User talk:Rick Block/Archive2007

TfD nomination of Template:CatDiffuse

Template:CatDiffuse has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the template's entry on the Templates for Deletion page. Thank you.

This may be my last hurrah on the categorization front. In the last day or two along with this TfD I've proposed repopulating Category:Films with every film in Wikipedia and restricting new category creation to admins. --Samuel Wantman 02:36, 4 January 2007 (UTC)

Monty Hall problem

Monty Hall problem has been nominated for a featured article review. Articles are typically reviewed for two weeks. Please leave your comments and help us to return the article to featured quality. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, articles are moved onto the Featured Article Removal Candidates list for a further period, where editors may declare "Keep" or "Remove" the article from featured status. The instructions for the review process are here. Reviewers' concerns are here. Gzkn 10:59, 7 January 2007 (UTC)

Consider me notified! I never even knew that FAR existed as an actual category let alone the MH review. Thanks for calling it to my attention and I'll surely watchlist it now. Regarding the "emit" inquiry, just read from right to left. --hydnjo talk 22:39, 14 January 2007 (UTC)

klat ojndyh-- !dluow uoy taht wenk I::

Added a reference for the Bayesian analyisis section as you requested. Thanks for your tightening of the Hij definition. I think I'll play a bit with it later to see if I can put back in a "cases" form with the same width (maybe putting the brace in a multirow span of the table), so that it doen's look like an "aligned" equation. Thanks for the kind note of encouragement. Cheers The Glopk 17:37, 26 January 2007 (UTC)

Cool, I see that you worked out that "cases" formula before I did. Looks much nicer. I'd just add a tiny amount of space after the LaTeX images. Also, I'd remove the \times in the sum expression that you split into rows below, for consistency with the other products of probabilities.The Glopk 06:27, 27 January 2007 (UTC)

Hey. I actually thought about this problem for a while, the 99/100 was confusing me for some reason. I think I get it now. LG-犬夜叉 22:01, 30 April 2007 (UTC)

Kunisaki

I also disambiguate with Kiyosu, Kirishima, and Amakusa in the past year by reverting the existing articles and created an new article for the city with the same name. Also, I also added the word "town" or the district's name after the existing article's name, but not to the new ones. User:BigBang19 3:35 PST January 20, 2007

Wikipedia:List of Wikipedians by featured article nominations

Looks like the nomination of Caspian expeditions of the Rus was mistakenly attributed to User:Briangotts. While I have enormous respect to Briangotts, that article was actually nominated by myself. Beit Or 21:20, 20 January 2007 (UTC)

Wikipedia:List of Wikipedians by featured article nominations is generated from the by-year nomination lists, so this is actually an issue in Wikipedia:Featured articles nominated in 2006. I'll fix it there, and it will get corrected in WP:WBFAN the next time I run the tool to regenerate the list. -- Rick Block (talk) 21:39, 20 January 2007 (UTC)

Re: Odd edit

Ahh - that was my fault :). I've just fixed it now where it hadn't already been done. The reason for it was that when catching the bot up (after downtime and a busy week), I set my system clock back to the day it sohuld be archiving, and normally I comment out the code which puts the date header on, but I clearly forgot this time! Thanks for bringing this to my attention, Martinp23 22:43, 20 January 2007 (UTC)

Humany

I worked for a long time with the article about, the Swedish company, Humany. WHY did you just delete my article and hard work?

Pascal DeBeaux +46 8 446 04 74

pascal@debeaux.se

---

18:17, 17 January 2007 Fang Aili (Talk | contribs) deleted "Humany" (spam, probable copyvio) View (previous 50) (next 50) (20 | 50 | 100 | 250 | 500).

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Log" —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Debeaux (talk • contribs) 23:43, 20 January 2007 (UTC).

Humany

---

Please make the article about the Swedish company back. I worked in hours to trnslate it from the Swedish Wikipedia..!

Pascal DeBeaux

I suggest you talk to the admin who deleted it (not me). Her talk page is at User talk:Fang Aili. -- Rick Block (talk) 00:28, 21 January 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for the note about this. I am pretty sure of my deletion. It sounded like spam and still does. However I am sick with a cold, and I don't have a lot of brain power to deal with this kind of stuff right now. It's possible there could be some value to the article, but given its spammy nature, and the broken english, I thought it would need a complete rewrite to be encyclopedic. It also didn't assert much notability in my mind.. however if you disagree I fully support you restoring the article and talking with its creator, if you felt so inclined. Thanks, Fang Aili ^talk 15:39, 22 January 2007 (UTC)

User:Whos

Hey Rick, saw your revert of User:Who's page. Do you think a block is in order for User:Whos for impersonation? --Kbdank71 21:06, 23 January 2007 (UTC)

Infobox City Location map

Hi Rick Block, since you requested this feature, you might like to comment on it here Template_talk:Infobox_City#Proposed_changes_to_support_the_Location_map_template (Caniago 13:29, 24 January 2007 (UTC))

garfield

I didn't think it was a big enough, important tidbit of trivia.--^TheNation 01:46, 31 January 2007 (UTC)

WikiProject Infoboxes

Hi there. I've finally gotten around to starting up Wikipedia:WikiProject Infoboxes and so I am inviting you to join. The project page itself is still pretty bare, but at least we now have a central discussion point for this sort of work, instead of using user-talk pages. - 52 Pickup 10:26, 31 January 2007 (UTC)

Safari vs Firefox question

Greetings Rick

As a fellow Mac user, I was wondering if there was a quick answer to this question: Why when I view Waterloo, Ontario in Safari v 2.0.4, does the -City Mayor and -Governing body break lines, yet in Firefox 1.5.0.9 it does not? —MJCdetroit 04:50, 4 February 2007 (UTC)

Different browsers have different layout engines. The table generated by the template doesn't say anything in the html about where to break lines - Safari and Firefox simply choose to allocate widths for the columns of the table using different algorithms. I saw an instance of this recently and made "Governing body" "Governing body" (  is "non-breaking space") which helps, but Safari apparently treats "-" as a breaking character (if you try this, you'll see what I mean). I'm not sure there's a good solution. -- Rick Block (talk) 05:04, 4 February 2007 (UTC)

Thanks, —MJCdetroit 05:14, 4 February 2007 (UTC)

How to create template?

Hi. I want to create footer templates like {{PakPoliticalDivisions}} in each district and tehsil of Pakistan. How do I do that? Shinas 11:56, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

Template text size

I wonder if you could help with Template:Refstart. It's all fine, apart from text displaying at a smaller size, which I wish to have displayed at the normal size, but as yet have not managed. Is there a simple solution? I would be most grateful... (fix if you can!). Thanks. Tyrenius 14:08, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

Thanks Rick! I tried doing that before but obviously had some minor error somewhere. I hadn't thought of a help page, but it's a good idea, and I shall probably do it. I will still keep the template, as it has arisen out of necessity, through explaining to users and having to do the fiddly nowikis etc all the time. I think it will be more effective and user-friendly in many circumstances for the editor to find this on their talk page, more personal and more encouraging for them. The same reason I guess why we have a welcome page and a welcome template. I have already found it very handy. The move towards referencing is becoming ever more imperative, so I think the template may have a life ahead. At the moment this isn't being properly addressed. Tyrenius 01:11, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

Inputbox

The signpost has news about inputboxes. I seem to have a difficult time reading mediawiki help pages. They never seem to have well developed examples, and the explanations seem fairly minimal. They seem to be written in a language I don't understand. Perhaps it makes sense to you. I'm wondering if an inputbox can be added to TOC's, so people could just type the first few letters of where they'd like to go. If incorporated into CategoryTOC there would no longer be a need for the large category toc. -- Samuel Wantman 07:58, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

Hi Sam - Looks like the "type" parameter is very, very limited, allowing creation of only the three types of input boxes shown on the help page (search wikipedia, create a new page, or post a comment to a page), i.e. this can't be used for any other purpose. -- Rick Block (talk) 14:43, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

Been meaning to have a chat with you for a long while

In the meantime, see my (edit conflicted with your post) solution here: Propose_tagging_with_both_and_expanding_use_of_Cat_redirects_overall -- Hey, was trying to look out for you too! Cheers // FrankB 18:05, 17 February 2007 (UTC)

This is a very good idea. In fact, I think it can be done by just changing the soft redirect template (which I'm about to try). Note that although I do run a variety of tools, I don't actually run a recatting bot (or any actual bots). -- Rick Block (talk) 18:26, 17 February 2007 (UTC)

Thanks -- And I didn't even have to argue more and had time for lunch on top of that! As a matter of fact, one mis-creation (cat name) of mine was cleaned up by your BOT the very next day. I wasn't sure I wouldn't also need the first name interwiki, so I applied that solution with both redirects... So I know it works. If my schema needs, no waste, if not, I db-author it when I'm sure. (I'm basically lazy! <G> Prefer to work smart not hard!) ttfn // FrankB 19:17, 17 February 2007 (UTC)

Xpost

FYI: Just left this note on RobertG's talk (here):

I'd thought I'd left you a note about this belated conversation continuation, and also whether you would be willing to run the BOT on the commons, say once a week--once we got back to the Maps project there, or consider leasing it to myself or David Kernow. (Failing us, how about CBDunkerson or such? There has to be someone you can AGF about! I know nothing much of scripts, as a hardware engineer of thirty years would like to know even less <g>, and would promise not to fiddle with it.) RL being RL, and being busy on six wiki's with WP:TSP, I apparently got distracted, and that post got left in a preview bit bucket unsaved--I'll likely find it in the next hour! (<G> darn it! I've been trying to close down browsers all week!).
   Now they are asking on the Commons Village Pump (here) about whether you run the BOT there on any kind of schedule or at all. Thanks, and sorry for the extra politics, but you hold an important bottleneck, pending the developers getting things finished. Cheers! // FrankB 23:56, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

Keeping sewage out of the wine

Rick, I enjoyed your essay. It lines up with some of the thinking I've been doing over the past week, since vandalism and other poor quality edits are destroying my desire to contribute here. You could mention in the essay that the ability of anyone to edit articles without registering is a foundation issue for all WikiMedia projects, apparently beyond debate. It was something I wasn't aware of until yesterday, and after finding out I thought about an approval system for anonymous edits. One open issue I've been thinking about which you don't mention, is whether the power of approvers might best be limited to their own domain of expertise. So far example, an editor with expertise in the physics and maths might be given approver status for these articles, but excluded from approving other article domains such as humanities. A domain specific approach I presume would provide a better rejection rate for nonsense entering articles, but may pose problems due to the increased complexity and more fragmented approval coverage across Wikipedia. Maybe there is scope for a Wikiproject to vote on who their reviewers should be for articles in their domains? Would be great to get your essay out into the public debate on the heals of the Wikipedia is failing controversy. I'm going to forward it to User:Dbuckner since he has some similiar ideas to what you have described. (Caniago 15:15, 19 February 2007 (UTC))

Thanks for the comments. Domain specific approval might be marginally better, but given the amount of complexity involved (approvers could be put into one or more approval groups, with each article requiring approval given a list of permitted approval groups) I'm not sure it's worthwhile. I'd think a binary "approver or not" account flag would be very simple to implement, seems "wiki-like" to me, and would get us at least 90% of the benefit of a domain specific mechanism (and if binary isn't good enough, I'd favor an approver level rather than a group-based approach). Most of the previous versions of stable/static/verified I've seen move from "anyone can edit anything" all the way to the other extreme of "only an article-specific group of experts can edit" (and usually there's a content fork involved as well). My basic assumptions are:

1. Anything involving a content fork is a complete non-starter
2. If it's not simple, it won't get implemented
3. It must massively scale.
4. MediaWiki is not just for en.wikipedia, so anything added must be generally useful.

I think separating editing from approving satisfies all of these. -- Rick Block (talk) 15:47, 19 February 2007 (UTC)

Another way to have domain specific approvers without adding to the complexity of the system would be to advise approvers to stick to primarily approving the articles and topics they are familiar with - things which would already be on their watch list. To handle edits which may slip through the net of approvers, a page on the system could list the pool of articles which have unapproved edits older than say 2 days, which any approver could handle. The list of articles in this pool would also help admins see which domains require additional reliable editors to join the pool of approvers. (Caniago 03:32, 20 February 2007 (UTC))

Well, in practice and completely without enforcement, I think that's exactly what would happen. The wiki philosophy is "we trust you not to be an asshole". This is fine for a small, relatively closed community and even works reasonably well in the large simply because most people really aren't assholes (I know many people find this to be an amazing concept). Letting people who have demonstrated that they aren't assholes decide for themselves what edits they should and should not approve builds on the very same message - "based on your edits, we now know you're not an asshole and we trust you to be a conscientious approver". Implementing a Special: page for pages with unapproved edits, and annotating a watchlist so pages with unapproved edits are noted somehow, and other UI goodies would need to be implemented, but the basic thing is splitting editing and approving (and making the generally viewed copy of an article the last approved version). -- Rick Block (talk) 03:47, 20 February 2007 (UTC)

Sure, just suggesting that it should be a guideline for this approval system since there are currently some generalists who like to do recent changes patrolling. Would be better for the generalists to back-off and let the specialists have first bite at approving edits. Some other questions: would the approval system apply to new article creation, image creation and page moves? These actions are currently harder to undo compared to article edits, so it could cut down on the workload of those trying to get rid of copyright violations, non-notable pages, etc. (Caniago 05:56, 20 February 2007 (UTC))

I wouldn't extend it to these areas, or to all edits for all articles. Just articles marked as needing it - roughly all the FAs and GAs, but my guess is there's another 20,000 or so articles that are "complete" enough that they could use this and I'd bet there would be a faction who'd want to mark all articles about living people. Again, these are details that I think aren't worth worrying about given that nothing is apparently currently happening. -- Rick Block (talk) 14:44, 20 February 2007 (UTC)

RE:Blueco.png

You asked me this at Wikimedia Commons, the point is just to provide a blue fill-in of Colorado. - Patricknoddy 22:57, 20 February 2007 (UTC)

This is the reason for it!! - Patricknoddy 20:38, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

No, it is not a practical joke. - Patricknoddy 22:17, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

Hey Rickkers.

