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Wikipedia:Harassment has been marked as a policy

Wikipedia:Harassment (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs) has recently been edited to mark it as a policy. This is an automated notice of the change (more information). -- VeblenBot (talk) 18:51, 10 May 2008 (UTC)

Bot

First, thank you, I've found this to be awesome : ) Second, can you switch my target page to the talk page? Thanks in advance : ) - jc37 20:01, 10 May 2008 (UTC)

source for descriptive int

"The Concept and the Role of the Model in Mathematics and Natural and Social Sciences"

I couldn't find a good way to link to this section, so I posted a screen shot of it at Image:Des-int.jpg. You can see it at Talk:Descriptive interpretation for now. There is probably a better way to do this. I thought this would help explain things. Pontiff Greg Bard (talk) 22:32, 12 May 2008 (UTC)

Empty Domains

Hi Carl: Thanks for adding those references to Interpretation re: Empty Domains. I remember reading about this in Rothmahler and Hodges both, I was just surprised that it was the Proof Theory that became problematic in the case of empty domains -- nonetheless I'll check those references for my own edification. Zero sharp (talk) 19:15, 13 May 2008 (UTC)

Well, "proof theory" in the most elementary sense - previously valid deduction rules become unsound in empty domains. I found several other relevant papers, including:

A tableau proof method admitting the empty domain. Melvin Fitting, Notre Dame J. Formal Logic Volume 12, Number 2 (1971), 219-224.

That paper is devoted to showing how to modify the usual method of analytic tableau to work with empty domains.

I think that that whole section could be rewritten at some point, but I have been trying not to edit the article until I figure out what it's supposed to contain. This may inspire me to improve the empty domain article, though. — Carl (CBM · talk) 19:21, 13 May 2008 (UTC)

Copyright question on WP:BOTREQ

Sorry to bother you, but I have raised a question about copyright on WP:BOTREQ regarding the use of a certain web site for creating hundreds of thousands missing geographical articles for Africa, Asia and South America. The web site in question claims copyright (they all do, don't they?). From what I have understood, they are combining public domain sources with proprietary commercial GIS products, so part of the content appears to be their own work. Since you are active on discussions related to copyright, I thought you might be able to clarify the issue, or at least suggest a better person to ask. Personally I know next to nothing about copyright, so I'm probably just suffering from acute copyright paranoia. The discussion is here. – Sadalmelik ☎ 06:39, 14 May 2008 (UTC)

Another potential Peer Review bug

Hi Carl, when the bot does the SAPRs, you should be aware that the script by AndyZ chokes on article titles that contain special characters like ampersand. When I tried to get the SAPR on Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games as User:AZPR earlier today, it gave a review for just Mario. What worked was to click on the edit this article link in the peer review - that gave the correct SAPR. I hope this is clear - please ask if you need more details or further clarification. Thanks, Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 03:36, 14 May 2008 (UTC)

Most likely the problem is that the script is making a URL for the title, but it not handling the ampersand, which has a special meaning in URLs and has to be replaced by &amp;. Once I get the archiving part active, the semi-auto stuff will be next on my list. — Carl (CBM · talk) 10:39, 14 May 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for the explanation - this is an old bug, but I had not encountered it recently and so thought you should know (assuming you will use parts of AndyZ's script). I archived PR about 7 or 8 hours ago and have been archiving it every 2 days or so (sooner if needed), so please let me know when there will be a bot test and I will hold off (no hurry, just thinking ahead). Thanks again for all you do, Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 10:56, 14 May 2008 (UTC)

When a trial is approved for the PeerReviewBot request, then I will be able to test out the code (it's already written and ready for live testing). So you should stop archiving once that trial is granted. — Carl (CBM · talk) 11:00, 14 May 2008 (UTC)

Looks like the trial is approved. For the moment, I will run the script by hand so I can examine the edits. Once the trial ends, I will make the script run automatically once a day. — Carl (CBM · talk) 11:08, 14 May 2008 (UTC)

Great news! I will still semi-transclude reviews over 10 k, if that is OK. Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 11:29, 14 May 2008 (UTC)

Yes, that's fine. Could you make me a list of the steps you follow when you do that? It's task #3 for PeerReviewBot. — Carl (CBM · talk) 11:48, 14 May 2008 (UTC)

How to partially transclude a peer review request:

1) I use your tool here to see which are the largest requests. I usually know which ones I have already semi-transcluded, but the edit summary also tells me this if needed.

2) I open the peer review for editing.

3) The first thing I do is paste <onlyinclude> as the very first thing in the whole peer review, even before the header. So ===[[Wikipedia:Peer review/Black Moshannon State Park/archive1|Black Moshannon State Park]]=== would become <onlyinclude>===[[Wikipedia:Peer review/Black Moshannon State Park/archive1|Black Moshannon State Park]]===

4) The second thing I do is paste <includeonly>:'''Note''': Because of its length, this peer review is not transcluded. It is still open and located at [[Wikipedia:Peer review/]].</includeonly></onlyinclude> right after the signature of the nominator (and before any reviewer's comments). Note this does not yet say the name of the article or the archve number.

5) The third thing I do is copy the name and archive number (here "Black Moshannon State Park/archive1") and add it to the notice, so it now reads <includeonly>:'''Note''': Because of its length, this peer review is not transcluded. It is still open and located at [[Wikipedia:Peer review/Black Moshannon State Park/archive1]].</includeonly></onlyinclude>

6) The last thing I do is put a standard edit summary in: Peer review is still open, just not transcluded to save space at [[WP:PR]]

If the bot semi-transcludes, I would make it so that it ignores its own edits for archiving. I also thought that a "nomination only above this line" and/or "reviews below this line" would help a bot placing the semi translcusion cut off.Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 14:48, 14 May 2008 (UTC)

ze da vinci barnstar

		The da Vinci Barnstar
		Thanks again for your help at WP:VPT, I was able to do exactly what I desired with your expert assistance. Also, great work with the quick preview script. Keep it up. xenocidic ( talk ¿ review ) 17:12, 14 May 2008 (UTC)

VeblenBot supports for the WikiProject Systems

Hi Carl, I run the WikiProject systems and it's assessment, which I installed a year ago. Now I updated this Assessment structure with fields, with the WikiProject Mathematics as example. I want to ask you, if you could develop similair VeblenBot supports to this renewed WikiProject Systems Assessment.

Yesterday I tryed to complete the necessary Wikipedia:WikiProject Systems/Wikipedia 1.0/Structure. And I think I only missed a few spots, see here. Now the main thing that is missing, I think, is the VeblenBot, who will complete the info!?

I hope you can establish this support. Systems science is divided in multiple rather independent fields and the current overall assessment isn't of much help to these multiple fields. With the differentation in fields I hope this situation will improve. This differentation in fields is also helping to get a more complete picture of systems science and its fields. All the more reasons to complete the renewed assessment.

I would really appreciate your help here. -- Marcel Douwe Dekker (talk) 14:37, 15 May 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia talk:Article size

I fail to see how anything that I have engaged in qualifies as edit warring. A proposal was made on March 27, 2008 Wikipedia talk:Article size#Proposal. I participated in that discussion -- WHICH IS ONGOING -- and while a consensus has not been reached, the majority opinion opposes that change.

Despite this, User:Oakwillow, who has not previously participated, decides that one argument on the pro-change side is particularly convincing so he unilaterally changes it. User:Bobblehead reverts it, as he should, and then I revert it when Oakwillow does it for a second time. Bobblehead reverts Oakwillows third attempt and I advise Oakwillows of his potential 3RR violation. I then posted the following on the discussion page:

Actually the discussion above focused only on the table and ignored the very first section WP:Article size#Readability issues which first raises the issue of "readable prose". This section has been there well before the change in the table which appears to me have been a logical step to make the article consistent. If it was intended all along, as some claim, to only use the concept of total bytes then the concept of "readable prose" never would have been included at all. There was, and still is, a proposal to change the table. This proposal has not secured a majority of support, let alone a consensus. If you have an alternative proposal, then spell it out and we can discuss it. Tom (North Shoreman) (talk) 17:40, 14 May 2008 (UTC)

As you can see, this post was followed by considerable back and forth. Despite this active debate, Oakwillow again reverted the text.

My SECOND revert occurred AFTER Oakwillow's fourth revert which violated 3RR -- I was in the process of preparing a request to the administrators when another administrator independently blocked Oakwillow. Why don't you tell me EXACTLY where, in your opinion, I stepped over the line into edit warring -- there is certainly nothing on edit warring policy that is applicable.

I hardly see how reverting a change made that is contrary to the majority opinion in an ongoing discussion constitutes an edit war on my behalf. I consider your warning on my talk page heavy handed and inappropriate -- that is, of course, unless you agree that Oakwillow's actions in ignoring the process of consensus was appropriate. Do you? Tom (North Shoreman) (talk) 16:06, 15 May 2008 (UTC)

PR redesign part 2

Hi Carl, SandyGeorgia has some questions about the bot archiving PRs for articles that are at FAC. The discussion is at User_talk:SandyGeorgia#Heads_up_and_a_goofy_idea.

She did not like the idea of splitting PR into a Featured PR and regular PR. I have two more goofy ideas.

1) Would it be possible to have a listing of all the PRs in one central location (like the current TOC is) but have 10 separate pages for the 10 topics? That way you could see them all at a glance, but if it were 10 pages of PR, there wouldn't have to be any partial transclusion tricks to save space. Or could they be listed chronologically and there would be 26 or 52 PR pages a year - just open a new PR page every two weeks (26) or even every week (52)? If this were the case, perhaps there would be no need to archive either (the page would eventually become its own archive).

2) Would it be possible to semi-transclude all PRs from the start (so only the request shows), but have some sort of bot generated info displayed? This peer review has received X edits by Y editors? Again the idea is to make the size of the PR page showing all requests more manageable, while still giving useful information.

