the suicidal lemmings trope; it featured the player guiding a group of anthropomorphised lemmings through a number of obstacles to a designated exit., but I need a good source for its general cultural impact first.

I also think that perhaps Lemmings should redirect to the video game, and there should be a {{redirect}} hatnote on the video game's article (with more parameters).

Should be a standalone article. Find and replace should NOT redirect to regular expression (there are more generic find-and-replaces, namely straightforward plaintext replacement). I could include a screenshot of the Notepad++ find and replace box. There's also Text replacement.

  • Strange section... WP:OR?
  • CiteSeer does not deserve a separate entry on the list from CiteSeerX (CiteSeer *became* CiteSeerX)
  • A gateway to government science information and research results. Science.gov provides a search of over 45 scientific databases and 200 million pages of science information with just one query, and is a gateway to over 2000 scientific Websites.
  • "People do not "lose" their life, but instead "return", for they are returning to God (who initially gave what the person is as a person)."
  • This is misleading, and not necessarily representative of the whole of stoicism (or modern stoicism, which is typically secular, at least in my experience.) Not all stoicism is based in Christianity.

Needs a page. Maybe it could occupy the main guy page, with the disambiguation being moved somewhere separate. Or maybe I'm just completely mistaken.

  • Media critic Andrew Keen uses the phrase in his 2007 critique of Wikipedia's policy to let anyone edit. He believes, along with Marshall Poe, that this leads to an encyclopedia of common knowledge, not expert knowledge. He believes the "wisdom of the crowd" will distort truth."
  • How is this relevant for a discussion of the phrase "2+2=5"? Is it simply sufficient for me to use a phrase to merit mention? If I happened to use the phrase in a paper, would the paper become the modern understanding of the phrase? Probably not, but if one allows content like this, then it becomes trivia (of course my example is a false analogy, but the point may still hold merit).
  • Another dispute involved the climate researcher William Connolley, a Wikipedia editor who was opposed by others.
    • I suppose this could be resorting to tribalism, and that would be bad, but I don't think it's tribalism to ask how Connolley's opinions were viewed by the broader scientific community and perhaps even what those opinions actually were. And I'm curious why he was banned (but that would be a bit WP:OR if not in separate news articles).

Two part of a series templates seem excessive.

  • Use in the wild: To them, the "doxing" of Violentacrez—"doxing" is hacker slang for publishing someone's personal information in order to intimidate or punish them—is an assault on the very structure of Reddit itself.
  • On October 3, 2018, Jackson Cosko, a House fellow for the Democratic party, was arrested by the U.S. Capitol Police (USCP). He allegedly posted private, identifying information of several Senators to Wikipedia. According to the USCP, the personal information of Republican Senators Lindsey Graham, Mike Lee and Orrin Hatch was anonymously posted to Wikipedia the week before on Thursday September 27, 2018. The information included home addresses and phone numbers. All three lawmakers are with the Senate Judiciary Committee. The alleged doxing occurred during the hearing of Supreme Court nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh. Cosko was initially charged with witness tampering, threats in interstate communications, unauthorized access of a government computer, identity theft, second degree burglary and unlawful entry. Cosko was fired after his arrest. He worked with Democratic Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX), Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif), Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.), and former Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif).[55][56][57] If convicted of all six charges Cosko faces up to 20 years in prison.
    • The use of 'allegedly' here seems rather strange, but I guess he hasn't been convicted yet.
  • Why is Law of Jante linked on this page?
  • Mark Adler, Thomas Boutell, Christian Brunschen, Adam M. Costello, Lee Daniel Crocker, Andreas Dilger, Oliver Fromme, Jean-loup Gailly, Chris Herborth, Aleks Jakulin, Neal Kettler, Tom Lane, Alexander Lehmann, Chris Lilley, Dave Martindale, Owen Mortensen, Keith S. Pickens, Robert P. Poole, Glenn Randers-Pehrson, Greg Roelofs, Willem van Schaik, Guy Schalnat, Paul Schmidt, Tim Wegner, Jeremy Wohl
  • Not everyone's name needs to be wiki-linked; not everyone who contributed to the format is necessarily notable. But then again, red links exist for a reason. Perhaps individually evaluating them for notability would be good before wholesale removing the red links.

Several phrasings here are non-neutral.