Dude, you are my go-to guy for math questions. I really appreciated your help with the ant in the room. This one is not NEARLY as hard... but I'm hoping you can settle a debate here. (No this is not my homework!! I'm way past that stage)

52 card deck. I need the ace of hearts, and the ace of spades, these aces only, in any order. I take only 2 cards from the deck.

1. Simplest way to calculate my odds: (2/52) * (1/51)... yes no?

Yes.

2. What are the odds this will happen exactly three times in a row: ((2/52) * (1/51))^3... yes no?

Yes.

3. Suppose you and I are standing next to a fair, american roulette wheel in vegas. The number 12 comes up, then the number 13, then the number 14. I say, "wow! what are the odds of that happening?" what would you say to me... how would you respond to my question.

I'd ask "the odds of what, any 3 consecutive numbers in sequence (only ascending)?" This one's a little harder. There are 38^3 sequences of 3 roulette numbers (they can repeat). Of these, 34 are sequences of consecutive ascending numbers (1-2-3, 2-3-4, 3-4-5, ..., 34-35-36). So, I'd say the odds are 34/(38^3). (double that if you want to count descending sequences, plus a few more if you're willing to include 0 and/or 00 - but does 0 come before or after 00?)

The question here (very poorly phrased by me) is really ... if any three numbers come up that even "Seem" like they are related in a pattern e.g. 5, 15, 25, or maybe 12, 21, 1, 2... etc. and I observe that it is a strange pattern and remark "Wow what are the odds!!" what would you say? - Abscissa 22:39, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

Like the numbers 3 1 4 1 5 9 come up in sequence? "yeah, that's weird". Note that the longer the sequence the weirder it becomes, but the odds of any given sequence are the same as any other given sequence (assuming it's actually random). Of course, I generally buy last week's winning lottery numbers this week (odds are the same as any other numbers, this week). -- Rick Block (talk) 02:50, 24 February 2007 (UTC)

Thanks mate, you're the best!! - Abscissa 00:01, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

No prob., but you know we have a math reference desk? -- Rick Block (talk) 02:41, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

e-mail

Hi, what's so awful about an "email in popular culture" section? I wouldn't have added just any novel that contains a couple of electronic messages, but one that is entirely made up of e-mails? Just asking, it's not something I feel strongly about. Best wishes, <KF> 05:52, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

"X in popular culture" sections almost always devolve into trivia sections with dozens of random, ephemeral (but perfectly sourced) factoids of absolutely no relevance or lasting importance. Including such references nearly always strikes me as a violation of WP:NOT#SOAP. Does someone looking up email in an encyclopedia care what novels or movies or TV shows feature email, or is the point to try to get such a person interested in the novel or movie or TV show? -- Rick Block (talk) 06:18, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

"Trivia", "random" "ephemeral" and "factoids of absolutely no relevance or lasting importance" are words which clearly show your bias, but, honestly, little else. I don't see the relevance of your reference to "Wikipedia is not a soapbox" as by definition a cross-reference is not an advertisement. Whether "someone looking up email in an encyclopedia" cares "what novels or movies or TV shows feature email" I don't know, and neither do you, but they might. And yes, trying to "get such a person interested" in knowledge and, in particular, its interrelatedness is the whole point of an encyclopaedia. Why would we want to draw the line at "novels or movies or TV shows"? In our case, the fact that someone is informed that such a novel exists does not imply that next they are going to order it from amazon. It may be debatable if such a link should be there if the article does not yet exist, but if it does, I see no problem whatsoever. I consider it rather eccentric to see getting someone interested in something as a negative thing.

As I said above, I do not feel strongly about this, but to me your reply raises more questions than it answers. Best wishes, <KF> 18:07, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

Image derived from Microsoft clipart

Yes, I agree that the work derived from the Microsoft clipart cannot be released to the public domain. For what it's worth, it should be relatively easy to create an equivalent picture without any restrictions. Conscious 20:13, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

late harvest wines

this was not a "marketing blurb". you could not find it on the web, since it does not exist there, and not copied from anywhere. this was an original composition which you may not be used to. However, your style rules are your own, and I do not want to comment on them. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Scipio afrikanus (talk • contribs) 22:38, 25 February 2007 (UTC).

late harvest wines -- # 02

your article has incomplete info, and at least one factual error -- relating to the Hungarian Tokaj —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Scipio afrikanus (talk • contribs) 22:44, 25 February 2007 (UTC).

Infobox City links

Hi. With the changes that I made, you can enter either a linked or non-linked name. I've always been a supporter of having users enter as little linked-text as possible - it reduces red links and by entering non-linked text, more template functionality is possible. You are right in that this has made it possible to automatically link to disambiguated names, but is that really common? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 52 Pickup (talk • contribs) 15:55, 26 February 2007 (UTC).

Survey Invitation

Hi there, I am a research student from the National University of Singapore and I wish to invite you to do an online survey about Wikipedia. To compensate you for your time, I am offering a reward of USD$10, either to you or as a donation to the Wikimedia Foundation. For more information, please go to the research home page. Thank you. --WikiInquirer 21:25, 3 March 2007 (UTC)^{talk to me}

Link to response from CBDunkerson (eom)

• Hi Rick. I absolutely agree with you regarding what you said to CBD. I am the "single clearly partisan person" that he mentions. CBD misses my point in that I never said that WT or DBuckner were acting incivil, my point was that I don't see why CBD kept having to defend himself all day. He should have a tougher skin and act mature about this. I think that's why other editors were getting upset at him and why I told him to back off. I don't see how he was being constructive as about 90% of his edits for those two days, were on that same AN/I re WT. To me, that's a waste of time regardless of if its one of his admin duties. MetsFan76 13:08, 6 March 2007 (UTC)

Rick - I chanced upon the message you left CBDunkerson and I just wanted to say I really appreciate that you did that. Thanks also for the note you left on my talk page. 81.179.115.188 00:42, 8 March 2007 (UTC)

Hiding columns

Hi Rick,
Do you think that you could give this question (Here) I posted a look? There's no hurry on it. Thanks, —MJCdetroit 02:59, 7 March 2007 (UTC)

I've made an attempt at fixing it (haven't extensively tested it). The upshot is the table preprocessor is very sensitive to line breaks. -- Rick Block (talk) 03:57, 7 March 2007 (UTC)

Link intersections

Hi Rick,

It's been a while! I've been pondering the notion of having two systems of categorization, one the formal taxonomies that we have been creating, and another, that would be a mostly unlimited tagging system. I've been thinking about this quite a bit, and I just realized that we already have a free, mostly unlimited tagging system in the form of a wikilink. Every time we link an article to another, we create a tag. All of these tags are managed in a pure wiki way. So all that is missing is the way to harvest information from these tags. We have "What links here" which is good as far as it goes, but what we really want to see for articles is "What links here in the main space", and also the intersection of those links with links to other articles. What I'm getting at is a way to find link intersections. Getting rid of everything but the mainspace for articles (Main could be the default and you could select other spaces if so desired) would make "What links here" much more useful. Being able to enter many different keywords, and then do an intersection of the links to each keyword would be a very effective way to search for information. The intersection of New York Suspension bridge Subway would likely bring up the suspension bridges in New York that carry the Subway. Of course there will be some articles that appear unexpectedly, but so what? This is essentially a tagging system that is going unused. What do you think?

Also, Just want to remind you that I co-nominated you along with Essjay, so you have nothing to worry about. I am who I say I am. -- Sam_{uel Wantman} 09:06, 9 March 2007 (UTC)

Hi Sam. Interesting idea. I'm not sure it's a lot different than a full text search (why do we particularly care if the reference is a ink?). I don't know if you noticed, but there was a comment at wikipedia talk:searching recently from someone who sounded like a potential Lucene expert (Lucene is the search engine underneath Wikipedia's search capability). I think the Google searching paradigm is actually pretty good - index everything and let people search it however they please (including "intersections"). Indexing the wikitext rather than the rendered HTML has some advantages. For example, if Google indexed wikitext category intersections would be solved (search for 'site:en.wikipedia.org "category: x" "category: y"'). Our internal search is based on the wikitext, not the rendered HTML, so if we spent some effort making it a little more reliable (and usable) we might accomplish what I think you're after.

About Essjay: I'm not worried - I am who I say I am as well. The point is only that there might be some folks wondering if others benefited from his duplicity. As a well known and well respected admin, his nominations presumably carried some weight. I thought it might be reasonable to create a discussion about it. Note that I later nominated you, so the truly paranoid might imagine we're both Essjay socks (and the extended discussion we had about CI was either the result of a psychotic multiple personality disorder or a highly elaborate ruse). This is kind of the point where Occam's razor comes into play. -- Rick Block (talk) 19:53, 9 March 2007 (UTC)

The difference between a regular text search and a search of links is major. The most important difference is noise. If there is a link such as Bridge, it points to a specific article (unlike Bridges which is a dab page, as is Bridge (disambiguation)), so the context of the word is clear. It won't be linked when used in other ways such as "burned a bridge" or "bridge to the future". If an article has an outgoing link, it means that the specific subject matter is relevant to the article, and thus acts like a smart tag. So if you look at the "What links here" list, filtered to only show mainspace articles, you get a complete list of informal tags to the article without nearly as much noise as all the articles that have the word. I also suspect that it would be much faster to search through the links than to search through the entire text.

Perhaps I haven't explained enough of what I'm thinking of. Let's say your looking at an article like Golden Gate Bridge and you want to find some similar articles. You'd click on a new item in the toolbox that says "find similar pages" and you'd see a list of all the outgoing links from the article. There'd be check boxes next to all of them, and you'd check off the ones you are interested in, and then click on a button that says "find similar pages". You'd get a list of all the articles that have the same combination of outgoing links. This is the intersection of all the articles that link to each tag. This is just like a flickr search. We have already tagged all the articles, and most of the tags are disambiguous to boot! -- SamuelWantman 06:57, 10 March 2007 (UTC)

I think I understand what you're proposing, and I'm not at all saying I think it's a bad idea. On the other hand, we haven't been able to get category intersections into the interface (which, as far as I can tell, pretty much everybody understands and supports) and I suspect what links here intersections would be nearly as difficult. The "what links here" pointers are kept in the same database (MySQL) as the category information, so would have the same sort of implementation constraints. The UI design has most of the same issues (although not the issue of subcategories and parent categories). I think it'd be fairly simple to sketch this out with mockups (even reusing a lot of what we did for CI). The selection list would likely be a new "special" page (perhaps "similar pages" as you suggest) listing all the outlinks from the indicated article with checkboxes for each one. After selecting and hitting enter, the page you go to would be a variant of "special:Whatlinkshere", perhaps just with added parameters (e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Whatlinkshere/New_York&article=Suspension_bridge&article=Subway). Since whatlinkshere is a special (and not a namespace), this proposal does avoid a bunch of the CI issues. If you think you could get one of the developers interested in it (or want to write a patch yourself), I"d say go for it. -- Rick Block (talk) 17:14, 11 March 2007 (UTC)

Yes, it dawned on me that there were similar technical constraints, but I wonder if there are any articles with as many incoming mainspace links as our huge categories (Living people, Albums by group, etc...) Off-hand, I can't think of an article that would approach 'Living People'. I'm guessing that most general terms are not linked. For example, biographies rarely link the word 'person'. If huge intersections are a problem, there might be some ways to control them. If an article has a huge number of incoming links, it might be grayed out in the list. I suspect that there is likely to be a similar, more specific link that wouldn't be grayed out. For example, if 'Bridge' had too many links, you'd be able to choose 'Suspension bridge'. Since the list of links will be much longer than the list of categories this might not be too much of a limitation. -- SamuelWantman 22:04, 11 March 2007 (UTC)

Link fixes on Infobox City

Did you want to try 52 Pickup's idea or do something different here (Template_talk:Infobox_City#Link_fixes)? Just wondering. —MJCdetroit 01:31, 10 March 2007 (UTC)

re: Can't see non-Roman characters

Thanks! I knew there was a help page for it; I just couldn't find the thing! --DrGaellon (talk | contribs) 18:01, 10 March 2007 (UTC)

Ping -- I added some to this. (I'm running way behind! <g>) // FrankB 23:06, 10 March 2007 (UTC)

actually...