I also think once the bot is doing archiving there is no need for the link to edit the article talk page (I had Geometry guy keep it in as it helps me archive). Probably also do not need to transclude the SAPR notice to the WP:PR page if they all get one from the bot right away - as long as someone opening the PR subpage for the article sees it, that would be OK.

Hope these ideas are useful and not too goofy, thanks again for all your help Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 01:56, 16 May 2008 (UTC)

WP:1.0 bot

I'm not sure whether you saw my reply on Oleg's talk page, but yeah, I'm interested in being part of that group. (Mostly for design stuff, because even though I have some programming experience, I don't know any Perl.) I'd also recommend asking Walkerma and Kirill Lokshin, as they were also part of the group that worked on the original implementation of the bot. Dropping a note on the WikiProject Council should generate more interest as well. Titoxd^{(?!? - cool stuff)} 08:08, 17 May 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for following up. I did see your note on Oleg's page, and was glad to add you to my (short) list of people who have expressed interest. I don't expect to make any movement on the WP 1.0 front until June; right now I am working on a bot for the Peer Review process. I will be sure to advertise the WP 1.0 bot work very widely. M plan is to work on essentially a complete overhaul, which means we have an opportunity to add new features if there is enough demand for them. — Carl (CBM · talk) 12:25, 17 May 2008 (UTC)

Semi Automated Peer Review

Hi Carl, thanks for the update and for your progress on the Peer Review Bot. I just run the script as AZPR and paste the whole result into the correct page - currently WP:PRA/MY08. I do not do any checking or filtering except to make sure that the names match (the ampersand bug I pointed out) and that I did all the ones that needed new SAPRs. Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 19:12, 17 May 2008 (UTC)

Thanks Carl for doing this. It shaves another few hundred K off the peer review page size, so I think we will be much clearer of the limits now. Geometry guy 23:14, 17 May 2008 (UTC)

No problem. I already have most of necessary API code, so these tasks can be programmed at a very high level of abstraction. I have already switched the PR page to stop transcluding the semiauto notices. — Carl (CBM · talk) 23:23, 17 May 2008 (UTC)

I guess you mean your edit to Template:PR/header: peer review postexpand size is now down to 1.45MB now that my expensive code has been removed. Geometry guy 23:32, 17 May 2008 (UTC)

Thanks - this was very fast (and the Cogan House Covered Bridge SAPR is linked properly - that's my current PR). User:AndyZ wrote the original peer review script and used to do them. I started doing them by hand and then AndyZ gave me access to the AZPR account. No one else has access to AZPR besides AndyZ and me, and knowing how much work it is to do them by hand, I doubt anyone else would do them, so I would say automate the SAPRs. I always thought it would be great if the SAPR appeared as soon as the PR was listed - give the eager ones something to do. We might want to ask AndyZ about this (I have his email address, if you want me to try contacting him that way too) - he may have some ideas for tweaks. I think having the PR script easily available to any user would be great - lots of folks have trouble installing the script.
There are two potential bugs I can think of: First, there are a few people who hate the SAPRs and do not want them - lately this is one a month at most. I use the SAPR count for the PR number at WP:FAS so I note when there is a no SAPR request at that month's WP:PRA page. Not sure if you want to make opting out an option - they can always ignore it. Second, there are a few articles that get two PRs in a month - London Underground was a recent example. As it is, the newest SAPRs go at the top, so the link is to the newest one. Not sure if this is a problem or not, but I know sometimes things not being single-valued is a problem. Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 23:55, 17 May 2008 (UTC)

Next GAR archive

Could you ask VeblenBot to list Category:GAR/37, the next GAR archive. Thanks, Geometry guy 18:52, 18 May 2008 (UTC)

I added 37, and removed 34 and 35. — Carl (CBM · talk) 11:32, 19 May 2008 (UTC)

Bug?

Hi Carl, I was looking at wp:pr/d (which loads much faster) and saw that Pat the Bunny was archived on the 15th by the bot, but it still listed. Not sure what the problem is - both the PR itself and article talk page seem to have been properly archived. If I should have reported this elsewhere (the bot's talk page?), please let me know. Thanks, Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 10:59, 19 May 2008 (UTC)

The first few that the bot archived had the wrong template replaced. I thought I had found them all and fixed them by hand, but I missed that one. I'm glad you pointed it out. — Carl (CBM · talk) 11:30, 19 May 2008 (UTC)

No problem - I look through all the PRs every few days to try and find problems and replies to my comments I may have missed. I also fixed a PR that was archived at the PR itself, then just had the notice removed from the article talk page. Should I have left that for the bot to find? Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 12:59, 19 May 2008 (UTC)

During the trial, it would be better to leave them for the bot to find. Once the trial is over, and the bot is only running once per day, the page User:PeerReviewBot/Logs/Archive will show any errors that the bot finds when it tries to do the archiving. For a couple days I was running the bot frequently by hand to look for immediate bugs (like the one you noticed), so the log for the first few days wasn't very useful. — Carl (CBM · talk) 15:39, 19 May 2008 (UTC)

OK, do you want me to undo the change? Also do you want me to give you a heads up if I find more of these (so you know and can check if the bot finds it)? I am not sure what all the bot checks, but this one would have been easy to find if there was a check of talk pages of articles listed at WP:PR. Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 15:49, 19 May 2008 (UTC)

help request related to zeteo

Hello,

I have another question I probably need your help with. In setting up zeteo, and adding all references to the database contained in all WP articles, it turns out to be necessary to distinguish between authors which have the same name, but are not the same person.

It is a pretty difficult task to do this without errors, but an approximate idea I had is the following. I want to measure the "distance" of two references by consindering the articles where they are cited and set up a distance of two articles.

My idea is to go up in the category tree and look for the smallest category which contains both articles. To do so, and this is where I would like to ask you to help, I need the following:

- the list of articles including their categories (I already have this from your previous post)

- the list of categories. Along with any category I'd need to know which categories contain this category, so for example [[Category:Geometry]] is contained in [[Category:Mathematics]] which in turn is contained in ...

Could you export such a list (for the moment I only need the 2nd) for me?

Thank you very much,

Jakob.scholbach (talk) 15:30, 19 May 2008 (UTC)

Yes, I can do that. I'll send it to you this evening or tomorrow. — Carl (CBM · talk) 15:44, 19 May 2008 (UTC)

Great! I don't know if it is easier or more difficult for you not to glue together all pages into one huge text file in the end. I you somehow do glue them into a single file in the end, please do not do it, but leave it in some smaller pieces (no matter what number), because it is a bit cumbersome to get the file into manageable pieces. Thanks, Jakob.scholbach (talk) 15:56, 20 May 2008 (UTC)

Here are two files with the information, in bzip format: list of categories, category membership entries. Neither one is very large compared to the files I made last time. — Carl (CBM · talk) 18:04, 20 May 2008 (UTC)

Hm, it says the files are not found...? Jakob.scholbach (talk) 21:41, 20 May 2008 (UTC)

Sorry about that, I typed them wrong. I fixed the links. — Carl (CBM · talk) 01:55, 21 May 2008 (UTC)

Peer Review bug

Hi Carl, not sure if you will see this since you are traveling, but the SAPRs are not showing up in the Peer Review by date page. The most recent one to have it is the PR for New York State Route 32. I checked and it is not on the individual page either. I can use the script to add notices if worse comes to worse, but hope this is just a glitch. Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 04:50, 23 May 2008 (UTC)

• I see the bot has not run since the 19th and PR needs to be archived too. I will archive, then add SAPR notices using the AZPR account. Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 15:52, 23 May 2008 (UTC)
  • I also note twice recently someone has listed a PR for an article that is already at PR - first was Evolutionary history of plants, second was Kristallnacht. I deleted the second request in each case, but would there be some way to not allow duplicates? Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 16:43, 23 May 2008 (UTC)
    • I will put in the SAPR links via AZPR until you return. Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 01:09, 25 May 2008 (UTC)
      • Odd problem - Wikipedia:Peer review/Siege of Lal Masjid/archive1 was not properly archived. The article talk page was archived correctly, but the template was left on the PR page itself. Then an editor doing cleanup moved the PR archive tag on the talk page and the PR was listed a second time on the PR page. Again if there can be some check that an article is not already listed once at PR this would be avoided. I have properly archived the Wikipedia:Peer review/Siege of Lal Masjid/archive1 page so it should be OK now. Hope this is clear, Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 03:10, 26 May 2008 (UTC)

• This is a reply to several comments.
  • The bot was not running while I was gone. This is a disadvantage of the "trial" system. Once the bot is approved I will make it run automatically. Thanks for making the links by hand during its absence. I had been running the bot by hand each day until May 21st, there were simply no peer reviews that needed to be archived for a few days up to that point.
  • I don't know any way to prevent an article from being listed twice, any more than there is a way to prevent an article from being on AFD twice simultaneously. In those examples you gave, was the talk page template actually in place on the article talk page? If not, I can make the bot detect that error.
  • I can also make the bot detect the error where the article talk page is archived but the peer review itself is not archived. This and the previous item will need to be a third "bot request" task, and I will work on this code in June. At the moment the bot doesn't try to fix these errors, it simply makes a note that something is wrong and skips that peer review page.
• — Carl (CBM · talk) 02:38, 27 May 2008 (UTC)

• • Thanks and welcome back - I assumed initially that the bot ran automatically, thanks for running it and for clarifying that. For the first two examples (Evolutionary history of plants and Kristallnacht), there were two PR request templates in place on the talk pages. The Siege of Lal Masjid error would have been prevented had the archive been properly done. I notice some people just delete the PR template on the talk page instead of changing to the oldpeerreview template. The other thing is that some people don't archive the PR with {{subst:PR/archive}}on the PR page, they just add "This Peer review has been closed".
  • I did the SAPRs and put in the notices with the AZPR script - I have not archived in about two days, so I will let the bot / you do that, if that is OK. Just a heads up, I will probably be offline for much of the coming weekend. Thanks again for all you do - I was trying to give you info on bugs / problems, not being critical (and hope I did not come across that way). Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 03:23, 27 May 2008 (UTC)
    • I ran the archiving script just now, which found 3 pages to archive. When you link to a semiauto review, can you add Category:Peer review pages with semiautomated peer reviews to it? My bot needs that know that a link is already present. You can use {{subst:PR/semiauto|date=May 2008}} to generate the note and category link at the same time (that's where the script gets its message from). — Carl (CBM · talk) 15:33, 27 May 2008 (UTC)
      • OK, thanks - I did not know that. I did the links as AZPR because that is a one click process (clicking on the edit link for the PR automatically adds the link to the SAPR). I will go back and add the categories to the ones I just did. Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 17:24, 27 May 2008 (UTC)
        • Well I see you have already done them all - thanks very much. Here is a link to the Kristallnacht talk page showing the two open PR requests at once (I deleted the more recent request). The Evolutionary history of plants PR is more complicated - I can not find a diff showing both reviews on the page. It looks like Wikipedia:Peer review/Evolutionary history of plants/archive2 was created as page by itself?? I deleted it. Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 17:49, 27 May 2008 (UTC)

PR archiving error?