Improving neutrality of phrasing; replacing phrases like "was ignited", "a game he referred to as 'billboarding'", "Armed with an axe and saw".

Danson's interest in environmental concerns was ignited when he was twelve years old and Bill Breed, then curator of geology at the Museum of Northern Arizona, introduced Danson and friend Marc Gaede to a game he referred to as "billboarding". Armed with an axe and saw, Breed, Gaede, and Danson ended up destroying over 300 outdoor advertising signs.

Danson's interest in environmentalism continued over the years, and he began to be concerned with the state of the world's oceans.

Danson became interested in environmentalism after Bill Breed, then curator of geology at the Museum of Northern Arizona,

  • Wikipedia has been criticized for exhibiting systemic bias, for presenting a mixture of "truths, half truths, and some falsehoods",[20] and for being subject to manipulation and spin in controversial topics.[21] In 2017, Facebook announced that it would help readers detect fake news by suitable links to Wikipedia articles. YouTube announced a similar plan in 2018.[22]
  • These sentences individually may be true, but having these sentences next to each other seems to me minor SYNTH if Facebook and Twitter weren't criticized. But maybe it's an apple case. Also, they didn't include links exclusively to Wikipedia, but also included other online encyclopedias, if I remember correctly.

'Eco-terrorism' -> 'Ecoterrorism'; if the current usage supports it. My spell checker seems to disagree.

Should probably be redirected to ecotage (but this has been attempted in the past and reverted (sometimes incidentally), so it should be considered carefully).

Oh, I see it's this edit that finally landed it at sabotage. Just because a term pre-dated it, doesn't mean that's the most useful target. In fact, that information could be added to the page's history.

Perhaps it should simply be a section on sabotage.

Or perhaps The Monkey Wrench Gang? Nah. I do think Billboarding should become a disambiguation, perhaps with one of the links to The Monkey Wrench Gang. Or maybe Ecotage!.

Monkeywrenching probably needs its own article based on the way it's used; it's a broad enough term it deserves its own focused discussion.

I could even include the editor from before to help with properly developing it.

  • Should be a disambiguation page, as it doesn't uniquely refer to 3D graphics
  • other perceived inhumane treatment of dairy cattle
    • "perceived" - I need more sources than one for a phrase like that, perhaps. It's a bit dismissive.
    • When raw milk is left standing for a while, it turns "sour". This is the result of fermentation, where lactic acid bacteria ferment the lactose in the milk into lactic acid. Prolonged fermentation may render the milk unpleasant to consume. This fermentation process is exploited by the introduction of bacterial cultures (e.g. Lactobacilli sp., Streptococcus sp., Leuconostoc sp., etc.) to produce a variety of fermented milk products. The reduced pH from lactic acid accumulation denatures proteins and causes the milk to undergo a variety of different transformations in appearance and texture, ranging from an aggregate to smooth consistency. Some of these products include sour cream, yogurt, cheese, buttermilk, viili, kefir, and kumis. See Dairy product for more information.
      • Perhaps this should mention the FDA's two hour recommendation (with the one hour adjustment when 90 degrees). I will want to independently verify that fact (presumably other research has been done, and it could corroborate it).

Worthy of a page?

Perhaps it should mention article 13. But it might be undue (or difficult to find sources to prove due weight).

    1. Example use in code
  • is WP:OR (although maybe ), and probably not necessary for the article anyway (I'm pretty sure even a layperson could get the gist of the concept without having a code example).
  • But I dunno.

Is missing a reception section. 'Themes' is not a substitute, as it presupposes the book's quality.

  • The criticism is very interesting. I would like to investigate Wikipedia's policy on age of sources, as the main criticizing article cites several other articles which may also be useful in understanding this point. Currently, I am investigating whether the EFF is largely corporate advocacy and government deregulation (which would challenge its stated missions] But this is beyond the scope of ...
  • Is Charity Navigator a reliable source? I should check the RS noticeboard.
  • 2000 - Armed Forces Act 2016 - what does this functionally mean?
  • Arabella Hunt - this Arabella Hunt case seems to have more layers than are represented here, as it seems Hunt didn't know she was marrying a woman and claimed Poulter was intersex, hence the court evaluating Poulter as a "perfect women in all her parts".
  • Regular expression page should mention dot-all mode and singleline mode are synonyms, and 's' is often used as the abbreviation because of this.
    • (It probably already mentions this; I just want to make it explicit).
  • Sometimes, Einstein's name is used synonymously with 'genius'. Someone who's considered a genius might be referred to as "the next Einstein".
    • Here's my OR, but it'd be nice if I could actually find linguistics literature on it. I think it's quite possible. My original source is a bit silly.