I wasn't referring to you. Sorry for the misunderstanding. Nandesuka 03:43, 13 March 2007 (UTC)

UTF-8 in Japan

I don't know about all computer os/mail client combinations. But, I think that cell phones do not like UTF at all, because I've sent mail from my OSX box and heard that it was mojibake. Neier 04:46, 15 March 2007 (UTC)

Deletions

Yea, it happens often. I don't know exactly what the highest rate is, but the weather in London has seen MUCH more action then my "User-page" has. 68.39.174.238 04:35, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

But will it ever? 68.39.174.238 04:53, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

Thanks... sorta

This was very decent of you. This was somewhat less so. To clarify, Nandesuka was referring to me, not you, when she said the bit about 'compass that always points south' and 'defending the greater of two evils'. I've had several disagreements with Nandesuka and others (though no one involved in this case to my recollection) over a general view which I would describe as 'this person is a bad guy / did something wrong - therefor we are allowed to abuse them'. I'm dogmatic and make no bones about it. I defend principles... not people. In my opinion, Wikipedia's principles of civil behaviour seem obviously fair and justified and true... and thus they are always fair and justified and true. Breaking them 'because he was bad first' is, to me, obviously still breaking them. Nandesuka describes this as 'defending the greater of two evils'... I'd call it rather 'objecting that the lesser evil is still... evil'. If we have behavioural standards, and enforce them on 'the masses', then it is IMO greatly detrimental to not enforce them on the 'favored classes'. Others disagree. To date policy has read the way I apply it - though that seems to be slowly eroding. Should it change to openly say that 'favored users are allowed to be as incivil as they like' I would abide by that... but you still won't find me calling people "fuckwit", "ignoramus", or "asshole", because no matter what people claim, I remain convinced that allowing such, under any circumstances, is detrimental to a collaborative project. --CBD 12:53, 19 March 2007 (UTC)

I agree with you in principle, but I believe you're mistaken about current policy. WP:IAR is policy, explicitly saying there are no absolutes about policy. The yardstick by which every administrative action should be measured is "what's best for the encyclopedia". You seem to be saying you think "0 tolerance for incivility" is always best for the encyclopedia. Dogmatic enforcement, even of civil discourse rules, can sometimes not be the best course of action. In this particular case, I still maintain that your block of WT (which was for continued harassment not incivility) was not justified and has in fact harmed the encyclopedia by directly contributing to the decision of one of our best editors to leave. Rather than giving differential treatment to favored users, please consider that the message might be that everyone should be given a reasonable amount of slack. -- Rick Block (talk) 15:55, 19 March 2007 (UTC)

I agree entirely with giving everyone "a reasonable amount of slack". Indeed, I'm, to quote Lar, "notorious" for giving the benefit of the doubt. However, I consider the well over a dozen warnings Worldtraveller received prior to my block significantly past "a reasonable amount of slack". I block only when there is no other apparent way to stop disruptive behaviour. Worldtraveller went past that and kept on going through the extra leniency allowed to 'valued contributors'. As to Worldtraveller leaving because of the block... no. He'd left for more than six months previously, stated his temporary return was only to make a case about his views on the problems facing Wikipedia, and had already announced that he was leaving again - before I blocked him. However, had he still been actively providing significant contributions to the encyclopedia as he used to, I still would have blocked him. Because allowing anyone to behave that badly for months on end IS more harmful to the encyclopedia than losing them as a contributor... nor is quitting the only possible reaction someone might have to being held to non-zero, but vastly lower, standards of civility (and harassment is just another form of incivility) than everyone else. --CBD 17:59, 19 March 2007 (UTC)

quotations from subject - peer review help

Hi. I commented in Wikipedia:Peer review/Jeff Buckley/archive1 that too many quotations from the subject can get FAC criticism, and was asked to be more specific. I referred to your and WT's comments, but can't really adequately present your points of view, since I don't completely agree with it - would you like to comment in that PR about the number and use of quotations in the article Jeff Buckley? --AnonEMouse ^(squeak) 16:15, 19 March 2007 (UTC)

Deprecate parameter names in #expr: functions

Hello RB,
I wanted to run this by you to see if this makes. When deprecating parameter names that are in #expr functions it would look something this:

{{#expr: {{{OLD_name|{{{new_name|}}} }}} * 2.589988110336 round 1}}

In the sandbox that I was playing with, everything worked great as long as "OLD_name" and "new_name" were not in the same infobox code; even if left blank. It seemed that any infobox that would be using the parameter names would have to have to be all OLD parameters names or all NEW parameter names. If you accidentally have a mixture of old and new names you will get an . Like I said accidentally, I don't know why the old and new would get mixed in normal usage but it does happen. Is there a way around this or is this just the way that it is? Or am I doing something incorrectly? —MJCdetroit 01:56, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

Well, I don't think this is quite what you want, but I suspect it's not the problem you're chasing either. First, what you have gives preference to OLD_name over new_name, so I suspect you want:

{{#expr: {{{new_name|{{{OLD_name|}}} }}} * 2.589988110336 round 1}}

But I think the actual problem is when null values are provided (like in this version of your sandbox). In this instance, the population density parameters are

|population_density =

|population_density_mi2 =

|population_density_km2 =1

|population_density_sq_mi =

and the relevant template code is

{{formatnum:{{#expr: {{{population_density|{{{population_density_km2|0}}} }}} div 2.589988110336 round 1}} }} /sq mi ({{formatnum:{{#if:{{{population_density|}}}{{{population_density_km2|}}}|{{{population_density|{{{population_density_km2|}}} }}}|{{#expr: {{{population_density_mi2|{{{population_density_sq_mi|0}}} }}} * 2.589988110336 round 1}} }} }} /km²) }}

I think the problem is the distinction between no value supplied and "null value" supplied, and in this case you're supplying a null value for population_density. This causes the default for this variable to NOT be supplied (it has a value, it's just null). You could fix this by using #ifeq rather than simple defaults, but I suspect if you reorder so that the new parameter comes first (and don't supply a null value for it) you'll get the effect you're looking for. -- Rick Block (talk) 02:59, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

(CBD's a template wizard as well and probably watching this page - CBD: please feel free to comment). -- Rick Block (talk) 02:59, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

Thanks, Rick. I will try that tomorrow if I get a chance. Here is a peek at what I've been planning in a table. —MJCdetroit 03:26, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

I agree with Rick's analysis. Only thing remaining is that the 'ifeq' scenario Rick mentioned if you may have situations where the 'new_name' values are set to blank (as opposed to unset) would look like; {{#ifeq: {{{new_name|}}}||{{{OLD_name|}}}|{{{new_name}}}}}. That's essentially the same as {{{new_name|{{{OLD_name|}}}}}} except that it returns OLD_name if new_name is unset OR set blank. --CBD 11:09, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

A new proposal

Hi Rick. I've written a proposal, please take a look. I'm calling it Wikipedia:Link intersection. I'd appreciate your comments and suggestions. This one seems much more straight forward than WP:CI. -- Samuel Wantman 05:06, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

BTW, did you know that you can now usurp long abandoned user accounts? User:Rick is there for the picking, if you are interested. I recently became User:Sam. If you are interested, see Wikipedia:Changing_username/Usurpations. -- Samuel Wantman 05:10, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

The disagreement with deletion

Hey! I responded on the iMarketingGuru Talk page -- feel free to check it out and I hate being a newcomer, it doesn't give you as much respect regardless of your expertise (or that of your family members who may one day begin to edit on Wikipedia -- read the Talk page for more on that) =oP.

By the way, Miles told me that his wiki has vandals all the time and he despises them...I need to get involved with this, for then I can get in and get my feet wet more and more =o) —The preceding unsigned comment was added by IMarketingGuru (talk • contribs) 06:04, 31 March 2007 (UTC).

Update for Wikipedia:List of Wikipedians by featured article nominations:

JSYK (You must get tired of editcountis-ridden editors pestering you lol...) I nominated the FA Archaeopteryx recently & not wanting to destroy anything on the mentioned page, I tohught I'd leave it to you when you update the list. It hasn't shown up yet, so I'm assuming you haven't updated the list yet - just making sure it would be included as I couldn't find its nomination on the source list. Thanks, Spawn Man 02:40, 1 April 2007 (UTC)

I try to update WBFAN about once a month, generally days (not hours :) ) after the start of the month. I'm sure you'll show up the next time I update the page (I update the by-year lists firsts, including a new by-month table in the relevant by-year list). As Wednesday says (in The Addams Family movie), "just wait". -- Rick Block (talk) 04:23, 1 April 2007 (UTC)

Just making you aware of Wikipedia_talk:Today's_featured_article/requests#Old_FAs. Don't know if this has any direct effect on the WBFAN code. Gimmetrow 18:06, 3 April 2007 (UTC)

Halloween (film)

hi, if u check the history of the FAC for this article you'll see it was nominated by Zzzzz. 86.27.151.251 19:10, 8 April 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for noticing. The script I use is not perfect and takes manual adjustments. I must have messed up on this one. -- Rick Block (talk) 20:05, 8 April 2007 (UTC)

By year nomination lists

Just FYI - I've updated FA vs. FFA and the mainpage appearance dates for each of the by-year nomination lists (like Wikipedia:Featured articles nominated in 2007) - using various scripts rather than manual methods. As far as I know, these lists now accurately reflect the content of FA and FFA, and the TFA archives. -- Rick Block (talk) 20:46, 8 April 2007 (UTC)

Sounds good. I've got my hands full tracking ArticleHistory and making sure WP:FA and WP:FFA are accurate, so I can't keep up with yet another list. Best regards, SandyGeorgia (Talk) 20:49, 8 April 2007 (UTC)

I added some info for you at Wikipedia:List of Wikipedians by featured article nominations/anomalies. I'm not clear why some of those are showing up as anomolies. Some of them are new FAs, and Gimmetrow and I reconstructed many of the FFA original FACs when we built the ArticleHistory templates. I'm pretty sure the rest of the missing FACs are Brilliant Prose promotions. Best, SandyGeorgia (Talk) 21:57, 10 April 2007 (UTC)

Sandy - Hopefully you're watching this page. The very new ones are simply not in the by-year lists (yet). These show up as anomalies since the script that generates WBFAN checks to make sure each article in WP:FA has a nomination history in one of the by-year lists (and I ran this script several days after updating the by-year lists). These will sort themselves out the next time I update the by-year lists. I'll update the appropriate by-year lists for the FFAs you've annotated in the anomalies list. I think once this is done the number of anomalies will be down to a very small handful. -- Rick Block (talk) 03:26, 11 April 2007 (UTC)

OK, let me know if I can check anything else. I was up to my eyeballs in FA history when we were building the ArticleHistory templates, so I now know where to find lots of pieces. Best, SandyGeorgia (Talk) 03:32, 11 April 2007 (UTC)

Rick, I apologize for the confusion, but I'm completely losing the train of what the issue even is on the Today's featured article request talk page. The situation started as Tony the Tiger wanting to change a process (that's not broken, doesn't need fixing, and has been defeated twice) for choosing main page articles, leading him to partially and incompletely strike articles from your list. Your list was working; I was concerned at why he was introducing another means of tracking something that is already tracked elsewhere. Now we've morphed to talking about why Gimmetrow is running GimmeBot, and whether stars should be blue or rust. I should probably bow out, because I'm no longer sure what we're trying to solve or what the concerns are? If you want to keep up with Tony's work, that's fine — I'm not sure what the issue is? SandyGeorgia (Talk) 23:43, 11 April 2007 (UTC)

Replies to your questions

1. I'm sure I could handle updating the WBFAN lists when articles become FFAs. Re-promotions are fairly rare and would be simplest to do by hand. But it seems likely to work better if you handle all the WBFAN work.

2. A huge part of the code involves dealing with ArticleHistory - not my original intent. My original intent was largely to try a new system of archiving. AfD has one system, Peer review has another system. Both have benefits, but both have disadvantages and are confusing in different ways to editors. The trial system is supposed to be easy for editors to handle, but it requires a bot to handle most of the upkeep. In a sense it's not necessary - this archiving could be discontinued at any time and it should be a minor transition back to the old system - the old instructions are still part of the FAC instructions. However, if editors like the system after a few months, I would like to explore ways to get the archiving function built into mediawiki. Even a javascript tool could be helpful.

3. Closing discussions was part of my original proposal, but a bit of an add-on. FAC discussions were never "closed" before, and there are FAC pages out there with comments months after the FAC was over. At least one page had comments two years after the fact, if I recall. So there's a window between Raul and the bot, but it's only noticeable because of the new closing tags. This bot process could probably be converted into an online tool, but it would be specific to the FAC/FAR process, and probably specific to en-wiki. Implementing some of the library tasks (archiving) on toolserver would help a bit. Gimmetrow 03:01, 15 April 2007 (UTC)

Question for an Admin

Hi Rick, I have a few questions and am asking you as from what I have read you seem like a pleasant and reasonable guy. I am confused as to what is and is not classed as spam on this site. A friend of mine has had a few discussions with some aggressive and rather unpleasant anti-spammers. I'd like to avoid the same treatment - as I would find it very upsetting. Is a PhD thesis really spam?? I can't beleive that it is! PhD theses are peer reviewed and freely available so what's wrong with citing them if they contain useful information. Who on this site decides who is or is not an expert on a subject? Thanks for any help.--Petdoc 18:29, 9 April 2007 (UTC)

Deathly Hollows

Explain and look at my talk page. I am NOT happy. You better bring that topic back. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Dracula101 (talk • contribs) 00:51, 13 April 2007 (UTC).

Me again:

Hi, I've got a wierd case for you about the Wikipedians by FA page - User:Cuivienen has 4 FAs, however 2 other stars link to the same article - The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask. This is because the article was promoted, then demoted & then promoted again. My question is - is this allowed, fair etc? If not, can you remove it, as it seems a bit unfair that one person gets to be higher on the table due to a technicality like that... And yes, I'm that petty... ;) Thanks, Spawn Man 10:38, 14 April 2007 (UTC)

Copied to, and replied at, Wikipedia talk:List of Wikipedians by featured article nominations. -- Rick Block (talk) 16:05, 14 April 2007 (UTC)

Re: Question about bots

Hi,

thx for answer. I thought of writing a bot (for my wiki) that would detect the users that are inactive (i.e. no edits for more than let's say 3 months) and would place appropriate info on their page. Do you know whether similar bot exists on wikipedia and whether I could use this code?

thx. --Aretai 15:25, 19 April 2007 (UTC)

I have a semi-bot (shell script) that checks admin activity here and produces an updated version of WP:LA. It doesn't currently auto-update the page (I'm adding auto-update functions using pywikipediabot). You're welcome to use this activity checking script as a basis for your bot if you'd like, it's at user:Rick Block/adminactivity. If you're not conversant with shell/awk sorts of things it might be kind of inscrutable. If you're a python programmer, I suspect it would not be terribly difficult to take the basic concept and code it entirely in python as a pywikipediabot. -- Rick Block (talk) 15:39, 19 April 2007 (UTC)

Wandering dot IE vs FF (a CSS problem?)