Hi Carl,

PR was getting full so I semi-transcluded above 8 kB. I then checked the three oldest PR requests and found two of them that should have been archived but were not:

Wikipedia:Peer review/William Wilberforce/archive1 was opened April 8 and has not had an edit since May 19, so it is over a month old with no activity in the past two days, but has not been archived. revision history

I also note that Wikipedia:Peer review/Treaty of Axim (1642)/archive1 was opened April 29, and the last non-bot edit was May 12, so it should have been archived. However, PeerReviewBot made an edit May 19, so my guess is this is what is keeping it from being archived. Could the bot ignore its own edits? Could they be flagged as minor and it could ignore all minor edits (or all bot flagged edits)? revision history

Thanks, Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 16:24, 28 May 2008 (UTC)

I looked these. For Treaty of Axim, I agree it would be better for the bot to ignore its own edits, and I plan to add that functionality, it simply isn't written yet. I have to fetch the revisions in a different way to make that possible, since currently only the most recent revision of each page is known. When I implement this, I will also make the script ignore minor edits and bot edits.

For William Wilberforce, the issue is that you archived and unarchived the page on May 12, so the script thinks the peer review is only 16 days old. I don't have an easy way to fix this at the moment. But it will help once the bot ignores bot edits and minor edits. — Carl (CBM · talk) 17:17, 28 May 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for the explanations - after I archived Wilberforce User:Slp1 asked me to undo my archiving so I did. I can archive it by hand. Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 18:02, 28 May 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Attribution has been marked as a guideline

Wikipedia:Attribution (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs) has recently been edited to mark it as a guideline. This is an automated notice of the change (more information). -- VeblenBot (talk) 18:48, 5 June 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Attribution/Header has been marked as a guideline

Wikipedia:Attribution/Header (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs) has recently been edited to mark it as a guideline. This is an automated notice of the change (more information). -- VeblenBot (talk) 18:48, 5 June 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Template messages/Wikipedia namespace no longer marked as a policy

Wikipedia:Template messages/Wikipedia namespace (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs) has been edited so that it is no longer marked as a policy. It was previously marked as a policy. This is an automated notice of the change (more information). -- VeblenBot (talk) 18:48, 5 June 2008 (UTC)

Barnstar

		What a Brilliant Idea Barnstar
		Given with respect and admiration to Carl for all of your work here, and in particular for developing VeblenBot and PeerReviewBot to automate many otherwise tedious tasks. Yours, Ruhrfisch ><>°° 12:19, 11 June 2008 (UTC)

Thanks, — Carl (CBM · talk) 17:29, 11 June 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Global rights usage has been marked as a policy

Wikipedia:Global rights usage (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs) has recently been edited to mark it as a policy. This is an automated notice of the change (more information). -- VeblenBot (talk) 18:51, 11 June 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Featured articles/Candidate list

Hi, would it be possible if you could create a page like Wikipedia:Featured articles/Candidate list but for WP:FLC and WP:FTC? I would greatly appreciate it, and so would others. Thanks for all your hard work! Gary King (talk) 16:29, 11 June 2008 (UTC)

I created User:VeblenBot/C/Wikipedia featured list candidates and User:VeblenBot/C/Wikipedia featured topic candidates. The FLC page seems to work correctly. The FTC page is broken; at the moment, I don't think there is a category whose contents can be used to create a list of all the FTC discussion pages. I need a category like that in order to set up the FTC list correctly. — Carl (CBM · talk) 17:27, 11 June 2008 (UTC)

Thanks, so far so good, but can it be formatted like the one for FAs? So, something like Wikipedia:Featured articles/Candidate list exists for FLC, and more importantly, at least for me, something like User:VeblenBot/C/Wikipedia featured article candidates for FLCs so that they are ordered in chronologically descending order. Also, which category do you use for FAC and FLC so I can create one for FTC? Gary King (talk) 17:34, 11 June 2008 (UTC)

I created Wikipedia:Featured lists/Candidate list, I think that's what you're looking for. I didn't change the shortcut though.

The categories I am using are Category:Wikipedia featured list candidates, Category:Wikipedia featured article candidates, Category:Wikipedia featured topic candidates, except that the last category has a different meaning than the first two. — Carl (CBM · talk) 17:58, 11 June 2008 (UTC)

Ideally, I'd like User:VeblenBot/C/Wikipedia featured list candidates to be like User:VeblenBot/C/Wikipedia featured article candidates, which is nice and simple. Also, for FTC, use Category:Wikipedia featured topic candidate main articles instead. Don't worry if it is empty, because I just created it so it will take time to auto-populate. Gary King (talk) 19:46, 11 June 2008 (UTC)

I changed that, and fixed up the featured tppics candidates list using the new category you made. — Carl (CBM · talk) 23:15, 11 June 2008 (UTC)

Awesome. Thanks! Gary King (talk) 00:06, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

		The da Vinci Barnstar
		For helping out with pages maintained by bots, and making life easier for the rest of us. Gary King (talk) 00:06, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

← Oh, I just noticed that User:VeblenBot/C/Wikipedia featured topic candidate main articles is in chronological order; could it be in reverse chronological order like the other pages so the newest candidates appear on the top? Gary King (talk) 00:07, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

I now see that they are in reverse chronological order already, but the dates are not the date the nominations began. I guess these are the dates the bot picked them up or something? Gary King (talk) 00:10, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

The dates are set when the page is added to the category. There are always a few incorrect ones at the beginning when the category is created. But future topic reviews will be in the right order. I changed the order, so it will really be reverse chronological for newer reviews. — Carl (CBM · talk) 00:24, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

This is getting a bit off topic, but I like the format of these pages so much that I thought I'd ask anyways. Would it be possible to generate similar lists but for WP:RFA? I know pages like WP:BNR exist, but I don't want to watchlist it because it updates once every hour and I don't want to have a new page on my watchlist that often. I only want the page to be updated when a new item is added or removed. Would that be possible? Gary King (talk) 03:21, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

I don't think there is any category for active RFA pages, so I can't use this system to track them. It would be possible to make a special tracker for the RFA pages that only updates for changes in the list, but I already have too many commitments to do that right now. I may be able to do it in a few weeks once I get some things off my todo list. — Carl (CBM · talk) 10:55, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

Alright. For RFA, you'd have to scrape the transcluded pages on WP:RFA; that's apparently the only way to do it there. Gary King (talk) 15:18, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Restricted materials has been marked as a guideline

Wikipedia:Restricted materials (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs) has recently been edited to mark it as a guideline. This is an automated notice of the change (more information). -- VeblenBot (talk) 18:51, 16 June 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Restricted materials no longer marked as a guideline

Wikipedia:Restricted materials (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs) has been edited so that it is no longer marked as a guideline. It was previously marked as a guideline. This is an automated notice of the change (more information). -- VeblenBot (talk) 18:52, 18 June 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Global rights usage no longer marked as a policy

Wikipedia:Global rights usage (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs) has been edited so that it is no longer marked as a policy. It was previously marked as a policy. This is an automated notice of the change (more information). -- VeblenBot (talk) 18:52, 18 June 2008 (UTC)

Bplus rating

Thanks for the notice. How about modifying the Bot code instead? Or if the Math WikiProject doesn't want to modify the Bot, how about removing the Math WikiProject from the Version 1.0 Assessment so that the Wikipedia-wide statistics don't get messed up? --seav (talk) 17:30, 20 June 2008 (UTC)

The explanation I have always heard for using Bplus class is that it is essentially the equivalent of GA, but not reviewed by the GA process. That's why the GA and Bplus articles are counted together on the WP 1.0 bot page. This was all set up before I started editing here, so I wasn't part of the discussion when it was organized. But I appreciate the idea that Bplus is to GA what A class is to FA.

I'm the assistant maintainer of WP 1.0 bot, and I'm going to be organizing a project for a next-generation WP 1.0 bot in the coming months. One feature that I will propose is the ability to handle project-specific assessments, since math is not the only project that wants extra grades beyond the ones that the current WP 1.0 bot recognizes. It's a pretty frequent request for WP 1.0 bot, but the current framework is not flexible enough to handle it.