This is categorized in Category:Television shows involved in plagiarism controversies, but it doesn't mention any plagiarism controversies. I wonder if other pages in this category have similar issues. This category's worthwhileness seems a bit suspect to me, but I guess plagiarism controversies are interesting and noteworthy. Maybe the category should be renamed?

Many unnecessary duplicate links. The tool can't detect them, because it ignores links in tables and citations. Some of the duplicate links seem to contradict the notes, especially with the piping.

  • I don't remember the specific problem I saw, but I believe it was a terminology or formatting consistency discrepancy among multiple pages.
  • Needs a better lead, since it should explain that the paradox arises when the past prevents the events leading up to the change. But I need to read the SEP article and other sources to be sure; the SEP article may contradict this idea.
  • I think the explanation for Andrew Carlssin is unclear and incomplete. It's possible (likely?) that he never existed, even if it was reported in Yahoo news. Especially considering Snopes denies it ( https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/insider-trading/ ) I wonder how reliable Snopes is a source for WP; it seems alright, even though primary sources are closer. And a source by this title, but not this publication (the link I give is The Scotsman, but Snopes cites Edinburough Daily News), appeared refuting it ( https://www.scotsman.com/lifestyle/anyone-can-be-fooler-of-the-world-1-874783 ). I also should just do a wiki-wide search for "Andrew Carlssin" to clean up all the links.
  • Despite saying that she was in favour of "peaceful negotiations" to end apartheid,[234][235] Thatcher opposed sanctions imposed on South Africa by the Commonwealth and the European Economic Community (EEC).
    • This feels WP:SYNTHy, but I can't tell because I don't have the book that sources it. Peaceful negotiations is also scare-quoted.
  • Thatcherism came to refer to her policies as well as aspects of her ethical outlook and personal style"
    • "The term" should precede "Thatcherism". Or perhaps it should be italicized? I think MOS:WORDSASWORDS is the relevant guideline here.
  • Lord Salisbury (13 years and 252 days, in three spells) and the longest continuous period in office since Lord Liverpool (14 years and 305 days)
    • When were these previous leaders in office?
  • I also feel like the whole section political career section could be split into a separate "political career of Margaret Thatcher" article. It's been done with other politicians, and it feels like this is the largest part of a very long article. But this may be a more general pattern than this single article.

Might be worth merging into Limit (mathematics).

I'm not sure about the relevance of the music section; but I would like to look at this carefully. I currently think it should be removed, but... I dunno. I don't get how this deserves an extensive music section with track lists, while DKC doesn't deserve one?

Pretty short, may not be worth a page.

Content contradiction

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Should perhaps redirect to a specific section like "Track list", but this is a broader question than this individual redirect.

Various problems, looks like it may be English difficulties (but also some sloppiness, like periods lacking spaces after ending a sentence.)

whom he met at a fire; what is this talking about; it needs more clarity.

Why was dinner and desert service piped to Tableware; why not just use tableware? This makes me suspect there's something deeper going on here. When I get results like this from a web search, I'm more willing to consider it's a legitimate term. I think dinner and desert service may be worth a section redirect somewhere with some explanation (perhaps a full article, but seems unlikely currently).

  • Why does this have 1=| background = #D6D6D6 in {{Planet}}?

Has a weird records table: {{S-start}} ... {{{S-end}}; it's also in a weird location; if noteworthy, it should have its own section, not be hidden at the bottom.

This is basically a disambiguation page.

A noteworthy XKCD... should probably redirect to XKCD. It might even be a worthwhile article on its own right.

  • Sections aren't normally separated by sources. These tables could be merged. What are the two rank columns in the Ethnologue section (needs clarity).
    • The below table is ranked by Ethnologue because it uses the most recent figures.

Two useful searches, for finding '=' as a tie indicator:

It seems to me that Tie or perhaps Tie (draw) would be a better target. TODO: RfD.