Hi Rick,

I posted a problem at WP:VPT#Location map dot varies location between Firefox and IE; one correct, one not. and someone thinks it maybe a CSS problem. Would you mind throwing in your two-cents? Thanks—MJCdetroit 12:19, 27 April 2007 (UTC)

Looks like the responses there are closing in on a solution. I don't actually know much about this, so other than experimenting with various browsers can't add anything. -- Rick Block (talk) 00:09, 28 April 2007 (UTC)

Ok thanks, I thought that you may have been able to rule out CSS as the problem. However, it looks like we may have a solution. I'll pull out my PC tomorrow and and make sure that the solution works on multiple browsers and OSs. —MJCdetroit 16:19, 28 April 2007 (UTC)

Articles created

You asked for the list of articles you'd created... your list can be found here. --Interiot 21:47, 28 April 2007 (UTC)

Ahh, thanks for the correction. --Interiot 02:18, 29 April 2007 (UTC)

Languages

maybe best at some point you re-run the whole process. Then I would not need to update all the changes. I think, what I changed until now are changes your script will detect next time. Not sure whether it's good to link the lc1 lc2 etc then all to one article. If at some point an article is created, the links will still go to the old macro-article. I know no cure. Tobias Conradi (Talk) 15:03, 30 April 2007 (UTC)

Category:Redirects from ISO 639 - can you mass create ISO 639 redirects? And fix the current sorting? (Instead of AAA is should be aaa) Tobias Conradi (Talk) 03:39, 1 May 2007 (UTC)

FA/FFA Bot

Looks good, Rick (scary to see how few 2003 FAs are left). SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:09, 4 May 2007 (UTC)

Thanks

Hi. Thank you for the change in the Tokyo article. I love jazz too.--Oda Mari 15:42, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

You're welcome. I find the wiki-way to be much like jazz - someone starts something, someone else picks up on it and perhaps elaborates on it, yet another joins in connecting the first and the second but adding yet another layer, and so on, ultimately producing something quite amazing. -- Rick Block (talk) 03:29, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

Hi again. I think I could help to add some information, like 4 bars ad lib, on the Toshiko Akiyoshi article. Maybe. Anyway I'll try. --Oda Mari 04:46, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

FA Vanity list

The strange and mysterious message at the start of the page told me to go here!

I'm mentioned twice, under two different names--one with one FA, the other with five!

One as Beneaththelandslide (displayed as G), and the other as Beneaththelandslide (michael).

Any chance that the 'G' one could be removed, and the Waterfall Gully FA ? moved to the michael one? Hope I'm making some degree of sense here. Cheers, michael ^talk 05:50, 29 May 2007 (UTC)

Done. The issue was the lowercase "b" in your (new) sig. "User:beneaththelandslide" != "User:Beneaththelandslide". I've fixed the script to ignore the case of the first character of the username. BTW - what about the message is strange and mysterious? WP:WBFAN is simply a generated page (sort of like a special: page), generated by a tool I run rather than software more closely associated with Wikipedia. -- Rick Block (talk) 16:56, 29 May 2007 (UTC)

FAR Bot

Rick, thanks for the offer. I'm traveling tomorrow, so will look at it when I'm home next week. (It sounds way over my head :-) SandyGeorgia (Talk) 03:36, 30 May 2007 (UTC)

I know, I'll just need to focus. I did write some pretty massive linear programs when my brain was younger, but that was before I lost it. Tonight, I'm trying to pack and not get too distraught about the day's events, so just not very focused. Will check in when I'm home in a week. Thanks so much, again, for the offer; I'd love to stop doing that tedious work. Best, G'night. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 03:59, 30 May 2007 (UTC)

Redirect?

How do you redirect?Shaneymike 12:57, 7 June 2007 (UTC)

Singles articles

The reason that I added those pages is because I thought people might be interested in knowing about them and that it would be nice to give them an easy outlet. But if you think it's overkill, I won't argue with you.Shaneymike 13:01, 7 June 2007 (UTC)

Upcoming films no longer allowed?

You claim that creating an article about an upcoming film is unverifiable speculation. Are you considering to nominate all upcoming films for 2008, 2009, 2010 for deletion? – Ilse@ 07:53, 10 June 2007 (UTC)

From Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not#Wikipedia is not a crystal ball (emphasis is in the original):

Forward-looking articles about unreleased products (e.g. movies, games, etc.) require special care to make sure that they are not advertising. In particular:

1. Individual scheduled or expected future events should only be included if the event is notable and almost certain to take place.

The shooting of Azazel has been postponed to "earliest in 2008" (according to IMDB). My guess (and I'm just speculating, in an unverified sort of way) is that this film is not currently in active production but on hold. Do you think it is "almost certain" that this film will complete production? What is the big hurry to create a Wikipedia article about it? Even if it were to be deleted now it could be created later, like perhaps when there's a firm release date and trailers are being shown in theaters. It is not an official guideline (and may not reflect current consensus), but the words at Wikipedia:Notability (films) about future films reflect what I think WP:NOT says about future film articles. Articles about films in production nearly always strike me as pre-advertising.

Will I nominate all upcoming films for deletion? I'm not sure. I might look around and see if there is a consensus about future films. -- Rick Block (talk) 15:35, 10 June 2007 (UTC)

Rick,

I feel that as Futtergate helped to shape the planning community in the Central North Island, that it is indeed worthy of being on Wikipedia. I am unimpressed that you wish this summary to be deletted. Perhaps if you had been near the Futtergate controvery (instead of residing in America) you would have a different view. Anyways as WIkipedia is a global domain you are entitled to your views.

Billy

Systemic Theory

Hello Rick, my name is Oswaldo (caracas4u@hotmail.com) and I'm assisting Daniele -who is my friend- who initiated this action. Neither of us are involved with Adaptogenos. In fact, Daniele was keen in making this known since he was succesfully treated with this medicine. He rather not talk about this last. On any case he requested permission from Jose Olalde to publish the information as well as to use the images and text published in eCAM. Please help us out on as how to achieve this. For starters is this the right way to get in touch with you? Also, somebody else already included in Wikipedia (Spanish) the term adaptogeno to which Daniele added some other useful terms. See you soon....

Hi Rick

I am owner this publications and have all copyright this 4 publications

Oxford University Press Licence

License Part I 1726011314401

Licensed content author: Jose A Olalde Rangel Licensed content publicaction: Evidence-based Complementary and Alternative Medicine Licensed content: Mar 2,2005 Portion of the article: Abstract

Licence Part II 1726020375846

Licensed content author: Jose A Olalde Rangel Licensed content publicaction: Evidence-based Complementary and Alternative Medicine Licensed content: May 27,2005 Portion of the article: Abstract

Licence Part III 1726020512768

Licensed content author: Jose A Olalde Rangel Licensed content publicaction: Evidence-based Complementary and Alternative Medicine Licensed content: Aug 20,2005 Portion of the article: Abstract

Licence Part IV 1726010772062

Licensed content author: Jose A Olalde Rangel Licensed content publicaction: Evidence-based Complementary and Alternative Medicine Licensed content: Dec,2005 Portion of the article: Abstract

Thank You

I need information about publish this concept.

Systemic Theory from Daniele (Oswaldo)

Hello Rick, my name is Oswaldo (caracas4u@hotmail.com) and I'm assisting Daniele -who is my friend- who initiated this action. Neither of us are involved with Adaptogenos. In fact, Daniele was keen in making this known since he was succesfully treated with this medicine. He rather not talk about this last. On any case he requested permission from Jose Olalde to publish the information as well as to use the images and text published in eCAM. Please help us out on as how to achieve this. For starters is this the right way to get in touch with you? Also, somebody else already included in Wikipedia (Spanish) the term adaptogeno to which Daniele added some other useful terms. See you soon....

Kansas High School Track and Field All Time List

I see you tagged the above article as a copyright violation. I copied the content from Category:Kansas track and field (and tried to delete it, but a bot detected page blanking and reverted), so then I guess it should be deleted too. GregorB 18:46, 14 June 2007 (UTC)

I've deleted the content (and categorized the category). -- Rick Block (talk) 18:54, 14 June 2007 (UTC)

cfd closing

Thanks for the info. That process has apparently changed since I started doing this, and I never noticed the change. But I'll do it that way from now on.--Mike Selinker 20:34, 14 June 2007 (UTC)

Notability films & books

Rick, I modified your new lead for films to work at books and inserted it there. You might take a look to see whether it works well. I think it does. Although I'm not sure that we really need either guideline since I think that WP:N suffices in both cases, I've removed my opposition to film and think that we can accept it as a guideline. However, I think that combining books and film into one guideline is practical and efficient. --Kevin Murray 14:36, 16 June 2007 (UTC)

Kevin - The modified intro at WP:BK seems fine. In the case of films, I think the original intent was to create a stricter standard than WP:N that would exclude the bulk of current release films (which, as I"ve mentioned on the talk page, seems unworkable). This guideline also allows articles on films that have won major awards or are "taught" that wouldn't otherwise satisfy WP:N. My interest comes from running into articles about future films, see Category:Upcoming films. I think most of these articles are effectively pre-release advertising, but since there are trade magazines and newspapers that print about films in various stages of production many of these films technically satisfy WP:N even though more than a few will in all likelihood never be released. The current version of the film guideline basically says "wait until the film is released" (which seems reasonable to me). I'm not sure what the point of the book guideline is, although it also allows articles on award winning books and I'd guess that we've had problems with authors creating articles about their own books (essentially using Wikipedia as advertising). The intent of these guidelines seems roughly the same, but may be different enough to warrant specific guidelines. Another approach might be to modify the WP:N guideline to include major award winners and to exclude any pre-release coverage (of films, books, video games, etc.). I don't know how malleable the WP:N guideline might be at this point, although there are definitely enough folks around these days that pretty much any guideline or policy change is extremely difficult. -- Rick Block (talk) 15:52, 16 June 2007 (UTC)

The Nine Planets website

Hi Rick,

I went back and looked at the text of The Nine Planets when I deleted it in Dec. 2006. It was a very short article that basically said "This is a website about the Solar System. It was started in 1994." There was no mention of any awards or other indication of notability.

Given that the deleted article was pretty empty, it'd probably be better if you restarted the article from scratch. Make sure to mention the more reliable awards (like the PC Magazine one, for example). Thanks, NawlinWiki 17:13, 17 June 2007 (UTC)

Looks good! NawlinWiki 02:59, 18 June 2007 (UTC)

My apology

I'm very sorry for my inaccurate edits in WP:WBFAN. It was an unexpected reversion, since I thought that the person who has major contribution to the article will also take credit for FA status. However, I feel this credit-evaluation criterion that bases on the nomination is somewhat unfair, for that an article is encompassed by number of contributions from various editors, not the nominator himself. If this continues, the case will be that more than one editor will try to nominate the article to get credit for it. Just opinion from my part albeit I've already undone my version. Galadree-el 03:50, 23 June 2007 (UTC)

A wise suggestion. I've already added his name to the list. I assume your bot functions through this kind of lists. Galadree-el 10:47, 23 June 2007 (UTC)

I have nominated 2 Articles for deletion

I nominated 2 Articles for deletion, And because your an administrator shouldn't you join in the discussion? The articles i have nominated are Buzz! Junior and Buzz! because they are very small and have little information when i looked at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion It said i had to notify users who would Monitor an Articles for deletion discussion, And because you were in the discussion during Cows In Action i thought i should notify you that i nominated 2 articles for deletion. Reply on your talk page. (Woggy 07:55, 19 July 2007 (UTC))

Can i create Cows In Action when its as successful as Astrosaurs?

In June, My article Cows In Action was nominated for Deletion, And the result was a redirect to Steve Cole (Author) You Nominated my article for deletion, But i thank you for changing my article into a redirect, Instead of deleting it. When Cows In Action is successful as Astrosaurs can i create it again? I understand now that Cows In Action, At the moment is unsuitable for an Article because its only just started, So when it is more successful can i recreate it? Leave your reply here, Or on my talk page Thanks, (Woggy 18:33, 18 July 2007 (UTC))

Monty Hall

Hi Rick, G-guy uses AWB to give ratings to article, so he probably didn't see the star. Bplus is the highest rating that one can give to a previously unrated article, so that is what he chose. Don't worry, he wasn't trying to downrate the article. :)--Cronholm¹⁴⁴ 04:30, 23 June 2007 (UTC)

Hi - It's not a big deal - just seemed a little curious. The article just went through a FAR a month or two ago. It's certainly not perfect, but B+ seemed a little harsh. BTW, as always, improvements would be welcomed (although this particular article is perhaps a little more difficult than most since it seems to bring up such strong reactions). -- Rick Block (talk) 04:46, 23 June 2007 (UTC)

Quite a few people have been curious about the ratings, so far about 2,500 articles have been rated by G-guy's push. The B+ was actually a compliment, as it was the highest rating he could give, GA, A, and FA all require review (as you are probably well aware of :) ). As for the improvements, I am no statistician, but we have a few at WT:WPM, you might want to drop a line there. Cheers--Cronholm¹⁴⁴ 04:58, 23 June 2007 (UTC)

It appears that I was wrong, G-guy replied on his talk page.--Cronholm¹⁴⁴ 11:03, 23 June 2007 (UTC)

My problem with the lead before is that it wasn't a WP:LEAD; it didn't summarize the article, rather introduced concepts not covered in the article body. It looks like a lead should look now, but that's probably because the article now covers the concepts, so the lead now summarizes. Regards, SandyGeorgia (Talk) 04:00, 25 June 2007 (UTC)

formatting

Hi - I've reformatted some of the articles you've changed using a simpler markup, for example see Arapahoe at Village Center (RTD). I believe the intent of the table at the bottom is that the table remain at the bottom regardless of how much text is ultimately added to the article. The way you've been doing these (incorporating the image with the table inside a larger table) makes the image float to the bottom. It's not a big deal, but I thought I'd drop by and let you know why I've been redoing your changes. -- Rick Block (talk) 16:35, 24 June 2007 (UTC)

Rick,

I don't know if I am responding to this in the correct fashion so that you will see it. But on the assumption you do, i really do not appreciate your edits. The pages look like crap again. "I believe the intent of the table at the bottom is that the table remain at the bottom" -- number one the tables are not that informative. If someone is coming to view a page about a particular station, why is the most prominent object there a table that is more has more info about the preceding or following station. Plus the table is confusing anyway.

If you want the table to float to the bottom that's fine, but in doing your edits you have deleted photos that in some cases were there before I even reformatted anything. You ever heard of the expression that a picture is worth a thousand words... why are limiting the photos... it's not like these are huge bloated pages.

If you don't like what i did why don't you at least put all the photos back up and try and format them in a way that is at least somewhat visually appealing, instead of the mess that it is now?

I guess this is a good example of no good deed goes unpunished. This is the first and last time i will contribute my time to wikipedia.

Replied at User talk:Mobyll. -- Rick Block (talk) 01:03, 25 June 2007 (UTC)

I'll respond in more detail later, but the general reason I deleted images from the articles was that the deleted images were either substantially identical to the image I left in the article or were (IMO) not that helpful. Anyone is free to add them back - following the basic premise of this site that it reflects the collaborative editing efforts of anyone who comes across it. The intent is to create an encyclopedia, not a travel site (and certainly not a host for personal photos).

