GraveGuy

Find a Grave templates

There are a couple issues here that need to be addressed. The first one is that you were originally registered as User:Jim@findagrave.com and are now making changes to templates for that website. That can be considered a conflict of interest as well as some could construe it as spamming. The second is that there are two different templates for Find a Grave - [[Template:Find A Grave]] and [[Template:findagrave]]. You are in the midst of changing a number of articles using the second template for the first one, for one, Aaliyahusing the rationale of "Corrected a malformed Find A Grave external link template." In fact, the other template works and is appropriate. Some time ago, a proposal was made to combine the two templates into one, but that was an issue because some articles use one and some the other. Because the [[Template:Find A Grave]] template was on somewhere around 1700 articles, and the [[Template:findagrave]] is on literally thousands of articles, the templates are being changed over to the second. Each time you change this back, you are undoing a lot of work that others have finished and re-populating with the lesser used template. Please stop doing this so that the templates can be combined into one. It is still being directed to your webpage. Wildhartlivie (talk) 07:38, 8 March 2009 (UTC)

To expand on this, the instructions for [[Template:Find A Grave|Find A Grave]] say that it is a deprecated template and not to be added to any more articles. —C.Fred (talk) 15:41, 8 March 2009 (UTC)

Ugh. I give up. I changed my username recently because I was told I had to in order to comply with Wiki name standards. Our webserver error logs were reporting many errors for malformed URLs. I wrote in some custom logging to track where these links were coming from and most of them were from Wiki pages. Every single link I have corrected on a Wiki page is due to a report our server generated. See Richard_Cromwell_(actor) and Baby_Face_Nelson for examples of these poorly formed templates. Cromwell is missing the 'id' and therefore takes you to a broken page. Baby Face Nelson uses the 'findagrave' template and includes an ID, but it doesn't work (which is why I have been using the 'Find A Grave' template, which does seem to work). I don't know a whole lot about Wiki. I was just trying to fix some broken links which I knew about because of my access to our server logs. I'll keep my hands out of it from now on. Every time I try to fix something, it seems to cause some sort of controversy (this dates back to Wikipedia_talk:Find-A-Grave_famous_people when I sent a Wiki editor our entire data set in hopes of improving the site). If all of the Find A Grave links can all be combined into the same template in some bulk operation, by all means, do that. That would seem to make the most sense.

I can understand your frustration. The newer [[Template:findagrave]] is entered simply as {{findagrave|graveIDnumber}}, while the older [[Template|Find A Grave]] requires the ID= at least. Sometimes, they've been entered as {{findagrave|id=graveIDnumber}}, which can be easily fixed by just removing the ID=. People tend to get these confused, I even did that on a handful I was converting by not taking out the ID=. I have been working diligently on the list that links back to the older, more complex template and hopefully have that done in the next week or two. If you have links come back as bad on the findagrave template, please leave a note on my talk page and I'll be glad to fix them. Wildhartlivie (talk) 23:37, 8 March 2009 (UTC)

I took a look at Cromwell. It used the old template. I went to the site, did a search on Cromwell, replaced the old template with the new template and his ID (i.e., {{findagrave|6385518}}), and the link works fine. I took a look at Nelson, and the link there is working fine—so without knowing when it was generating errors, there's no way to know what the problem was. It is possible that at the time the link to Nelson was triggered, somebody had either edited the article or edited the template to cause a malformed link, but the problem was subsequently reverted.

In the five minutes it took me to write this comment—when I just decided to go back to the site to check the formatting of find-a-grave, the Cromwell link is now not working. It's still expanding the link to http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=6385518 which worked before. User side, I'm getting the error "Firefox can't establish a connection to the server at www.findagrave.com. Though the site seems valid, the browser was unable to establish a connection. Could the site be temporarily unavailable? Try again later." Are the queries just getting caught in server overload at the site? Since the same link worked fine five minutes ago but not now, I think there's something more going on than just a malformed link.