In the meantime, there's no reason I can see to switch the Bplus categories. If a lot of other people at the math project prefer a switch, I would go along, but I think the argument I repeated above is somewhat compelling for things to remain as they are. I realize it isn't a perfect system, but it is what it is. The best place to discuss this with other people is probably WT:WPM. — Carl (CBM · talk) 19:52, 20 June 2008 (UTC)

Loom91's edit war

Hi,

I noticed you made an edit on the introduction to systolic geometry page. User Loom91 has removed the Introduction template from the article (twice). I would like to challenge his edits. What is the procedure to follow? I left a similar comment on Oleg's page but he does not seem to be logged in right now. Katzmik (talk) 12:28, 22 June 2008 (UTC)

WP 1.0 bot

Hi Carl. I am just wondering when you plan to merge the changes at wp1.0b back to the main code in the svn repository. I think it is easier to maintain the code if we just have one copy. Thanks. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 19:38, 22 June 2008 (UTC)

I had put it off for a while because I was concerned there might be flaws in the new code, or it might break your installation of the cgi version. You're right I should go ahead and merge it back into your code. I'll see if I can get that done by the end of the week. — Carl (CBM · talk) 20:27, 22 June 2008 (UTC)

I think if there is something wrong with the CGI version it should be quite easy to see on just one run, as all it does is call the main routine in the code. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 23:10, 22 June 2008 (UTC)

SAPR bug

Hi Carl, I am not sure why this is the case, but the semi-automated peer review for Tea & Sympathy is listed as being linked to by PeerReviewBot each day since June 13 at User:PeerReviewBot/Logs/SA links, but it never shows up on Wikipedia:Peer review/Tea & Sympathy/archive1. I checked and there is a SAPR at Wikipedia:Peer_review/Automated/June_2008#Tea_.26_Sympathy. My guess is the ampersand is the problem. Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 12:49, 26 June 2008 (UTC)

PBB bot help

Hi Carl, Since you once helped with a bot request from me before, I thought I'd note another recent request I made at the bot requests page. No pressure, but if you have the time and interest to help out the WP:MCB and PBB communities, it would be most welcome. (I'll watch for replies here or at Wikipedia:Bot_requests.) Cheers, AndrewGNF (talk) 01:29, 28 June 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Privacy policy has been marked as a policy

Wikipedia:Privacy policy (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs) has recently been edited to mark it as a policy. This is an automated notice of the change (more information). -- VeblenBot (talk) 18:50, 29 June 2008 (UTC)

Groundbreaking news

In breaking news, Monday, rumours are spreading that the month of June is facing a tough challenge from up-and-coming month of July, and may not even survive another day. The PR team for June says that it still has more life in it than May, which has now been completely substituted. The July team on the other hand are quoted as saying "Watch us, we're going to make the archives".

In other news, GAR/38 was reported to be limbering up to take over from GAR/37.

Geometry guy 19:13, 30 June 2008 (UTC) (Just when you next get the time and opportunity, Carl, please pass this information on to VeblenBot.)

Thanks for the reminder. It looks like VeblenBot is having trouble; see below. — Carl (CBM · talk) 12:43, 3 July 2008 (UTC)

You're welcome. I guess VeblenBot is sulking to be left alone to update the categories while you are on your travels. :-) Geometry guy 21:51, 3 July 2008 (UTC)

VeblenBot

I noticed that VeblenBot hasn't edited for several hours, which means there is some issue with the computer that runs the scripts, or with the network connection. I can't connect to that computer remotely to debug the problem, which is also unusual. It will be Sunday July 5 before I can look at it in person.

In the meantime, the only script that can't wait is the category listing script, which is used for peer review. I have set it up to run that on another computer in the meantime, as user CBM2, but it may not run as regularly as usual. — Carl (CBM · talk) 12:43, 3 July 2008 (UTC)

Can the pages such as User:VeblenBot/C/Wikipedia featured article candidates be listed in reverse chronological order instead of alphabetical, like it was before? Also, will User:VeblenBot/C/Wikipedia featured list candidates still be updated until you can fix this? Anyways, if these can't be done until then, then of course that's fine :) But, if they can, then please do so. Thanks! Gary King (talk) 19:25, 3 July 2008 (UTC)

This is a temporary problem: with the computer hosting VeblenBot unavailable, Carl doesn't have access to the cache data that records the chronological order. With luck, chronological order will be restored early next week.

I'm pleased to see that VeblenBot's featured article candidates pages are being used. Can you elaborate on my talk page why you use them, and what improvements would help you. Thanks, Geometry guy 21:51, 3 July 2008 (UTC)

I don't know if you guys are aware, but the bot that updates Category:Wikipedia protected edit requests is also broken as the table has not been updated since yesterday. Gary King (talk) 23:19, 3 July 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Peer reviews by date is sorted alphabetically (reverse order) too. Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 12:04, 4 July 2008 (UTC)

I added the featured list category to the temporary installation, and tweaked the category sort order some. If it still isn't right, I won't be able to fix it until Sunday. I realize that the table for WP:PER isn't updated, but I don't think it's critical since the category list can be used for a couple days. — Carl (CBM · talk) 14:27, 4 July 2008 (UTC)

The hard disk in my computer started to fail, so the computer froze. I had expected that failure for a while, since the disk was 3 years old. I installed a new hard disk, copied over my backups, and started the bot again. Everything should run like it did before the emergency fix, please let me know if you notice an unexpected change. — Carl (CBM · talk) 14:05, 6 July 2008 (UTC)

Thanks very much for this and all you do - the chronological peer review list is still in reverse chronological order (oldest first). Would it be possibleto list them newest first? Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 14:25, 6 July 2008 (UTC)

This should be fixed now. — Carl (CBM · talk) 01:44, 7 July 2008 (UTC)

Policy advice

Dear Carl,

As you may recall, I quit wikipedia in April over disagreements with MathSci. At the time, I summarized my experiences in a paragraph at my user page. Recently, a certain user Elonka, at the request of MathSci, has made an unauthorized edit and removed the bulk of my statement. I would like to ask for your advice on the following policy issue:

• What are the relevant rules governing the use of the user space?

My understanding is that editing of other user's pages is either banned or strongly discouraged, and if there are any concerns, they should be discussed with me first. I know that you are both quite knowledgeable about and very careful with the wikipedia policies, therefore, I would very much appreciate your response and any other input you may have. Thank you, Arcfrk (talk) 21:37, 7 July 2008 (UTC)

Rollback request

Hi Carl, long time no see. I am former User:Tony Sidaway and have also edited recently using the account User:Anticipation of a New Lover's Arrival, The. I saw your name in Category:Wikipedia administrators willing to grant rollback requests.

I'm an editor in good standing with a long history of good rollback use, and would like to have the rollback capability on my new account. I have retired the other ones and no longer use them. --Jenny 09:15, 8 July 2008 (UTC)

That is to say, I no longer use them except for purposes like this: to confirm that I am the owner of the Anticipation account, which already has rollback status. --Anticipation of a New Lover's Arrival, The 09:18, 8 July 2008 (UTC)

Sorry, I've butted in to CMB's talk page. I've given you rollback Tony, just let me know when you need it on your nexyt new account ;-) Ryan Postlethwaite 11:29, 8 July 2008 (UTC)

Thanks

Thanks for your fixes to the PR bot - I have very limited internet access currently. Perhaps an article history template could be added to or updated for an article that is soon to be archived as a test. Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 14:10, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

PeerReviewBot

Seems to be inserting "6" into links instead of "July 2008". DrKiernan (talk) 14:22, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for pointing that out, I'll fix it. — Carl (CBM · talk) 14:26, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

Constructive math refs

Howdy, In case you are interested in constructive mathematics and general topology, I wanted to mention that Separable space#Constructive mathematics needs expansion and references. If you know somebody who'd be into it, feel free to let them know. JackSchmidt (talk) 14:35, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

Math rating template

Thanks, I will start rating the articles now when I add the maths rating template. Thanks also for your note about Kempner series. I did not know anything about this either when I started, but I read the interesting article by Schmelzer & Baillie in the current American Mathematical Monthly and looked on Wikipedia to discover it was a redlink. So I dug up the info and wrote the article. --Uncia (talk) 14:35, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

cfd

thanks. i thought the tool would do this automatically but it didn't. i might just leave it as the it looks like there was a discussion before and there was no consensus can't fathom why though as the category is nonsensical though there might be technical reason for keeping, Tom (talk) 16:27, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Reusing Wikipedia content no longer marked as a policy

Wikipedia:Reusing Wikipedia content (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs) has been edited so that it is no longer marked as a policy. It was previously marked as a policy. This is an automated notice of the change (more information). -- VeblenBot (talk) 18:50, 11 July 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Libel no longer marked as a policy

Wikipedia:Libel (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs) has been edited so that it is no longer marked as a policy. It was previously marked as a policy. This is an automated notice of the change (more information). -- VeblenBot (talk) 18:51, 11 July 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Privacy policy no longer marked as a policy

Wikipedia:Privacy policy (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs) has been edited so that it is no longer marked as a policy. It was previously marked as a policy. This is an automated notice of the change (more information). -- VeblenBot (talk) 18:51, 11 July 2008 (UTC)

WP 2.0

I'm currently building something that I believe could be the base of WP 2.0. Since you (and Oleg) write code for WP 1.0 bot, I wanted to give you some heads up, and discuss a universal WP 2.0 "core" template for wikiprojects. What I have in mind is still very crude and won't be ready for a few months, but I'd rather start talking about it right now. Head to User talk:Headbomb/WP 2.0 tomorrow (or whenever the link is blue and not red) for the discussion. Headbomb {ταλκ – WP Physics: PotW} 02:04, 12 July 2008 (UTC)

Proposal to change CSD G7

Notifying you directly because you took part in the preceding discussion. Please see Wikipedia talk:Criteria for speedy deletion#Proposal to change CSD G7. Thanks. Carcharoth (talk) 06:17, 12 July 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Featured articles/Candidate list

Seems like your bot has done something wrong with Wikipedia:Featured articles/Candidate list. — Wackymacs (talk ~ edits) 08:05, 13 July 2008 (UTC)

It seems to be an issue with Template:CF/Content review/List rather than the bot. I tweaked that template some, which seems to have fixed the issue. But I don't know what could have caused the behavior to change. — Carl (CBM · talk) 11:32, 13 July 2008 (UTC)

Alright, thanks! :) — Wackymacs (talk ~ edits) 19:08, 13 July 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject Mining/Assessment has been marked as a guideline