Are you still thinking you won't contribute? Do you still want this page deleted? BTW - I am an administrator here and can delete this page whenever you'd like (although I'd prefer not). -- Rick Block (talk) 18:39, 25 June 2007 (UTC)

rick -- i'm really tired of going back and forth over this... i am not going to add the photos back, i asked you to b/c you were the person that removed them. i don't see how the photos are substantially identical (i suggest you look again, if you really think they are). As far as them, in your opinion, not being that helpful -- i disagree and i think it very presumptuous of you that based on your opinion, you deleted photos that were already there (before i touched anything). Again if the were 7 or 10 photos i would probably agree with you but that was not the case in any of these instances. When you say that anyone is free to add them back... how are people who are coming to visit the webpage even going to know there are other photos that exist about that station in order to put them back. The photos you removed were all there previous to my edits, with the exception of the one that i added at lousiana - pearl.

"The intent is to create an encyclopedia, not a travel site (and certainly not a host for personal photos)" -- you know encyclopedias contain photos. They do so b/c they add information. The webpages for these stations are pathetically thin. I resent the implication that i am trying to use wikipedia for a travel site or hosting personal photos. i have created other webpages for that [1] & [2], and they themselves are heavily edited down from the photos i took. And yes I want this page deleted, as a matter of fact i want my user account deleted, but i read thru the help and it seems that is not possible, but if you can arrange that i would appreciate it.

I wasn't implying you were trying to treat Wikipedia as a travel site or for hosting personal photos, just setting the context. We really haven't gone back and forth about this essentially at all, I've simply been trying to engage you in a conversation in an apparently futile attempt to keep you as an editor. I've deleted your talk page per your request. I will look at the images again, and I wouldn't mind discussing them with you if you decide to pay attention to this page (or any of the talk pages for the articles in question). -- Rick Block (talk) 02:56, 26 June 2007 (UTC)

Daniel Hensel

Hello Rick:

Why should this site be deleted? The music of this composer is of an outstanding quality.Though he is one of the persons that work still in the background, he becomes more and more important in the young german composers generation and receives more and more perception. His music has gotten a european dimension at his last event. Not many students are growing that fast in the music world. You just have to look on the list of his teachers, that have been the most important german and austrian composers of their time.

You surely may delete it. But if you do that, there will be coming an other person in some weeks or months to create this site new. You would have to answer the question why a site of the composer Moritz Eggert is not deleted but the site of Daniel Hensel. Surely Eggert got more international reputation, but he is more than 14 years older.

I believe in Hensels music. I saw and heard him in Berlin and he was quite impressive to me. And he won international prizes as well.

Duran Duran featured article

Thanks for the kind words about Duran Duran. I was very disheartened by the article's turn at WP:FAR -- while I appreciate the dedication and sincerity of the people who work there, it was hard to see the star removed over relatively small matters; the bulk of the actual text of the article remains untouched (although I am waiting my turn for a little attention from the League of Copyeditors to see if they can make any improvements -- strike that, apparently being defeatured means I don't get to ask for copyediting either....).

However, with my new job I have very little time for serious Wikipedia editing these days -- I cast an eye over my watchlist for vandalism each morning, and occasionally take a turn at a simple task like disambiguating, but I hope that some day soon I will able to just spend a day or two poring over my source materials and cite every last crazy thing they asked for. I know I can finish bringing the level of citations up to standard, and when I have I will definitely re-submit the article to WP:FAC. I thank you again for the encouragement to do so. — Catherine\^talk 04:47, 28 June 2007 (UTC)

Re: Deletion of Faceboy

Hi, sorry it took so long to get back to you. Since the speedy was contested, I've nominated the faceboy article for deletion (Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Faceboy).ˉˉ^anetode╦╩ 14:49, 29 June 2007 (UTC)

Workshop diffs

The diffs you are using on the workshop are wrong. The diff for "End of March to end of April" should be be from the last saved version in March to the last saved version in April. You have an off-by-one error - e.g, you're using the last saved version in March to the first saved version in May. Now this is normally not a problem, unless the first edit of the month happens to be someone promoting or demoting FAs, which in this case, it is. Raul654 17:47, 2 July 2007 (UTC)

Nevermind though. It was all my fault to begin with - I archived them to the wrong month. I've fixed it all now. So everything back to (and including) July 2005 is correct. Raul654 17:54, 2 July 2007 (UTC)

I meant to be taking end of month to end of month, but didn't adjust to UTC (times on history pages are displayed in my timezone preference, not UTC). Even if I'd thought about this, I might have used that diff anyway (since you're in US Eastern time, and that diff was made in April in your timezone). -- Rick Block (talk) 00:47, 3 July 2007 (UTC)

Wikipedia:List of Wikipedians by DYK article creation/nominations

I saw that Rick Bot maintains Wikipedia:List of Wikipedians by featured article nominations and thought that you could help out DYK. DYK is in the process of trying to create a List of Wikipedians by number of DYKs. We've been trying to do it manually and encourage editors to add their own numbers, but the list is far from complete. However, each DYK's Article creator's talk page receives {{UpdatedDYK}} on it and each DYK article Nominator's talk page receives {{UpdatedDYKNom}} on it. Is it possible for Rick Bot to be revised to search through all user talk pages for {{UpdatedDYK}} and {{UpdatedDYKNom}} and to use those postings to create a table similar to the one at List of Wikipedians by number of DYKs.? Also, a list of DYK creators can be obtained from the first post of each article listed at Wikipedia:Recent_additions. For example, the users who made the first post for each article listed between ''' ''' marks at Wikipedia:Recent_additions is considered the DYK article creator. Such a list would be great. Thanks. -- Jreferee ^(Talk) 22:30, 4 July 2007 (UTC)

Hmm. I could probably write a script of some sort that would find all references to UpdatedDYK and/or UpdatedDYKNom and create a table. I'm not sure how to figure out the counts. I'll think about this and let you know. -- Rick Block (talk) 22:53, 4 July 2007 (UTC)

The important one is article creation. Could the bot compile a one time list of the users who made the first post at each article listed at Wikipedia:Recent_additions. I could just take the list, put it into Microsoft Excel, and manually count how many times a user is listed. We are more or less looking for the big DYK contributors to give people an idea of who is doing what and what is considered alot of contributions. Thanks. -- Jreferee ^(Talk) 07:07, 6 July 2007 (UTC)

The person who makes the first post in the article isn't necesary the author, since many articles are expanded stubs, former redirects and so forth. Blnguyen (bananabucket) 02:35, 16 July 2007 (UTC)

If we follow the WP:WBFAN model, how this will work is there will be a "history" page with the article, creator, nominator, and main page appearance date, automatically created but editable after the fact to correct any anomalies. The "main" stats page would then be fully automatically created from these history pages (this is how WBFAN works). Corrections made to the "history" pages would show up in the main stats page the next time it was regenerated. My bot, user:Rick Bot currently updates WBFAN daily, and could probably be convinced to update a DYK stats page (if we ask nicely). -- Rick Block (talk) 03:07, 16 July 2007 (UTC)

There seems to be two issues - compiling a list of existing DYK credits and getting the bot to update that list going forward. If you can get the bot to compile a list of existing DYK credits, I would be happy to hand check it to confirm that it posted the correct names. -- Jreferee ^(Talk) 06:37, 17 July 2007 (UTC)

Reading through this again, it actually wouldn't be too difficult to write a tool that would read all the archives for Wikipedia:Recent_additions producing a list of DYK articles, and then another tool to find the first contributor to a given article, and then a third tool to run the list through the "find first contributor" tool. Reading the notes at the archive, this would (erroneously) identify a stub creator as the contributor (rather than whoever "greatly expanded [a] former stub"). Perhaps the right way to do this would be archive by archive, and produce a file (for each archive) of the article name and the creator/contributor - conceptually similar to the files like Wikipedia:Featured articles nominated in 2007. Given a regularly formatted set of files like this (perhaps a subpage under the archive page), it wouldn't be hard to write some code to generate a list like WP:WBFAN from these files (which I gather is basically what you're after). I can probably get around to this sometime this weekend. -- Rick Block (talk) 18:50, 6 July 2007 (UTC)

Sweet! The DYK articles in 2007 heading might be 1. Article 2. Main page date 3. Article by 4.Nominator. The WP:WBDYK(?) results could be posted someplace at Wikipedia:Did you know/Hall of Fame. -- Jreferee ^(Talk) 20:46, 6 July 2007 (UTC)

Perhaps this page may prove useful as well. User:Anonymous_Dissident/List_of_Wikipedians_by_number_of_DYKs#The_list.Bakaman 22:58, 14 July 2007 (UTC)

We're aware of that page. Thanks. -- Jreferee ^(Talk) 23:05, 14 July 2007 (UTC)

New tool

I now have a tool that can generate pages like this (note the article names are as presented on the DYK page - it would be trivial to put the actual article name in the table instead if that'd be preferable). Where are the main page dates and nominators recorded? -- Rick Block (talk) 23:47, 6 July 2007 (UTC)

Let me see if I can get some help from the others at DYK on this. I don't think that DYK maintains a main page dates and nominators list. The actual credits are made from credits and the actual appearance on the Main Page is from Template:Did_you_know. You might want to take a look at How a DYK suggestion makes its way to the Main Page. It's not as simple as it seems. More info. DYK made its first Main Page appearance on February 22, 2004. Credit recognition for article creators started on November 24, 2004[3], DYK began placing DYK notifications on article talk pages on January 13, 2006[4], and nominators started receiving credit on May 13, 2006[5]. -- Jreferee ^(Talk) 22:50, 14 July 2007 (UTC)

Houston, We've got a problem

Hey, Rick. Ack, double ack, and triple ack.[6] No idea what happened; I didn't hear from Gimmetrow at all (I hope he's OK!!), and GimmeBot hasn't processed the last batch of 18 promotes/archives of FACs. I'm putting together a chart of the steps to be done on each FAC/FAR in my sandbox, but updating articlehistory by hand is a whole 'nother chore. I'm hoping to at least keep up with FAC/FAR promotes/archives until hearing something from Gimmetrow, and maybe he'll catch up on articlehistory when he returns. Can you help at all? If so, we can lay out steps in my sandbox and on its talk page. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 22:15, 18 July 2007 (UTC)

I won't have any time to help out until 8-10 hours from now. I've previously suggested bots that are at all important to keeping the place running should be uploaded someplace (so somebody else could pick them up), and am currently pushing the idea of global bots that folks could add hourly/daily/weekly tasks to. I'm a little surprised how lackadaisical most folks seem to be about this. -- Rick Block (talk) 15:29, 19 July 2007 (UTC)

I understand; I'm quite undone about this, actually. Worried about Gimmetrow since I didn't hear from him or know he was going on break, wondering if I somehow failed him as a friend or if something happened IRL. I've outlined all the steps at User:SandyGeorgia/sandbox, but Raul promoted/archived 18 articles this week that still have to be botified, so without any sort of automation, the manual task seems daunting . SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:47, 19 July 2007 (UTC)

That is, I've outlined all the steps except the actual updates to ArticleHistory; that has got to be one complicated bot. I feel that I may have failed Gimmetrow for not agreeing to learn to run the bot when he asked me at the beginning of the summer. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:49, 19 July 2007 (UTC)

If it helps, I find that when people leave a wikibreak notice, they are at least aware of what is going on, so are generally OK. Hope that is of some comfort. Regarding Rick's comments about global bots and what not, I agree. Has anyone even made a list of the "most important" bots? How you define important varies, but a global talk page archiving bot is one thing, and Gimmebot, and the refdesk bot is another, and Cydebot is indispensible for CfD. Surely there are more bots on Wikipedia than listed at Category:Active bots on Wikipedia? Maybe I should be looking at Category:Wikipedia bots? On the other hand, bots do come and go, and it is interesting to see different approaches from different bots. Carcharoth 16:31, 19 July 2007 (UTC)

Well, Gimmebot has to be one hell of a bot when you look at all it was doing. I wish Gimmetrow's contribution had received more acknowledgement; I feel that I took him for granted. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 16:35, 19 July 2007 (UTC)

Oh absolutely. My last comment there was a general one. When you have a bot that does stuff really well already, like Gimmebot, obviously you want them back. But it is always good to have a plan B, even a list of manual steps if nothig else (as you are doing). Reverse-engineering from the bot's contribs list is effectively what you are doing. Carcharoth 17:04, 19 July 2007 (UTC)

I stated a list a while ago at Wikipedia:Maintenance/tasklist that's never been completed and hasn't been kept updated. My suggestion for a general hourly/daily/weekly bot is currently at Wikipedia talk:Bot policy/Archive 18#hourly/daily/weekly maintenance bots (I'm doing a little restructuring of my current bot tasks so they more easily fit this sort of framework). I think it should probably be required for the source for pretty much any bot that any process relies on to be posted. This would be a deliberately unavoidable side effect of the hourly/daily/weekly proposal. I'll bring this up again at Wikipedia talk:Bot policy after I've got my own bot using the approach I've suggested. And, in case it's not obvious, the point is not to denigrate anyone's bot but to make sure we don't have to reverse engineer and reimplement. -- Rick Block (talk) 18:39, 19 July 2007 (UTC)

I completely understand; I'm just so bummed out that my tone may not be coming across right, but I don't mean to imply anyone means anything :-) SandyGeorgia (Talk) 18:43, 19 July 2007 (UTC)

Comments

Please see my comments here Raul654 21:25, 19 July 2007 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/MJCdetroit 2

MJCdetroit has asked me to inform you (and a few other users) that he is about to undergo the RFA process for the second time. Since he says you have offered to nominate him in the past, I am informing you before the RFA goes live. Shalom ^Hello 02:53, 20 July 2007 (UTC)

Template question

It's been a while. Hope you are doing well. I spent a few minutes trying to track down how this category's talk page ended up categorized in its own category. Do you understand how this happened? I can't find the offending code in any of the called templates. -- ☑ SamuelWantman 07:16, 21 July 2007 (UTC)

I'm mostly fine (work IRL is getting kind of stressful - it'd be nice to win a lottery or something). The categorization was from this bit of Template:WikiProject United States

 Please participate by editing [[{{ARTICLESPACE}}:{{PAGENAME}}|the article]], and help

which was intending to be a piped link to Category:ZIP_Code, but instead is a piped category addition (that's why it's indexed under "t"). I've fixed it with this edit. -- Rick Block (talk) 16:17, 21 July 2007 (UTC)

This was in the original version of the template, which I suspect means there are other similar templates that likely have the same issue. I'll poke around a bit and see (have you noticed any others like this?). -- Rick Block (talk) 16:22, 21 July 2007 (UTC)

Not good. Looking at Template:WikiProjectBannerShell/Compliant banner list and Category:WikiProject banners there are lots and lots of these templates. I haven't sampled enough to get a statistically meaningful percentage, but so far something like 3 out of maybe 15 include the problematic syntax (of these, only one is currently used to tag a category talk page). This problem was found in Template:PeruProjectBanner and fixed by this edit (simpler than what I did with Template:WikiProject United States). Beland used to download the database and run offline analyses to help find various broken things (like this). I suspect he doesn't really do this much if at all anymore. I'll post a query at Wikipedia:Bot requests and see if anyone volunteers to find and/or fix these. -- Rick Block (talk) 17:01, 21 July 2007 (UTC)

Thanks so much! I knew I came to the right person. I had traced it down to that template, but then I did a find on "Category" and didn't find the problem. Now I understand why. With all the nested templates its getting difficult to track down where the offenders are. Especially for people like me who don't spend much time in template space. Thanks again. -- ☑ SamuelWantman 10:56, 22 July 2007 (UTC)

Need your help!