As for the perceived conflict of interest, speaking for myself here, I think this is one case where having an editor with a connection to the site is a good thing. If I were in a similar situation, I'd probably go ahead and put on my user page that I am connected with the site and I'm working to make technical corrections to the links. I'd also mention that I was fixing malformed links in my edit summaries—which you do appear to be doing most of the time, and I thank you for doing that. The way I see it, users will link to find-a-grave in articles whether we give them a template or not. By giving them a template, we can standardize the links and—hopefully—make them as economical on the servers as possible. I agree that having a bot replace the old templates is a good idea, but if the new templates are throwing sporadic errors, we should probably get those ironed out before setting a bot loose on articles with (hopefully) working links. —C.Fred (talk) 23:42, 8 March 2009 (UTC)

Thank you. I will just start posting the pages on your 'talk' page if that is acceptable to you. Do I just post them in at the bottom, in that Find A Grave section? Yes, that error you were seeing on the Cromwell page was temporary. We are doing some weekend maintenance to the servers and they happened to be down during the window you were testing. But I'm still seeing the error on the references section of Baby_Face_Nelson. It resolves to: http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid={{{grid}}}

I don't see an issue with either of the pages now (Nelson and Cromwell). I do see what the problem was with the Cromwell page - the url: http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GSln=Cromwell&GSfn=Richard&GSby=1910&GSbyrel=in&GSdy=1960&GSdyrel=in&GSst=6&GSob=c&GRid=6385518&FLgrid=6385518&pt=Richard+Cromwell& that was originally in the article was changed to a template at some point and used the wrong number string in the template (from the &GSby=1910) and then someone used the confused combination of the two templates.

You could post the notes on your page about what you are doing, but if you did, I'd probably contact the wikimedia organization to clarify what you're doing, so no one does object as a COI issue. I'd still be glad to have you post the names you're having problems with on my talk page - I'll just put a section at the bottom for findagrave and you can post any there. That will help my project of combining the two templates and will help you from having errors show up. I've never had a problem accessing your site and I also use Firefox. Wildhartlivie (talk) 01:02, 9 March 2009 (UTC)

Found the problem with Nelson. The template in the External links section was fine, but it was also used as a reference for where he's buried. That's the link that was mis-resolving; I just fixed it.

FYI, GraveGuy, if you could, please make sure to type four tildes (~~~~) after your comments? That adds a signature of your name and the time; it also makes it easier to follow who said what. —C.Fred (talk) 02:02, 9 March 2009 (UTC)

Thank you for the four tilde trick. I've been thinking this sort of free form text conversation wasn't very helpful if people didn't know who was saying what...I will use it from now on. What's the protocol for deleting the above conversation which is now, largely, resolved? GraveGuy (talk) 05:21, 9 March 2009 (UTC)

There are two ways to do it. Most people archive their talk so they can readily access it. If you want to do that, click on User talk:GraveGuy/Archive 1, cut what you want to remove and paste it into the new window. Put the template {{talk archive}} at the top of the new page. Then tomorrow I will add an archive box to the top of this page. OR you can just delete it. Archiving is generally encouraged. BTW, I added a specific section to the bottom of my talk page for any errors that you find popping up. Good night. Wildhartlivie (talk) 06:05, 9 March 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for the list. I can't do anything about the answers.com page, and may not have fixed the Russian one (ru.wikipedia) since I can't read the language. I did try. I'm working on these templates now, so I'll get these fixed. Thanks! Wildhartlivie (talk) 03:33, 10 March 2009 (UTC)

Oh, yes. To start each link on a new line, use an asterick before the new link. Wildhartlivie (talk) 03:39, 10 March 2009 (UTC)

No problem, I'll trim it every now and then. I THINK I have all the links fixed on Bonnie and Clyde now. I missed a couple in the body of the article. Wildhartlivie (talk) 13:09, 22 March 2009 (UTC)