Wikipedia:WikiProject Mining/Assessment (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs) has recently been edited to mark it as a guideline. This is an automated notice of the change (more information). -- VeblenBot (talk) 18:50, 14 July 2008 (UTC)

Peer review bug

Hi Carl, the total size of the peer review page briefly exceeded the size limit, so I did the partial transclusion trick on all peer reviews larger than 10 kB. Normally there is a warning from VeblenBot, so I am not sure what they problem is. Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 01:36, 15 July 2008 (UTC)

Category:X1

I'm not convinced that Category:X1 is really a sandbox in the sense that, say, WP:Sandbox and Template:X1 are. For instance, it looks to my as if all the other sandboxes have automatic cleaning. Does Category:X1? Also, I think that your deletion of the db-test template is not in keeping with the usual procedures for WP:SPEEDY. How about reverting the deletion, adding a hangon template, and seeing how the admins decide to handle it? Stepheng3 (talk) 20:44, 15 July 2008 (UTC)

You're correct that usually content creators shouldn't remove tags from their own pages. In this case, it really isn't a big deal, and frankly we don't usually run into the issue very often as admins don't usually create content that is tagged for deletion. I've reviewed the category in question (and made a trivial edit to the category description page). While the name could probably be improved (X1, etc. always seemed rather ambiguous to me), the idea is a good one. Categories can have plenty of quirks, especially when they interact with templates. A testing ground seems perfectly reasonable. As for maintainability, I figure that we'll cross that bridge when we get there. At present we have three separate bots maintaining the various sandboxes. A simple request to one of the bot ops is all that is really needed, if keeping the category description page maintained is really necessary. Cheers. --MZMcBride (talk) 01:50, 16 July 2008 (UTC)

Archiving Everglades?

I'm not sure why the peer review on Everglades was archived. The most recent comment was only 3 days ago, and I was in the middle of going through the entire article, which I had most recently worked on only 4 days ago. Would you mind unarchiving it so we can continue? --Cryptic C62 · Talk 21:26, 16 July 2008 (UTC)

Feel free to unarchive the page - all you need to do is undo the bot's edit on the peer review page and undo the bot's edit on the article talk page.

Per Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/PeerReviewBot, the bot archives pages that either

• Have no comments in 14 days, or
• Are more then 30 days old and have no comments in 2 days

It may be worth asking on WT:Peer review if you think that 2 days is not long enough. I was given that parameter when the bot was requested, and didn't make it up myself. I can change the parameter to whatever has agreement on the peer review talk page. — Carl (CBM · talk) 21:50, 16 July 2008 (UTC)

Template protection

Hi, I notice you have protected the templates {{Polish2}}, {{IPA-pl}} and {{Plph}}. This is fine, except that these templates were created and are maintained by myself, and it would be inconvenient for me to have to go to an admin every time I want to change something. Would it be possible to change the level of edit protection on these templates to semi? (or, if such an option exists, to allow edits by rollback-enabled users, since I have that right?) In fact, if the latter option does exist, I would also like to request it for {{Infobox Settlement}} and its subtemplates, since I used to do quite a lot of development work on those before they got protected. --Kotniski (talk) 11:30, 19 July 2008 (UTC)

I'm torn about these, since they are extremely highly used (and thus vandalism targets). I changed them to semi until I make up my mind on what to do. It isn't currently possible to limit editing to rollback-enabled users, but that isn't such a bad idea if it were possible. — Carl (CBM · talk) 14:36, 19 July 2008 (UTC)

Thanks:) I do have them on my watchlist, so any vandalism ought to be picked up fairly quickly anyway.--Kotniski (talk) 16:42, 19 July 2008 (UTC)

Could you also consider downgrading protection on {{Europe topic}} to semiprotection? There has been a good deal of constructive editing by logged in users, no vandalism that I can find, together with a need to update (e.g., Kosovo); also cf. {{Asia topic}}. Thanks for the consideration. The Evil Spartan (talk) 23:35, 19 July 2008 (UTC)

I lowered it. — Carl (CBM · talk) 23:39, 19 July 2008 (UTC)

Thank you very much. By all means feel free to lower it if vandalism becomes thick. The Evil Spartan (talk) 23:40, 19 July 2008 (UTC)

My user account

I have appropriately named this account and I do not intend to change it. I do not see how one would mistake this name for an administrator as administrators do not have unique names. I have edited your comment on my user page as it is implied by being the page of an anonymous editor.

I intend to remain an anonymous editor as I have been for years. I do not wish to have a log of all the things I have ever done and I do not desire praise for the work I put into Wikipedia. I am still annoyed that such a nonsense event has forced me to generate useless user accounts (after a few uses, they are retired, else I would not be anonymous) to create and delete pages and has similarly made any page I do create or nominate for deletion suspect by editors who think every page created by a new user account is a hoax. Wikipedia asks that people assume good faith, but human nature will not be denied. Anyway, you requested that I consider creating a real account, and I have declined your proposal. Have a fine evening. DeletionAccount (talk) 16:18, 19 July 2008 (UTC)

The nominations are procedurally fine, sure. But this current one is completely pointless, is tendentiously ignoring the copious referencing in the target article, and more to the point the trend of the prior discussion on the very same issue. And do we really want to be encouraging the use of misleading-named, throwaway-use, single-purpose accounts to facilitate those who wish to have their cake and eat it, as regards IP-editing? A more pressing question to me seems to be, should this account simply be immediately blocked as a SPA? Replies to my talk page, please. Alai (talk) 16:45, 19 July 2008 (UTC)

Purely a question of action, what do you think I should do about Alai? On one hand, I have little time to begin with and every second spend on this dispute is a waste, but on the other hand, I've never seen an administrator act so remarkably uncivil. I noted on Gwen Gale's talk page that I was going to file a grievance (something I had somehow avoided until now), but I wonder if it's worth the time and effort. He deserves it -- threatening users with a ban, throwing accusations around, and trying to improperly close a deletion debate -- but I haven't been a bored high-school student for a long time. Do you think it's worth following up on? 81.51.232.219 (talk) 19:29, 19 July 2008 (UTC)

I would suggest just following productive things, like the AFD. I left a long comment there, and I think it will be an interesting discussion. — Carl (CBM · talk) 19:36, 19 July 2008 (UTC)

Template:WikiProject Canada

Thank you for your advise on the Bot request page. It is now a semi-protected template, and I have never made an assessment template banner yet, so I made the relevant categories, showed your results to the two main creators of Template:WikiProject Canada User talk:Arctic.gnome and User talk:Qyd. So hopefully it is a go!!! What a wonderful concept, it means that every single province can have a local child department the same as the nation of Canada whilst using the same assessment banner, becoming a powerful powerful tool! Thank you!!! Kind Regards SriMesh | talk 01:38, 21 July 2008 (UTC)

The Golden Maple Leaf Award Awarded for assistance with the WikiProject Canada template for assessing the child wikiproject Saskatchewan communities and neighbourhoods SriMesh

On the merged WP 1.0 bot code

Hi Carl. From I seen from the history of the SVN repository, you merged the WP 1.0 code you made faster back. A question though, do we still need the separate directory wp10.b, or should the wp10 directory be used instead? By the way, I added the file fetch_articles_cats2.pl to the svn repository, as well as get_html2.pl and watchdog_file.pl. I think all the files are in the repository now. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 02:31, 22 July 2008 (UTC)

Once we switch over the cgi code to run the new version, we can use the same directory. I believe there are output differences in the cache files between the new and old versions, so that the same files can't be shared. I've been putting off finishing the merge for some reason, but I'll move it up on my list of things to do. — Carl (CBM · talk) 19:08, 22 July 2008 (UTC)

Ah I see. I saw the code committed to the svn repository, and I did think that you're only partially done. That explains the issues with the CGI script, as I updated from svn in that directory, and the functionality which was meant to be used only from the cron job is now used in the web based interface. I'll take a closer look tomorrow to see what needs fixing there, unless you get there before me. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 04:24, 23 July 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Global rights usage has been marked as a policy

Wikipedia:Global rights usage (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs) has recently been edited to mark it as a policy. This is an automated notice of the change (more information). -- VeblenBot (talk) 18:49, 23 July 2008 (UTC)

Re your comment on the bot requests page

You made a remark regarding the WP 1.0 bot on the bot requests page; could you expand a bit on that? Your comments are welcome at User talk:B. Wolterding/Article alerts. Thanks, --B. Wolterding (talk) 10:05, 24 July 2008 (UTC)

I'll respond there. — Carl (CBM · talk) 12:18, 24 July 2008 (UTC)

Meher Baba

I think you might have done something wrong with the archiving of the Wikipedia:Good article reassessment/Meher Baba/1 page as now it does not link properly from the Talk:Meher Baba page. Please check. I don't know how to fix it. Pipaaz (talk) 13:27, 24 July 2008 (UTC)

fixed. — Carl (CBM · talk) 13:30, 24 July 2008 (UTC)

Well thanks for adding the Peer review link, too. --Nemonoman (talk) 13:33, 24 July 2008 (UTC)

Kerala school of astronomy and mathematics‎

User:carl, Please see Kerala school of astronomy and mathematics‎. See user:fowler's disruptive edits . He has done atleast 5 reverts since july 22nd. He is not even trying to discuss the issue at talk page. He was asked to provide reference and till this time , he is being evasive. Please see Wikipedia:Three-revert rule - In this spirit the rule does not convey an entitlement to revert three times each day, nor does it endorse reverting as an editing technique. Rather, the rule is an "electric fence".[1] Editors may still be blocked even if they have made three or fewer reverts in a 24 hour period, if their behavior is clearly disruptive. Efforts to game the system, for example by persistently making three reverts each day or three reverts on each of a group of pages, cast an editor in a poor light and may result in blocks. - Regards -Bharatveer (talk) 08:17, 26 July 2008 (UTC)