Hello! I hope you are feeling great. I need a help from you with regards to templates. For more information, please view this page. I feel that it is paramount to achieve consistency with regards to templates. If you know how to correct this, it would be much appreciated. --Siva1979^{Talk to me} 05:00, 24 July 2007 (UTC)

Replied at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Africa/Assessment. -- Rick Block (talk) 14:19, 24 July 2007 (UTC)

user:Rick Bot

Just a minor bug. At the page of people who make/nominate featured stuff, it appears that if the same person works on an article that became FA, lost FA, then got it back again, it lists the article twice. In my case, Hero of Belarus is listed twice because of a promotion in 2005 and in 2006. I am not sure if the bot can completely avoid that, and honestly no big deal, but I figured I should let you know. User:Zscout370 ^{(Return Fire)} 08:56, 27 July 2007 (UTC)

This has come up previously at Wikipedia talk:List of Wikipedians by featured article nominations#order by current # of FAs excluding former FAs. Bottom line is I consider this to be a feature, not a bug. -- Rick Block (talk) 13:20, 27 July 2007 (UTC)

Not a problem at all, features are always good. User:Zscout370 ^{(Return Fire)} 16:11, 27 July 2007 (UTC)

WikiProject Japan taskforces

In order to encourage more participation, and to help people find a specific area in which they are more able to help out, we have organized taskforces at WikiProject Japan. Please visit the Participants page and update the list with the taskforces in which you wish to participate. Links to all the taskforces are found at the top of the list of participants.

Please let me know if you have any questions, and thank you for helping out! ···日本穣^{? · Talk to Nihonjoe} 01:31, 8 August 2007 (UTC)

Wikipedia:List of Wikipedians by DYK article creation/nominations

Hi Rick. Were you able to modify your bot per the discussion at Wikipedia:List of Wikipedians by DYK article creation/nominations? -- Jreferee ^(Talk) 06:57, 12 August 2007 (UTC)

I'm still working on it (I've been quite busy IRL). At this point I have a list of the DYK main page dates, parsed from the history of T:DYK. Per the thread at Wikipedia talk:Did you know#List of Wikipedians by DYK article creation/nominations finding the creator is easy, but finding the nominator is not so easy. I'm thinking it's probably not worth posting anything until the whole bit basically works - although if you think lists containing the article, main page date, and creator are worthwhile (without attempting to identify nominators) I could create these. -- Rick Block (talk) 17:18, 12 August 2007 (UTC)

Thanks. I ran "Template talk:Did you know" through Wikipedia Page History Stats. It came up with 36,340 edits and 2,229 unique editors. It looks like User:MacGyverMagic, User:Ghirlandajo, User:Carabinieri, and User:GeeJo have the most time in with that page (each having over 1,000 edits). -- Jreferee ^(Talk) 04:32, 23 August 2007 (UTC)

Meaning of the word indiscriminate

I don't know what you think "indiscriminate" means, but there's certainly nothing "indiscriminate" about an article about high school track and field in Kansas, any more than say an article about football in England. The subject may or may not be notable enough for inclusion in Wikipedia (I'd say not), but it is simply not indiscriminate. Therefore the grounds on which you prematurely deleted it were illegitimate. RegRCN 12:42, 13 August 2007 (UTC)

I didn't delete it, but simply nominated it with the intention of forcing a wider discussion, per the deletion process described at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion. The discussion at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/High school track and field in Kansas was pretty clearly leading to a delete consensus. The section of WP:NOT that I referenced in the nomination includes a variety of issues under the topic "indiscriminate", see in particular #4 ("Long and sprawling lists of statistics"). I'd actually be fine with an article about high school track and field in Kansas, but a list of best performances is not an article. -- Rick Block (talk) 15:47, 13 August 2007 (UTC)

Tokyo revisited

Hi Rick,

I've been thinking about the lead section of Tokyo for some months since you left your May 23 comment on my talk page, and just now made some edits which I hope clarify Tokyo's status as a prefecture, the way in which the prefecture resembles a city government, and a couple of other aspects. Please let me know what you think. As always, I depend on other editors to clarify what I've muddled and correct me when I'm wrong, so I hope you'll continue to edit the article.

Thanks

Fg2 11:45, 14 August 2007 (UTC)

List of administrators update tool

Hi Rick Block, I think there's two minor bugs in your update tool. See this diff and what it did to Toby Bartels (lost a comment) and Until(1==2) (lost the 1= prefix). -SpuriousQ (talk) 17:44, 17 August 2007 (UTC)

Thanks. Toby's comment wasn't formatted correctly (comments should be noincluded - the tool drops comments that aren't noincluded, I could fix this but I'm not sure it's worthwhile). I'm not sure yet what to do about Until (= in a user name? really?), but I'll figure something out. -- Rick Block (talk) 17:54, 17 August 2007 (UTC)

I've added some code that adds a "1=" parameter to the admin template if the name includes an "=" (which fixes the "Until(1 == 2)" issue). I've also edited Toby's comment so it is noincluded. I still haven't connected it to my bot yet, but will likely get that done fairly soon. -- Rick Block (talk) 21:42, 17 August 2007 (UTC)

Cool! -SpuriousQ (talk) 00:52, 18 August 2007 (UTC)

Infobox assistance

Hi Rick,

I've seen you've done a lot of template type work and wonder if you could cast your eye over Template:Infobox cricketer biography for me. It's producing a couple lines of blank space at the top of articles and I can't find where they come from!

–MDCollins (talk) 10:23, 18 August 2007 (UTC)

Well, I know what it is, but not exactly why. There's an extra html break inserted at the end of the category listing when the template is there. This break is not inserted when the template is not there. It's coming from the career statistics portion of the template (the switch with the raw table HTML). I do know that the table preprocessor has some funky quirks and mixing HTML and non HTML table markup can cause problems like this. I'd suggest converting the entire template to raw HTML (user:David Kernow converted template:infobox country to exclusively use HTML table syntax a while ago, for this sort of reason). I think it's essentially a bug in the table preprocessor. -- Rick Block (talk) 17:42, 18 August 2007 (UTC)

Thanks. –MDCollins (talk) 23:16, 18 August 2007 (UTC)

Rick Bot

Cool bot. Except that it keeps re-adding me to Wikipedia:List_of_administrators/G-O. Seems logical, being an admin and all, but, I have intentionally removed myself from the list in protest of something and because I do not wish to be bothered by anyone. See [7]. No-one has raised serious objections to this, and this was mentioned in my arbcom case without comment, so I'd appreciate if a fix could be applied to it. Thanks. --Jeffrey O. Gustafson - Shazaam! - <*> 19:20, 19 August 2007 (UTC)

Well, OK. I'll hard code an exclusion. -- Rick Block (talk) 19:25, 19 August 2007 (UTC)

Regarding my former name Kylohk on the FA nominations list

Hello, I'd like to inform you that I, formerly Kylohk, have changed my username to "Alasdair". So, I'd like you to update the Wikipedia:List of Wikipedians by featured article nominations. To reflect the name change. Thank you.--Alasdair 07:58, 20 August 2007 (UTC)

Done (by updating the entries at Wikipedia:Featured articles nominated in 2007). -- Rick Block (talk) 14:31, 20 August 2007 (UTC)

Category intersection

Hey, thanks for the message - I appreciate your getting the word out. Seems that conversation there has been a bit moribund lately? Anyway, I was wondering if you had any idea what's going on with m:Extension:DynamicPageList? And where do the devs gather to decide what to add to the software actually running the en Wikipedia? Girolamo Savonarola 02:49, 21 August 2007 (UTC)

My signature

Thanks for your comments regarding my signature. It is actually just a subst of Template:user9. Any correction probably needs to be made there. Acdixon ^{(talk • contribs • count)} 21:28, 26 August 2007 (UTC)

Responded here. -- Rick Block (talk) 22:03, 26 August 2007 (UTC)

Cryptic Deletion

Thanks for your note regarding my article: 21:46, 31 October 2006 Cryptic (Talk | contribs) deleted "RSC Equipment Rental" (G11: blatant advertising) I took your advice and went to Deletion Review, but I'm not quite sure how to proceed once there. I can't find it in the archive - is it acceptable for me to post on the deletion review log? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Areesssea (talk • contribs)

How to proceed depends on why you want to look at the article. If you want to challenge the deletion, it's perfectly acceptable to request a review (per the Instructions section). For pretty much any other purpose, you can add your request in the Content review section (with the specific reason). -- Rick Block (talk) 17:37, 27 August 2007 (UTC)

DYK History tool (see also this thread)

Hi Rick. For the page at Wikipedia:Recent additions 146/history, could you arrange the headings as follows:

! Article !! Creation date !! DYK date !! Nominator !! Nom link at T:TDYK !! Creator !! Creation date !! Info. Verified !! Article credited !! Nom credited !! Creator credited.

Also, have the tool notate a greater than 5 day difference between the creation date and the DYK date (make the background yellow or something). Also, so that I can manually verify the DYK nominator, please have the tool pull the URL from T:TDYK and post it in the table. I can manually verify the creator by looking at the article history. If the tool can pull the URL for the three pieces of credited information from the article talk page, nominator talk page, and creator talk page, I can use that to manually verify the information as well. Take a look at the bottom of Wikipedia:Recent additions 146/history at the Bidhannagar College entry and you will see what I mean.-- Jreferee ^(Talk) 19:42, 27 August 2007 (UTC)

I can change the headings with no problem. I gather the T:TDYK link you want is the specific rev where the nom first appears? Turns out I can get this, too. I can easily add a link to the article's talk page, but not so easily to the version where the article might have been credited (ditto the nom and creator - and, again, the creator will be the article creator not necessarily whoever expanded the article). The nom process was different before October 2004, so there won't be nom links for anything before then. I'll repost the tool's output to the same sample page when I have it (shouldn't be longer than a day or two - I'll let you know). -- Rick Block (talk) 00:09, 28 August 2007 (UTC)

This is looking good. The link to the article's talk page is fine since that is all that is need. The other links are fine, too, since they will be right some of the time and I can change the ones that are not. Can you have the tool place the "Creation date" between the "Article" column and the "DYK date" column. Also, please change "Creation date" to "Article first post" or something like that. It would take too much time to figure out the creation date for those who expand the article 5x and it is not information that is really needed. Also, please put the "Info. Verified" column as the last column. Moreover, if you want to shrink the font size for the table a notch or two, that would be fine since the table is getting cramped. Also, some people like to see how their DYK post appeared on the main page. Is it possible to keep the DYK date, but also turn it into a link that shows how the post appeared on the main page? Thanks. -- Jreferee ^(Talk) 05:54, 28 August 2007 (UTC)

I've posted output from the current version. It has everything except the link to T:DYK as of the appearance (I don't have the revid in a convenient form - it might be possible to get it going forward). I chased down one of the entries that's missing the nom date, and nominator (Brandenburg Navy) - it apparently got renamed after the initial nom but before it appeared. I'm not sure how common this is, and there may be other anomalies. If you're going to manually check this by hand you have my sympathies. It's been almost more work doing it automatically than I have the patience for. -- Rick Block (talk) 03:24, 29 August 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for all your effort. I'll manually verify the entries at Wikipedia:Recent additions 146/history. Once that's done, I'll let you know and we'll have the bot generate tables for Wikipedia:Recent additions 1/history through Wikipedia:Recent additions 162/history. In a month or two after that (when I'm finished verifying everything), we can create a bot to generate a difference list between T:DYK and the histories 1-146. I'll manually go through that difference list and manually fix the histories 1-146. At that point, we'll have an accurate, verified database (histories 1-146) of DYK information from which we can generate the lists similar to the FA lists. As for developing a bot that works on on-going DYK steps, we can do that after we're done with the present project (unless you have time now ). -- Jreferee ^(Talk) 15:28, 29 August 2007 (UTC)

• To make things easier, I'll start posing my question numerically and monitor your talk page for the answer. -- Jreferee ^(Talk) 15:39, 29 August 2007 (UTC)

1. Instead of linking to the Nominator talk page and the Creator talk page, is it possible for the bot to provide a link to editor talk page having the DYK credits? For example, the Creator credits for Mid-Delaware Bridge are posted on the page User talk:Daniel Case/Archive 6/7/2007-8/20/2007 (see [this]), but the Creator talk link at Wikipedia:Recent additions 146/history links to his current talk page, User talk:Daniel Case. It would be even easier for me if the link were the diff of the actual credit posting, such as this or this). -- Jreferee ^(Talk) 15:39, 29 August 2007 (UTC)

   Hmmm. The tool could do a "whatlinkshere" query on the DYK article, looking for links from user talk space and, if there's a link from the creator's talk (or any subpage) link to that page. Finding the right talk page diff seems like it would be kind of difficult. How did you do it manually? -- Rick Block (talk) 18:37, 29 August 2007 (UTC)

   For Daniel Case, I went his talk page, did a ctrl+F to search for Mid-Delaware Bridge. I didn't find it, so I went to his Archive 5 and did the same ctrl+F search where I found this. If you look at Whatlinkshere, it list a link to creator Daniel Case's archive page where the credit is posted. Since your bot already identified the creator and the nominator, it need only look for the Whatlinkshere links to their talk pages and post all such links to the table. The cretiding process uses a template so the bot should be able to determine if the Whatlinkshere links is to a credit or something else. If it does not find any Whatlinkshere for a creator or nominator, the bot need only leave that cell blank and I'll know that it is likely that they were not credited (at which point I'll post a crediton their page). -- Jreferee ^(Talk) 02:04, 30 August 2007 (UTC)

   I think we're talking about basically the same thing. The step of verifying that the reference on the talk page is a DYK credit is a little problematic since the template is actually subst'd (leaving the expanded text, which I'd guess has occasionally changed over the years). I'll write the code to do the whatlinkshere and look for links to the creator's or nom's talk pages and post the output when I have it. -- Rick Block (talk) 03:02, 30 August 2007 (UTC)

   Output from the new version is posted. -- Rick Block (talk) 04:22, 31 August 2007 (UTC)

   Looks good. Give me a few days to verify the table at Wikipedia:Recent additions 146/history.