Don't make up bogus stuff on this and other talk pages. The wording in the Kerala School lead was the result of a long RfC conducted by me on the Talk:Indian mathematics page. The lead was thereafter copied from the section on the "Kerala School" in the Indian mathematics page to the Kerala School page. The conclusion that there was no transmission of calculus from Kerala to Europe is not just that made by the two mathematicians referenced there, but also by many prominent historians of Indian mathematics, including David Pingree, Takeo Hayashi, and Kim Plofker (author of the Encyclopedia Britannica article on Indian (South Asian) mathematics, and of the forthcoming Mathematics of India (Princeton University Press, 2009). See my post here. You can't turn up on a page, start adding irrelevant material by dubious authors with not a single publication in History of Mathematics journals, and then, if I delete the bogus content, throw every Wikipedia rule at me. What's you game plan Bharatveer (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log)? You've been blocked many times. You are under ArbCom restriction for edit-warring. You don't know the first thing about mathematics, Indian or Michael Atiyah's. Why then are you wasting everyone's time? Fowler&fowler«Talk» 22:34, 26 July 2008 (UTC)

Hello. The messages on Wikiproject Mathematics on Michael Atiyah are also relevant here. User:Bharatveer and his cronies have been extraordinarily disruptive - even User:R.e.b. has commented on the BLP noticeboard. Cheers, Mathsci (talk) 02:43, 27 July 2008 (UTC)

Pictures

Given your remarks at Hilbert space, you should take a look at Differential geometry of surfaces. Arcfrk (talk) 11:15, 26 July 2008 (UTC)

(unindent) Hello Carl. The article Differential geometry of surfaces is currently still in the process of being comprehensively rewritten to be more elementary and approachable, with help from other editors like User:JackSchmidt. This has been going on for at least a week or two. It is a subject where there are two distinct approaches.

• One, based on modern versions of Eisenhart's 1909 classic, Marcel Berger's book, or the undergraduate textbooks of PMH Wilson and Amdrew Pressley, do not use forms or Riemannian connections. This is the classical undergraduate treatment.

• The other using Riemannian connections, forms and parallel transport where the start of a new section has been added, is the approach where the subject is lectured at the graduate level. This can be found in the books of O'Neill, do Carmo and Singer & Thorpe.

The first approach is explained in most of the article, with details of the second towards the end. This is a difficult subject and needs pictures, if, as has been stated many times, the aim is to simplify the subject as much as is humanly possible. Curves has lots of pictures and the suggestion was that this article should be like the Curves article. The subject is of course much harder and deeper, but pictures help to make it easier and more approachable. Anybody that looks at the books of Pelham Wilson or Andrew Pressley will see that there are pictures on every page. It is clear that pictures are absolutely essential in an article on the elementary theory of differential geometry of surfaces, particular if it is aimed at a general audience. Comments are not really relevant at the moment since the article is not yet finished. The standard examples are still lacking from the article and I still have to flesh out the final section on connections. The order and several imprecisions on fundamental forms needed cleaning up.

I think the addition of pictures is essential to make this article user friendly. I took as my model Emmy Noether which one of our most skilled editors User:WillowW, in conjunction with other editors, has attempted to render readable to as wide an audience as possible. That is also the aim here, but editors must be patient. User:JackSchmidt seems quite happy at the moment. Rather than here, a more helpful place to make comments would probably be the talk page of Differential geometry of surfaces, but only when writing is completed (the templates will have disappeared from the examples section and later sections on the shape operator and connections).

Also at this stage the main point is to guarantee that the relevant content is actually in the article. In Hilbert spaces, people are attempting to bring it up to GA status. While there is no proper account on WP of Fredholm operators on Hilbert space or their application to Sobolev spaces on tori and elliptic regularity, that will be a somewhat slow task. (I intend to add these missing articles at some later stage.) Several iterations and improvements will be necessary for the differential geometry of curves article. Even for the examples, I don't even know yet whether the spherical and hyperbolical geometry articles handle the needed cosine rules, etc. So this article is at quite a different stage, half experimental in parts. For example, informal summaries in words precede more technical descriptions. There are also different and equally helpful ways to explain curvature, to be found for example in Eisenhart. That might get added later.

As a final comment, I was quite thrilled to find the wikimedia image of Gauss from exactly the period he made his discoveries on curvature. It beats the 10 mark note!

Thanks, Mathsci (talk) 02:39, 27 July 2008 (UTC)

PeerReviewBot tweak

Hi Carl, I stumbled across this, but India House was still listed at WP:PR while it was also at WP:FAC. On July 11 the talk page was properly changed to the archive notice (which is all SandyGeorgia checks, I believe) and a notice that the peer review was closed was put in the PR itself (Wikipedia:Peer review/India House/archive1), without actually replacing the template. In this case the PR was not properly archived by the bot until after the article's FAC was closed (unsuccessfully). Would it be possible for PeerReviewBot to cross check the WP:PR list against FAC and FLC? Thanks, Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 12:10, 27 July 2008 (UTC)

That was a bug, which I fixed now. I ran the archiving script again, and the log shows it picked up one FLC and two FAC articles. — Carl (CBM · talk) 12:34, 27 July 2008 (UTC)

Great - thanks! Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 15:35, 27 July 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Recurring items on ITN has been marked as a guideline

Wikipedia:Recurring items on ITN (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs) has recently been edited to mark it as a guideline. This is an automated notice of the change (more information). -- VeblenBot (talk) 18:49, 28 July 2008 (UTC)

RFC regarding F&f

Hi CBM. Thanks for contributing to the discussion on Atiyah. You were one of the editors who warned [User:Fowler&fowler] early in the debate to stick to the point and avoid personal attacks on other editors and living individuals. However, I note that although WP:BLP was quoted several times in the debate, no attempt was made to apply it to C.K. Raju and other living individuals. The result is several egregious violations of this policy and statements amounting to libel against Raju on the talk page. Hence, I have created a RFC requesting that F&f delete these comments and be restrained from making similar slanderous edits in future. Since you were one of the editors who attempted dispute resolution early in the debate, if you agree with my summary, please certify the RFC. thanks, Perusnarpk (talk) 21:57, 28 July 2008 (UTC)

August PR cat

Hi Carl - when you get back there's another cat for VeblenBot to watch: Category:August 2008 peer reviews. Geometry guy 12:30, 30 July 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Role of Jimmy Wales has been marked as a policy

Wikipedia:Role of Jimmy Wales (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs) has recently been edited to mark it as a policy. This is an automated notice of the change (more information). -- VeblenBot (talk) 18:49, 2 August 2008 (UTC)

{{Merge-Class}}

Check the template again; needs an extra } for the protection template. My fault. PC78 (talk) 01:45, 3 August 2008 (UTC)

musings on an AN comment

That's a good argument for using the image on the article about Malcolm X, but not so much for using it on four different articles (!) as the image page Image:Malcomxm1carbine3gr.gif tries to justify. The interest in the picture is not in the particular gun, but in the person who is holding it. — Carl (CBM · talk) 00:14, 3 August 2008 (UTC)

This is a flawed post of yours for a number of reasons. Two of the justifications on that page are distinct from or go further than Georgewilliamherbert's argument. One of them was written by myself for inclusion in an article about a period in which political concerns are a defining characteristic; this image ties into a moderately complex allusion. When we attempt to write articles on aspects of culture from a serious historical and socio-political perspective, we should expect others to at least read our rationales and judge them against the article. Otherwise we should just write facile content-light articles, I guess. So it seems in your comment you have already decided the image use is unjustifiable based merely on the number of articles in which it is used. This is not a good mindset to start from, and it's possible it might poison discussion initiated on this image use.

I think the bare minimum reading required for evaluating image use in "my" article is the first two paragraphs of the lead and the img rationale, with the relevant parts of the img talk page also very helpful. My understanding is that no one who has questioned the img use in this case (Bkell, Howcheng, and, very briefly, Ricky81682 so far) has first done this reading, but, conversely, my understanding is that once they have done so, they have let the img use stand. I consider this a testament to both the intelligence and the temperament of the average editor working in this area. But my fear is that sooner or later someone will start from such an entrenched default position that no further considerations will be allowed impact on that. 86.44.28.197 (talk) 21:26, 3 August 2008 (UTC)

The image page claims use in four articles. However: the use on M1 carbine isn't needed, since that article can just link to the article on Malcolm X; and the use on New school hip hop is an exact duplicate of , and so it too can be replace by a text link. Our goal is to keep the use of non-free images to a minimum. If we can link to another article that contains the image, then we don't need to use it a second time. — Carl (CBM · talk) 21:35, 3 August 2008 (UTC)

In terms of chronology, the use on By All Means Necessary (album) is a duplicate of the use on New school hip hop. What the img is doing on New school hip hop is specific to that article, as the lead and the article in full hopefully makes clear. 86.44.28.197 (talk) 21:51, 3 August 2008 (UTC)

As far as I can tell, there is exactly one sentence in the new school hip hop article that refers to that album: "The next album By All Means Necessary (B-Boy, 1988) left that element behind for political radicalism, with the title and cover alluding to Malcolm X.". That text, along with the link to the album article, conveys the information perfectly well even if the image were only on the album article. — Carl (CBM · talk) 21:56, 3 August 2008 (UTC)

Yeah, there's a little bit about this at img talk, of whatever worth. You're also discounting the caption, which adds a very definite nuance concerning this (self-defense, this ties into other aspects, young black males considering themselves under threat from a white establishment; as I said, this is a moderately complex allusion, it also relates obviously and specifically to to a certain moment in social history), and disconnecting the img use with one of the main concerns of the article—the artists' socio-political commentary as a defining trait, moving from reportage to radicalism to an afrocentricity twinned with inclusiveness. While more critical commentary regarding these specific images would be nice, and I intend to add some, a summary style is called for in an article such as this, and the pictures impart the import of this allusion in a way that, it seems perfectly obvious to me, cannot be adequately imparted by text, even if we wrote at length and tracked down the suitable sources limning the ramifications of this choice of cover art (it's somewhat paradoxical that such critical commentary would alleviate concerns over img use even as it would attempt to diminish the need for it).