2. If not already done, please have the bot list the article name as it appeared on the Main Page. After we obtain a completed history of DYK, I would like to have a list generated of those articles on DYK that have been deleted or redirected. Thanks. -- Jreferee ^(Talk) 18:36, 31 August 2007 (UTC)

   Do you mean the piped version, as shown on the archive page, or something else? The piped version is no problem, but is sometimes only changed so the name fits in the DYK sentence better. I can change it to the piped name the next time I run the tool so you can see the difference.

   My mistake. Please do not use the piped version. If a DYK article has been deleted or deleted+redirected, that is something DYK want's to know (it does not look good to have a page appearing on the Main Page subsequently deleted or its content merged into a different article). -- Jreferee ^(Talk) 20:00, 31 August 2007 (UTC)

3. As for the missing DYK dates, how does the bot locate the DYK date? -- Jreferee ^(Talk) 18:44, 31 August 2007 (UTC)

   I have a pre-parsed version of the history of T:TDYK with a revision by revision list of all the additions that I've merged with a list of DYK dates obtained from a pre-parsed version of the history of T:DYK. Looking at a missing one it shows up in the DYK dates file (i.e. it was found as a diff to T:DYK) but not in the nom file. Looking deeper into this, the T:TDYK diff shows up as a net change, not as an addition. I've reparsed T:TDYK, finding all newly added lines whether they're the result of an add or a change (which made this output file much larger, nearly 33000 lines as opposed to 19000) and reposted the output using this version. Looking at the diff between these versions, I don't immediately understand the change to Hassan Ghul (I'll figure this out). The others make sense to me. Note the nom for Brandenburg Navy is listed as Yomangani. He renamed the article and must have revised the DYK nom (I don't know if the original nom was his).

   Re: Hassan Ghul - I understand this one now, too. It's a little complicated, but the bottom line is the original nom by Sherurcij wasn't within a 5 day window the tool was using (I've increased it to 7 days).

   Usually, the DYK noms usually are moved onto the Main Page within five days of the DYK qualification date. Sometimes the nominations are moved into the Template_talk:Did_you_know#Expired_noms section and this is stretched out longer, perhaps as long as 12 days (very rare). I've never heard of someone nominating an expired nom, but I'm sure it happens.-- Jreferee ^(Talk) 21:08, 31 August 2007 (UTC)

4. Should the "H" in history as in Wikipedia:Recent additions 146/history be capitalized? -- Jreferee ^(Talk) 18:50, 31 August 2007 (UTC)

   Doesn't matter to me.

   I think a capitalized "H" is per the style manual. I would hate for someone down the road move all the History pages from history to History. -- Jreferee ^(Talk) 20:00, 31 August 2007 (UTC)

   I looked but didn't find it (if you have a reference I'd be interested - this is a subpage, not article space). Again, I don't actually care either way.

   The only thing I could find was Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style_(headings)#Capitalization. Lowercase second and subsequent words in titles doesn't really answer the question. I don't really care either, but my concern is that someone doing clean-up via a tool will find the pages months from now, care about the issue, and move the pages. Whatever you want to do is fine with me. -- Jreferee ^(Talk) 20:55, 31 August 2007 (UTC)

5. Would you please revise Wikipedia:Recent_additions/History and then have the bot transcluded that page into each of the new History pages? I manually included it in Wikipedia:Recent additions 146/history to give you an idea of whait it may look like. -- Jreferee ^(Talk) 19:23, 31 August 2007 (UTC)

   Sure.

6. Would you please change the name of the "Creator" column heading to "Creator(s)". Thanks. -- Jreferee ^(Talk) 20:28, 31 August 2007 (UTC)

   Everything on that trial run wrt to myself seems to work. I guess the yellow is where the lag was greater than five days so that the nom is also the expander. Blnguyen (bananabucket) 05:48, 11 September 2007 (UTC)

Barnstar

		The da Vinci Barnstar
		This barnstar is for Rick Block for having his bot (Rick Bot) update the list of administrators. NHRHS2010 Talk 20:58, 27 August 2007 (UTC)

DYK History

Sounds about time to let the bot generate tables for Wikipedia:Recent additions 1/History through Wikipedia:Recent additions 162/History. I got my fingers crossed! : )-- Jreferee ^(Talk) 05:23, 1 September 2007 (UTC)

I don't think there's any particular hurry on this. The more that are generated, the more awkward it is to regenerate them. I'd suggest we go kind of slow and generate them at about the same rate the entries can be verified (making improvements along the way). For example, I'm not sure when Oct 2004 hits in the archives, but before then we won't have any nomination data (that's when T:TDYK started). DYK started in Feb of 2004, so there's 8 months of nomination data that will simply show up as missing in what we're doing so far. -- Rick Block (talk) 05:40, 1 September 2007 (UTC)

Slow and steady sounds good. DYK made its first Main Page appearance on February 22, 2004. The article, pencil sharpener, was developed by Raul654 who had been an editor with Wikipedia for about six months at that time and now is a bureaucrat. An April 2004 screen shot shows DYK located in the space now occupied by In the News. Credit recognition for article creators started on November 24, 2004[8], DYK began placing DYK notifications on article talk pages on January 13 2006[9], and nominators started receiving credit on May 13, 2006[10]. -- Jreferee ^(Talk) 14:53, 1 September 2007 (UTC)

Do we want to retroactively award creator and/or nominator credit? Without any changes, the tool's output for the first archive file is Wikipedia:Recent additions 1/History (DYK date is missing since the primary key for the dataset used by the tool is T:TDYK additions, which don't exist before Oct 2004). All of the archive histories through Oct 2004 will look like this. At a minimum, I can add the DYK date. I could also recover the edit that added the entry to WP:DYK if the DYK date is before Oct 2004, and list this editor as the nominator (I don't know exactly when the process shifted to a nomination based process, but it was no later than Oct 2004). -- Rick Block (talk) 16:50, 1 September 2007 (UTC)

I plan to award retroactively award creator and/or nominator credit. For those pages like Wikipedia:Recent additions 1/History where the DYK Main Page post was before the credit award system, I'll wait until we figure out who should get credit and then do the awards all at one time. Any more information that the bot can add to Wikipedia:Recent additions 1/History would be appreciated. -- Jreferee ^(Talk) 01:55, 2 September 2007 (UTC)

• DYK uses the nominator awarding system to help insure that DYK receives a steady flow of suggestions. Compared to creating an article, the effort that goes into nominating an article is insignificant and there really should not be an award for nominators - at least one that does not make creating and nominating an article equivalent. I think it would be OK to put N/A in the noms columns in Wikipedia:Recent additions 1/History and other table rows whose DYK content existed before the nomination award system. -- Jreferee ^(Talk) 14:36, 4 September 2007 (UTC)

FA to FFA to AFD

Hey, Rick, how are you? Not sure if you need to follow the conversation at Wikipedia talk:Former featured articles#Nude celebrities in terms of how your scripts work. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 13:09, 1 September 2007 (UTC)

I'm good. Thanks for the heads up. The article shows up as a deleted FFA (crossed out redlink) in Wikipedia:Featured articles nominated in 2003. I never figured out who should get credit for the nom, so no nom is listed (which means it's not a rusty star at WP:WBFAN). As long as it stays a redlink at WP:FFA my tools will be fine. -- Rick Block (talk) 16:30, 1 September 2007 (UTC)

Okay

That's fine man. You could delete it now ;-)--Angel David (talk•contribs) 0:45, 2 September, 2007 (User Talker Contributor)

I know...

...but it's not that bad a thing. I dislike preventitively protecting a page from creation unless it's going to be repeatedly recreated across all future time(s) and is literally better off never seen then deleted (EG. SPAMs, libel, etc.). 68.39.174.238 14:16, 2 September 2007 (UTC)

Probability question

I saw your edits on the Monty Hall problem page and thought you could help me understand a different probability problem. I am totally baffled by this puzzle, although I fully grok the explanation for Monty Hall and other similar probability problems. This one has me stumped, however:

There is an urn with ten balls in it. Nine are white and one is black. A person puts their hand in the urn and at random selects a ball. It's white. They throw the ball away. They select another ball, also white, and throw it away. Question: what is the probability of selecting the black ball if eight of the white balls have already been removed and tossed out?

There are now two balls left. One is black and the other white. Seems to me the probability of selecting the black ball is now .5. My friends (well educated with advanced degrees in engineering, computer sci) tell me that the probability is still .10. I don't get it. If you've sampled without replacement, how can the probability not change? Isn't the problem now a different problem than when the urn was full? I just don't get it... can you help?

Thanks in advance. Sorry if my question is inappropriate behavior for Wikipedia. This is the first time I've ever tried asking a question in my many years of using this resource.

Most sincerely,

—Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.152.158.27 (talk) 22:47, 2 September 2007 (UTC) 

If the original picks were random, then at the point the person is selecting the last ball (with two left) it's a 50/50 chance (random choice among two objects). I think your friends are wrong, or are answering a different question. -- Rick Block (talk) 23:03, 2 September 2007 (UTC)

Every thing is back on track

So every thing is back to normal. Cool.:-)--Angel David 01:05, 3 September 2007 (UTC)

Updating

Okay, I didn't know that. But the fact that nobody noticed my edit for half a year is kind of telling, is it not? :) >Radiant< 07:24, 3 September 2007 (UTC)

I'm not sure who else noticed, but based on this edit SMcCandlish apparently did (but also not for six months). It is not the most widely used "update needed" maintenance template (less than 100 references), but is there some reason a page explaining even the most rarely used maintenance template should be marked historical? -- Rick Block (talk) 15:26, 3 September 2007 (UTC)

That was because it was called a "proposal" before that, and it was clearly not an active proposal. >Radiant< 09:51, 4 September 2007 (UTC)

DYK history

Hey there, regarding DYK I'm not sure of the duration (although I'm sure the edit history will reveal it), but after the "new" main page was created, I updated DYK by hand for a long time, basically going through the new pages reports and adding ones with good long items and good DYKs, and then I think people started nominating themselves, and I would mostly just edit the nominations so they were more interesting or coherent...It's been a long time though, so my memory is fuzzy. Good luck! :) jengod 05:52, 4 September 2007 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Bureaucrats

Hi, would it be possible to get your bot to update this page daily along with the admin lists? Cheers. Majorly (talk) 19:07, 4 September 2007 (UTC)

Entirely possible. I'll chime in at the talk. -- Rick Block (talk) 22:48, 4 September 2007 (UTC)

Scott Thorson

I've had another go, hope you approve this time! Paste 19:56, 5 September 2007 (UTC)

Lack of response

I believe the lack of response is because this really isn't a big deal for most people. I'd suggest you simply make the change; it is possible that somebody will start objecting at that point, but it seems unlikely. >Radiant< 09:46, 6 September 2007 (UTC)

The Barnstar of Diligence

		The Barnstar of Diligence
		I'm awarding you this barnstar of diligence for your combination of extraordinary scrutiny, precision and community service to wikipedia. Wikidudeman (talk) 15:05, 6 September 2007 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Recent additions 146/History

Ekem self nomed Bombing of Zurich in World War II (see this Nom link), but the table at Wikipedia:Recent additions 146/History omitted the Nominator, Nom, and Nom talk links. The word "Bombing" in the nomination was posted as "bombing" (with a small "b"). Is that why the bot missed it? Can you fix this? Thanks. -- Jreferee ^(Talk) 16:06, 6 September 2007 (UTC)

The bot also missed this nom. It was listed as "Sports_in_Karnataka" with the underscore marks. That may be why the bot missed it. -- Jreferee ^(Talk) 16:17, 6 September 2007 (UTC)

I guess you missed the second post to this thread? -- Rick Block (talk) 23:45, 6 September 2007 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Articles needing copy edit

Wikipedia:Articles needing copy edit what is this all about? What is wrong with the cat page? Rich Farmbrough, 11:02 7 September 2007 (GMT).

Rich apparently found this on his own, but for anyone else who may be interested this relates to Wikipedia talk:Maintenance#Using whatlinkshere rather than categories for maintenance lists. -- Rick Block (talk) 13:40, 7 September 2007 (UTC)

Email

I fired you off one. If you don't get it, please leave me a note and I'll resend. Cheers, Daniel 14:10, 7 September 2007 (UTC)

Modelun

You're right, I've experianced stuff like this before I disappeared, so I was trying to jump quickly. Wow it's weird being a normal editor with no block and protect options. Yamakiri 01:20, 9 September 2007 (UTC)

Whatlinkshere

No problem. We need a new category for the pages whose whatlinkshere's need to be dated. Then I can run SB off that. Rich Farmbrough, 17:48 9 September 2007 (GMT).