While it may seem to you against the grain to have this image use now in two articles, it is a logical error to conclude therefore that usage in New school hip hop is untenable. The usage relates to the article as a whole. A debate about which of the two articles the imgs should best be restricted to in order to satisfy minimal usage goes against common sense, don't you think? Either the use is justified on its own merits in each article or it is not. And in the case of New school hip hop, this is a textbook non-cosmetic, pedagogical use of non-free media.86.44.28.197 (talk) 22:34, 3 August 2008 (UTC)

Just because each use could be justified on its own doesn't mean that both can be justified simultaneously, since the first use can make the second use superfluous, as it does here. — Carl (CBM · talk) 22:40, 3 August 2008 (UTC)

And which is the first use that makes the second superfluous here, and, if not a simple matter of editing chronology (in which it would default to New school), how and why do we make that editorial decision? Do we follow an instinct left over from treatments of discography articles? Or do we assume an album article is base camp for all information regardless of context? Do we decide that a political reference is less important in a historical context than in an atomized one?

To me this is a strange debate. No, i still think you're disconnecting the reason for the img use from the img use itself. We cannot hope that the reader will select from all the article text the album link, that he will click that link, that he will then pay special attention to the images, that he will then link that back to the section he was reading, and that he will hold in his head the relation to the overall arc of the article. He may do so, but this goes against the pedagogical purpose of an encyclopedia, against the NFCC, against the NFC. 86.44.28.197 (talk) 23:39, 3 August 2008 (UTC)

Scope of math wikiproject

Is cryptography considered outside the scope of the math wikiproject entirely, or where is the line drawn? Best, RayAYang (talk) 20:32, 4 August 2008 (UTC)

There isn't a firm line. There are lots of things that involve mathematics in some way - organic chemistry, black holes, MD5, etc. My personal opinion is that topics that are primarily studied and taught in the context of computer science shouldn't be tagged for the math project. There is some overlap in theory of computation, but things like cryptography, sorting algorithms, etc. are of much more interest to computer scientists than mathematicians. — Carl (CBM · talk) 20:45, 4 August 2008 (UTC)

Gotcha. Sounds good. RayAYang (talk) 20:50, 4 August 2008 (UTC)

error in placement of remarks on PR page

On Wikipedia:Peer review/Sildenafil/archive1, the bot placed its comments before the introductory (opening) comments for the peer review, instead of after them. Please fix this. Thanks. Dr. Cash (talk) 14:20, 5 August 2008 (UTC)

Bot comments were misplaced here, too. Dr. Cash (talk) 14:24, 5 August 2008 (UTC)

As you can see in this diff [1], the bot simply replaces a placeholder with its text. The bot cannot control where that placeholder appears on the peer review page. It may be that the "preload" page can be tweaked to put the placeholder below the nominator's text. I'll ask the PR people about it. — Carl (CBM · talk) 14:49, 5 August 2008 (UTC)

I responded at Wikipedia talk:Peer review, but wanted to note that every single peer review has the SAPR before the comments currently. Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 16:30, 5 August 2008 (UTC)

WP 1.0 bot v2

Hi, Carl. When do you think we could start coding the new bot? My availability will decrease two weeks from now (the school year starts again), and I'm really interested in working on the bot at least a little bit while I still can. Should we advertise User:WP 1.0 bot/Second generation more widely so we can get more opinions as to what to do? Titoxd^{(?!? - cool stuff)} 04:37, 5 August 2008 (UTC)

Yes, I think we should advertise is more widely now. I do have some pre-alpha but functional code that can:

• Download ratings into a mysql database
• Make summary tables from the database
• Run simple web-based queries against the database (including intersecting two projects)
• Extract the old log information from wiki pages and add it to the database

My goal with that code was to see what issues will actually arise in practice. I'll clean up that code today and put it into my svn repository on toolserver. I think most of the coding work will be in the query interface. — Carl (CBM · talk) 13:37, 5 August 2008 (UTC)

You can download the proof-of-concept code on svn at https://svn.toolserver.org/svnroot/cbm/wp10.2g/alpha — Carl (CBM · talk) 17:48, 5 August 2008 (UTC)

Whee, I'll have to learn Perl. :) That said, from a cursory design-level review, it looks good. What I didn't understand was what $Extra did. And also, wouldn't it be more efficient (from a SQL perspective) to generate a bunch of SQL queries and execute them all at once, instead of executing them one at a time? It would also help to prevent updates to the database failing halfway and leaving the database in an inconsistent state. Now, a small-scale test with limited live data (I as usual volunteer using WP:WPTC's assessments) would be nice. Titoxd^{(?!? - cool stuff)} 21:09, 6 August 2008 (UTC)

The $Extra var, and get_extra_assessments(), was a successful test of one way to let a wikiproject specify extra rating values. Since then, I changed my mind about how to do that. I am thinking that the project will put a template on their category (Category:Mathematics articles by quality for example) that the script will parse. The template might look like this:

{{WP10params|
|homepage=Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics
|extra1-name=Bplus
|extra1-type=quality
|extra1-category=Bplus mathematics articles
|extra1-ranking=400
}}

That would tell the bot that about a new quality rating "Bplus" that is used by the project. The template could also be used to track which WikiProjects are task forces of larger projects, or to track other per-project data in a way that can be configured on the wiki.

The way to prevent updates from failing halfway through is to use database transactions. I will look into how to accomplish this with Perl's DBI class. My initial research says that I just have to add the right "start transaction" call at the beginning and a "finish transaction" call at the end of the script. I didn't want to use them yet because I like to kill it halfway through and look at the database manually.

I've been doing some initial testing on my local computer. I should be able to set up a demo on toolserver for you to look at. The web interfaces I wrote are all very very basic. — Carl (CBM · talk) 21:34, 6 August 2008 (UTC)

Here is a live demo:

• http://toolserver.org/~cbm//cgi-bin/wp10.2g/alpha/cgi-bin/list.pl
• http://toolserver.org/~cbm//cgi-bin/wp10.2g/alpha/cgi-bin/list2.pl
• http://toolserver.org/~cbm//cgi-bin/wp10.2g/alpha/cgi-bin/table.pl

I think you'll find this query interesting: [2]. — Carl (CBM · talk) 22:28, 6 August 2008 (UTC)

Indeed, that query is interesting. :) One question, though: if we allow B+ to be 400, and another project wants to use B+ and GA, (which is also 400), how will the script know which one to put ahead? Also, if a project thinks that GA should be above A, would they be able to modify their wp10params declaration to set GA to 500 and A to 400? How would we deal with those? Titoxd^{(?!? - cool stuff)} 06:13, 7 August 2008 (UTC)

I just made up the 400. All the details about project-specific ratings are up for discussion at this point. — Carl (CBM · talk) 12:20, 7 August 2008 (UTC)

• I'll be learning Perl on the go, but sure, I'll try. Titoxd^{(?!? - cool stuff)} 20:06, 7 August 2008 (UTC)

  It doesn't actually seem that complicated if you have a book next to you (which I rushed to get from the local library), but the roadblock for now is getting Apache/Perl to recognize MySQL (apparently support for it is not installed on a vanilla Leopard installation, nor is mod_perl), so I might end up just getting a toolserver account to test this on. Titoxd^{(?!? - cool stuff)} 06:36, 8 August 2008 (UTC)

Invented words

Please verify your comment. And no, a blog fails miserably as a verifiable source. The New York Times does not, in fact, call it's lead section "lede". The term is archaic, and is used by some, and I mean some, Wikipedians to sound, well, snobbish. The word had a meaning at one time for newspapers (let's not even discuss an encyclopedia), but not now, according to several reliable sources, mainly the Oxford English Dictionary. To be honest, of all the problems with Wikipedia, snobby editors using "lede" doesn't rank in the top 100, but let's not come across as elitist, especially when we want to be a democratic project. OrangeMarlin ^{Talk• Contributions} 23:21, 6 August 2008 (UTC)

As I commented on the talk page (where you didn't respond...) the Associated Press actively uses the term. [3] — Carl (CBM · talk) 01:12, 7 August 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Featured topics/Candidate list

This doesn't strictly work, as the main article name doesn't always match the nomination name. For example, there's one at the moment. What's this page used for, anyway? Seemingly nothing - rst20xx (talk) 16:06, 7 August 2008 (UTC)

Yes, that doesn't work. The solution is to create the redlink as a redirect to the appropriate page. I think that the FTC list is used by some people to watch the lists of FTC nominations without all the text. I made it because of this request — Carl (CBM · talk) 16:19, 7 August 2008 (UTC)

Hmm, that's not ideal at all, as I guess that would have to be done manually. Oh well - rst20xx (talk) 20:30, 7 August 2008 (UTC)

Displayname template

(Continued from Geometry_guy's talk page)

Sorry to intrude here. The main feature you need (to change the bold text above the article) is already in MediaWiki, as the DISPLAYTITLE magic word. It would be possible to make a template somewhat like {{wrongtitle}} that would take the common name and latin name as parameters and would display them appropriately. At least it wouldn't take any software changes. — Carl (CBM · talk) 23:47, 2 August 2008 (UTC)

Interesting. However, judging from what it says in the manual, it looks to me like DISPLAYTITLE can only be used to change a title's case (i.e. IPod => iPod). Are you sure it would work? --Jwinius (talk) 01:06, 3 August 2008 (UTC)

You're right - it would require a software change to remove the "normalizes to the same title" check. That's not as hard as adding the displaytitle functionality in the first place, though. I need to figure out (or ask around) why that check was added in the first place. — Carl (CBM · talk) 01:30, 3 August 2008 (UTC)

Although I'm not optimistic that this check will be easy to remove, I'll be very interested to hear what you find out. --Jwinius (talk) 01:57, 3 August 2008 (UTC)

Yes, I looked into this yesterday. DISPLAYTITLE doesn't even handle subscripts and superscripts, so for that reason there is code at MediaWiki:Common.js which does. Actually, the code is fairly straightforward and would be easy to change if there were consensus to change it. It is maintained by User:Remember the dot. Geometry guy 10:52, 3 August 2008 (UTC)

Well, let's see what he has to say about this. Cheers, --Jwinius (talk) 11:49, 3 August 2008 (UTC)

Please try to avoid making article titles different from their displayed titles. The JavaScript code we currently use should be used sparingly. Ideally, we would not use it at all because it causes problems for screen readers, text-only browsers, and search engines.

I'm afraid that I don't know what the best solution to your problem is. I personally prefer common naming ("lion" instead of "panthera leo"). Both names are given in the lead section anyway to avoid confusion. Plus, templates like {{Felidae nav}} seem to do a good job of organizing articles already, without the need to move articles to uncommon names.

I know this answer was probably not the one you were hoping for, but all the same I hope you find a good solution to the problem. Please let me know if there's anything else I can do for you. —Remember the dot ^(talk) 03:17, 5 August 2008 (UTC)

That's exactly what I was hoping to do with it: change the titles of articles with scientific names to common names. That way, I figured readers could remain comfortable with the titles while the valid scientific names would remain inextricably linked with the articles, making it much easier for people like myself to maintain large collections of them. The problem is/was that DISPLAYNAME does not allow this.

Your answer was predictable, unfortunately, but what I find most depressing is that the people on the long end of this consensus seem not even to want to consider the possibility that the opposition may have a point that is important enough to warrent a search for a possible solution in this matter. --Jwinius (talk) 23:30, 6 August 2008 (UTC)

Basically, it boils down to the fact that it's not a good idea to have the displayed title of an article be significantly different than the actual title of the article. It would lead to confusion - people would copy-and-paste the title to make a wikilink to the article only to discover that "Lion" is really just a redirect to "Panthera leo". Isn't there a way that you can do your categorization of these articles without changing the article titles? —Remember the dot ^(talk) 01:19, 8 August 2008 (UTC)

To be honest, sure, it would be possible for me to work with common name titles and organize everything properly. For example, if I were to put in a gargantuan effort, basically devoting the rest of my life to completing 3,000+ properly organized articles on snakes -- using common names -- then I would be the only one who would know that the articles were actually following the proper taxonomy (totally consistent with no errors or duplication). That's simply because I organized them and any changes show up on my watchlist. However, when I eventually bow out and somebody else eventually come along and wants to take my place, then how easy do you think it would be for that person to tell whether everything really is properly organized or not? (Mind you, they're not going to assume this).
The answer is that it would be very difficult. You see, all that matters is where the scientific names point to -- they are the key in any zoological database. Any database administrator can tell you how important that is. However, with common name titles, the scientific names are only loosely linked to the articles as redirects. You can't know that they point to the correct articles unless you follow each and every one to verify that the article it leads to does indeed contain a description of the corresponding species. You may not even know if the redirects exist. Even worse, if you plan to maintain the collection, you'd have to add all of the redirects for the scientific names to your watchlist in addition to the articles. That's a lot of work!! In fact, it's so much work that I'm afraid nobody would ever again bother to maintain the entire collection. Thus, much of my work will have been for nothing. Sure, a few corrections would be made every once in a while, but in this environment the number of errors creeping into the collection would far outnumber them and within a few years it would all degrade into a typical incoherent mess, full of duplication and error.
On the other hand, if all of the articles were to have scientific name titles, anyone willing to take over for me would have a much easier task. It would be safe to assume that, in the articles for the higher taxa (genera, families) and in the main category overviews, the scientific names were all direct links to the articles. Therefore, to verify that the names were all valid you'd only have to check them against the 3rd party taxonomic database that they're supposed to be following. To maintain the lot, you'd only have to add the articles to your watchlist -- not all of the redirects as well.
IMHO, this is why scientific name article titles are so important at Wikipedia. Somehow, we must see to it that they are inextricably linked to the articles. If our technical options are so limited that it means renaming "Lion" to "Panthera leo", then so be it. It's a question of long-term and large-scale maintainability. The folks at WP:BOTONY have already figured this out; now it's up to the zoology people. The longer we take to come up with a solution for this problem, the longer it will take us to recover from the inevitable mess. --Jwinius (talk) 13:38, 8 August 2008 (UTC)

fetch_articles_cats2

Hi Carl. Preparing to migrate away from query.php I took a look at fetch_articles_cats2.pl. I wonder, is there way a simpler way to fetch articles and categories than done there? I tried to adapt it to mathbot, and I got the error:

XML PARSING ERROR 1 $VAR1 = ; Error parsing XML - truncated response?
$VAR1 = 'Died at /home/mathbot/public_html/cgi-bin/wp/modules/Mediawiki/API.pm line 1361. ';  

Did you see something of this kind before? Any help with moving from query.php will be very much appreciated. Thanks! Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 03:29, 8 August 2008 (UTC)

Ah, I figured it out. My XML::Simple.pm was out of date. I did not do Perl programming for a while, I start feeling as if I've been living in the woods. :) Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 03:35, 8 August 2008 (UTC)

Once you get the right libraries on your machine, fetch_articles_cats2.pl should be almost a drop-in replacement. I had thought about moving away from XML, but the other encodings that the API can use would also require some library to parse them, and XML was the first one I tried. I think that the version of Mediawiki::API in my svn is more recent than the one on kiwix.

The main issue I have always run into is utf8 encoding. The general principle is that you pass utf8-encoded arguments to Mediawiki::API and it returns native (not encoded) results. But it's a continuing nuisance, especially since api.php was not stable when I was writing my code.

Please do let me know if you run into problems with Mediawiki::API, I will be glad to fix them. — Carl (CBM · talk) 11:35, 8 August 2008 (UTC)

Yeah, utf encoding has been a big annoyance for me too when I developed WP 1.0 bot. I'd appreciate it if you let me know when you notice bugs in Mediawiki::API that can affect fetch_articles_cats2 so that I can upgrade. The last thing we want is large amount of pages in which things like "Â" suddenly become \2032 or worse. :) Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 15:09, 8 August 2008 (UTC)

G_δ space

I would refer to

• Steen, Lynn Arthur; Seebach, J. Arthur Jr. (1995) [1978], Counterexamples in Topology (Dover reprint of 1978 ed.), Berlin, New York: Springer-Verlag, ISBN 978-0-486-68735-3, MR 0507446 P. 162.

Richard Pinch (talk) 19:17, 8 August 2008 (UTC)

For some reason User:Topology Expert has claimed that there is no such page in the book. Perhaps you would care to look at my reply on his talk page and, if you think fit, comment from your own experience. Richard Pinch (talk) 09:49, 10 August 2008 (UTC)

GAR category dates

Hi Carl, I updated the GAR reassessment page header to make it more robust and sort GAR discussions within the category. For some reason this has led VeblenBot to believe that the current reassessments are new entries. Could you restore the older dates at User:VeblenBot/C/GAR? Thanks, Geometry guy 11:07, 11 August 2008 (UTC)

No problem - I added that category to the cache system and copied the dates from a previous list by hand. — Carl (CBM · talk) 13:07, 11 August 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. This has actually reversed the sort order, but I think that was the old tradition anyway (two wrongs make a right!), so I'm happy to leave it unless anyone complains. Geometry guy 19:12, 11 August 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Assume good faith no longer marked as a guideline

Wikipedia:Assume good faith (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs) has been edited so that it is no longer marked as a guideline. It was previously marked as a guideline. This is an automated notice of the change (more information). -- VeblenBot (talk) 18:48, 11 August 2008 (UTC)

This is a false positive caused by {{guideline}} being replaced by {{subcat guideline}}. Since {{subcat guideline}} displays almost identically to {{guideline}} and appears to indicate the same status, shouldn't the bot treat them identically? Algebraist 21:40, 11 August 2008 (UTC)

The reason the bot made a report is because the page was in Category:Wikipedia guidelines and isn't in that category any more. Now that people are using subcategories of the guidelines category, I'll need to add code to the bot to check those as well. — Carl (CBM · talk) 23:13, 11 August 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. Algebraist 23:14, 11 August 2008 (UTC)

Frequently viewed WP:ECON articles

I messaged you a few months ago about setting up a "frequently viewed articles list" like this one you set up for WikiProject Mathematics. I'm not sure if you set this up (if you didn't don't worry about the hassle), but if you did, I don't think I have a link for it. Just wondering if you could provide one. Thanks a lot. -FrankTobia (talk) 05:43, 12 August 2008 (UTC)

I'm sorry to say I forgot about it. I should be able to do it this weekend. Would you like the frequently viewed articles to have a message on their talk page banner, like you see on the math banner at Talk:Number? — Carl (CBM · talk) 11:16, 12 August 2008 (UTC)

Totally alright. I don't want to impose if it's labor-intensive. The message on its talk page banner is a neat addition; does that take a lot of time or effort also? What does it entail? Thanks again for doing this. If it's as simple as running a script and updating the page, I could take over in the future if you get swamped. Let me know. -FrankTobia (talk) 17:10, 12 August 2008 (UTC)

User:WP 1.0 bot messing up.

Hi, according to the bots talk page, you are one of the operators. The bot has messed up here, while updating the category, San Jose Sharks task force articles by quality. If you could figure out what went wrong, that would be great. Thanks, LegoK^ontribsT^alkM 22:00, 12 August 2008 (UTC)

After looking at the debugging logs the bot generates, I think that the issue was that the template {{ice hockey}} was broken when the bot ran. That seems to be fixed now. Please let me know if the problem shows up again. — Carl (CBM · talk) 01:36, 13 August 2008 (UTC)