Wikipedia:Recent additions 146/History

Hi Rick. Sorry. I got distracted with other things. I'll start working on it. I figure I'll do a few pages by myself so we can work out all the kinks before generating all the remaining pages and I open up the verification to others at DYK. -- Jreferee T/C 06:46, 24 September 2007 (UTC)

• Sylvia Seegrist is listed twice on the Wikipedia:Recent additions 146/History list. Glitch in the software? -- Jreferee t/c 21:46, 29 September 2007 (UTC)
• For some reason, the bot is not picking up Smee's nomination credits. -- Jreferee t/c 22:28, 29 September 2007 (UTC)
• The bot failed to locate this nom post for the Sports in Karnataka entry. -- Jreferee t/c 00:32, 30 September 2007 (UTC)
• The bot missed this nom post for Bombings of Switzerland in World War II. They may have changed the article name from Bombing of Zurich in World War II to Bombings of Switzerland in World War II after the nom and before it appeared on the Main Page. -- Jreferee t/c 01:02, 30 September 2007 (UTC)
• I located a missed credit and made it here. -- Jreferee t/c 01:14, 30 September 2007 (UTC)

• Wikipedia:Recent additions 146/History is done. After considering the bulleted points immediately above, go ahead and generate the history page for the remaining Recent additions pages. Thanks. -- Jreferee t/c 01:28, 30 September 2007 (UTC)

Recent article

Hi Rick, I've responded to your comment on my discussion board. Peter Ruocco (not the actor)

Query

I noticed that your bot updates the Wikipedia:List of Wikipedians by featured article nominations. I take it that even though I rewrote most of an article that was nominated for FAC and participated in that FAC, I can't receive credit for it? (I was new at the time and didn't know what FAC was - someone was helping me.) My contribution to the article was acknowledged at the FAC. Just wondering. Awadewit | talk 06:11, 30 September 2007 (UTC)

Of course you can. Assuming you're referring to Mary Wollstonecraft, I've made the update at Wikipedia:Featured articles nominated in 2007 which will propagate to WP:WBFAN the next time I run the bot (in a few minutes). -- Rick Block (talk) 16:05, 30 September 2007 (UTC)

Indeed I am and thanks! Awadewit | talk 16:50, 30 September 2007 (UTC)

Have you time to review a template?

Hello there. Several editors and I are working on a talk page template, {{MoSElement}}. In the hunt for a math/science-skilled editor, I was referred to you by SandyGeorgia. If you have a minute, could you take a look and perhaps suggest options which might be useful for folks who work on math/science/tech articles? Thanks in advance. – Scartol · Talk 14:22, 30 September 2007 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Recent additions 147/History comments

Wikipedia:Recent additions 147/History is done. Here's my comments to Wikipedia:Recent additions 147/History. I'm posting these for your consideration. If you need to, respond here. Thanks. -- Jreferee t/c 15:16, 2 October 2007 (UTC)

1. Added an Anchoress missed nom credit here. Added a Howcheng missed nom credit here.
2. Added article talk page credit for Fort Victoria, Bob Simpson.
3. Y Right now, the bot only provides a link to the article talk page. Is there a way for the bot to determine whether the article talk page credit is there and, if so, provide a link, and if not, don't provide a link?
4. Y Furietti Centaurs - A significant concern, Furietti Centaurs was not in Wikipedia:Recent additions 147/History. Apparently, the bot did not pick up both DYK nominations in here, which nominated both Giuseppe Alessandro Cardinal Furietti and Furietti Centaurs. Furietti Centaurs does not appear on the Wikipedia:Recent additions 147/History list. There might be a way that the bot can recognize double, triple, etc. DYK noms within the same hook, but is there a way for the bot to pick up any linked articles within a nomination that also have the triple tick marks around them (e.g., '''[[article name]]]''')?

   It's no problem to parse multiple bolded articles from the archive file. Doing this for the pre-parsed T:TDYK and DYK content I've been using has been more problematic. Without this, the suggestions for the 2nd and later articles in a single hook will be very sparse (probably non-existent). I'll work on this some more, but it's kind of a drag.

5. Y To be consistent, you may want to include a space in the table between the || and the article name. For example, ||[[Fort Victoria]] should be || [[Fort Victoria]]. Also, all double spaces should be single spaces.
6. Y I'm not sure if the Bot can adjust for this common problem, but this self-nom was not credited to Stevecudmore in Wikipedia:Recent additions 147/History, probably because Deckiller edited the nomination. Deckiller got the nom and Cdc got the credit in the table and there was no mention of Stevecudmore. Is there a way for the bot to discount subsequent edits to the nom and find the actual DYK nom?

   It already ignores subsequent edits. The problem in this case is the original proposed hook didn't start with "... that". The first user who adds a line to T:TDYK with "... that" gets the credit. I've reparsed the T:TDYK history looking only for "...".

7. Y The bot missed the nom for George D. Prentice; I'm not sure why.

   Another instance of "..." not followed by "that".

8. Y The bot missed this nom.

   Yet another instance of no "that".

9. Y The bot missed the [11] Bob Simpson (cricketer) nom but did pick up the Minh Mang portion of the nom.

   Not sure what the problem was, but the current version finds it.

10. Y The bot missed the nom for Summis desiderantes affectibus and the nom for rail transport in Vatican City, both posted by User:Savidan.

    Summis was another instance of no "that". The link for "rail transport" changed (added "the"). This one I can't do much about.

11. N You might be able to improve the Bot by reviewing my other changes to the table here and here.

    The code can't tell a DYK brag page from a talk archive if they're both in talk space. Not sure what the other suggestion is.

Number of admins

Well I was more wondering how you generate the number of admins? I am an admin of another wiki run on MediaWiki and wanted to know how to display that. -Sox207 17:40, 2 October 2007 (UTC)

Lol sorry I didn't check the code. -Sox207 04:52, 3 October 2007 (UTC)

{{administrator}}

Would you mind if I put the {{administrator}} template on your user page? Almost all the administrators has {{administrator}} on their user page and I noticed that you don't have that, and you are an administrator. So mind if I place {{administrator}} on your user page? NHRHS2010 ^Talk 02:29, 4 October 2007 (UTC)

Actually, I would mind. I intensely dislike the absolute positioned images that are turning up everywhere (I use classic skin so I can immediately tell whether I'm logged in or not, and classic doesn't deal very well with these images). And, I find the category ridiculously redundant with both Special:Listusers/sysop and WP:LA. If you need to know whether a user is an administrator, the special: page is the way to do it. If you want to talk to an admin, WP:LA has a list annotated with additional contact information and also separated by recent activity levels. BTW - I make no secret of the fact that I'm an admin, it's right on my user page. -- Rick Block (talk) 04:02, 4 October 2007 (UTC)

Bot request

Hi Rick. I have a bot request for Rick Bot, but I wanted to run it by you before filing. I was digging through Category:Wikipedia administrator hopefuls and quickly realized how useless that category is for finding prospective sysops because so many of them are inactive or have a very low level of activity. Would it be possible to program your bot to sort those by activity level (running maybe once a month, if that often)? I think it would be useful to exclude those who have not made an edit within the past five days and at least ten edits within the last fifteen days (either, both?). These are arbitrary numbers, but they make the content much more useful. I already used AWB to put the category contents in my userspace here. Some of the links are to userbox subpages, but I can fix that by hand if necessary. What do you think?--chaser - t 20:48, 4 October 2007 (UTC)

I think I'd rather not do this, since it seems to support a view that some rate of editing is a criteria for becoming an admin. I sort WP:LA by recent activity to help folks find an available admin. If you change your list to use one of the user templates, maybe template:user7, I think you'd get 1-click access to all the information you might want and your browser history will distinguish visited from unvisited links. Doing this would allow anyone to peruse this list looking for whatever criteria they'd like, and you could update it whenever you'd like (I assume AWB would be capable of this). -- Rick Block (talk) 17:37, 7 October 2007 (UTC)

I'm going to make another pitch and then I'll leave you alone. Instead of excluding based on the prior criteria, how about removing those who haven't made an edit in 15 days? That would allow me to restrict the list to those who would be likely to respond to a nomination (instead of an edit-countis consideration). A small sample indicates that would get rid of about half the list, which is a big help for me with almost 1,000 editors listed. As you pointed out above, I can still do this without your help, but it will take longer. I've also cleaned up the list.--chaser - t 21:50, 20 October 2007 (UTC)

Hmmm. I might be willing to write a little filter that would identify those who haven't edited in a month or two (15 days seems like not long enough). It will be at least a day or two before I get to this. -- Rick Block (talk) 22:17, 20 October 2007 (UTC)

No hurry. Thanks for your help.--chaser - t 22:24, 20 October 2007 (UTC)

I changed User:Chaser/Admin hopefuls into a table, including the latest edit from each of the users. At the moment I don't have a good way to regenerate this from the category (I generally use a Mac, so I'm not an AWB user). Let me know if this is close enough to what you're after. -- Rick Block (talk) 18:29, 21 October 2007 (UTC)

Wow, that's excellent. Getting the very date is actually more than I ever expected or would have thought to ask for. Thank you very much.--chaser - t 00:01, 22 October 2007 (UTC)

No problem - exact date's easy (it's right in the contribs). BTW - the missing ones are users with no contributions (which seems a little curious). -- Rick Block (talk) 00:24, 22 October 2007 (UTC)

Barnstar of good humor

		The Barnstar of Good Humor
		I like your name; it often makes me smile because of the word "block". NHRHS2010 Talk 15:35, 8 October 2007 (UTC)

I'm happy it makes you smile - however, it is my actual name and when I chose to use it as a user name there was no double entendre intended, so it doesn't seem quite appropriate to accept this barnstar for this reason. I do attempt to exhibit "good humor" - I'm not sure if you were around at the time, but I was particularly proud of this comment which takes an immense amount of context to fully appreciate. -- Rick Block (talk) 18:55, 8 October 2007 (UTC)

Yes, and I've heard that Block can be used as a last name. My username, NHRHS2010 is my high school abbreviation and the year I'm graduating from high school. NHRHS2010 ^Talk 19:17, 8 October 2007 (UTC)

Advice... please?

Hi there! Me and a couple of other people are currently dealing with a rather sticky situation- a user that seems to have good faith, but because of a combination of a very old computer and what we assume is either brain damage or perhaps autism of some sort, is having a lot of difficulty communicating. He has been blocked in the past, but the block was lifted after six hours when the administrator realized that what he was adding was not vandalism, merely difficult to read. We are looking for someone from accessibility to possibly lend us some advice about where to go from here, and you were recommended by Graham87 as someone that might be able to help. If you would pop over to my talk page, where this and other completely unrelated things are being discussed, that'd be great. Thanks in advance... L'Aquatique ^talktome 18:29, 9 October 2007 (UTC)

I won't have any time to look into this until late this evening. Based on a quick glance it does look kind of puzzling. -- Rick Block (talk) 19:24, 9 October 2007 (UTC)

Please Don't my Comments on Discussion Pages

Thanks.Countmippipopolous 03:52, 16 October 2007 (UTC)

Please read WP:AGF. Threats in response to a polite request are inflammatory and should be avoided.

My apologies, I forgot to sign the above remark.Countmippipopolous 04:46, 16 October 2007 (UTC)

How do i chat to people about different pages

How do i chat to people about different pages eg talk to amy4eva my daughter to help her with homework while i am at work —Preceding unsigned comment added by Smtc123 (talk • contribs) 14:18, 16 October 2007 (UTC)

Smile

Hello Rick Block, NHRHS2010 has smiled at you! Smiles promote WikiLove and hopefully this one has made your day better. Spread the WikiLove by smiling at someone else, whether it be someone you have had disagreements with in the past or a good friend. Go on, smile! Cheers, and happy editing!
Smile at others by adding {{subst:Smile}} to their talk page with a friendly message.

NHRHS2010 ^Talk 22:14, 16 October 2007 (UTC)

User:Woggy

It looks like he/she deleted the entire sequence, not just the last rude comment. I would have happily left the 1 week block if Woggy hadn't continued to escalate things. Given Woggy's recent contributions, what do you suggest? NawlinWiki 03:53, 17 October 2007 (UTC)

How about these?

Hi! How about these as citation for festivals/matsuri in Tokyo? [12], [13], [14] and [15]? And what do you think of the image of Shinjuku skyscraper in here? I think it's a good photo. Could you put it in somewhere you think appropriate in the article? Oda Mari (talk) 07:10, 19 October 2007 (UTC)

The specific claim is "Major festivals draw people from all over the city". The last of these references mentions "attracts huge crowds from all over the world" which is fairly close but not quite the same. None of these strike me as particularly high quality sources either. Something from the TMG (for example) would be much better. Fg2's suggestions that the image be in the 23 wards section seems reasonable to me. -- Rick Block (talk) 13:45, 19 October 2007 (UTC)

I see. It's not easy to find citation. (sigh) As for the image, I added it to the empty space. On the right of the ward list in the section. I thought it better than putting on the top right. Oda Mari (talk) 14:39, 19 October 2007 (UTC)

Smile #2

Hello Rick Block, NHRHS2010 has smiled at you! Smiles promote WikiLove and hopefully this one has made your day better. Spread the WikiLove by smiling at someone else, whether it be someone you have had disagreements with in the past or a good friend. Go on, smile! Cheers, and happy editing!
Smile at others by adding {{subst:Smile}} to their talk page with a friendly message.

Like I said before, your name makes me smile a lot. NHRHS2010 ^Talk 21:56, 20 October 2007 (UTC)

futsal

Did you know the futsal article is gone —Preceding unsigned comment added by 65.35.113.170 (talk) 17:13, 22 October 2007 (UTC)

It was blanked and has been repaired. -- Rick Block (talk) 23:55, 22 October 2007 (UTC)

Somebody beat me to FAC

Hey Rick - Would it be possible for me to be considered a co-nominator of the successful Mount St. Helens FAC nomination for the purpose of Rick Bot updates of Wikipedia:List of Wikipedians by featured article nominations? As seen here, the nominator wasn't a major author of the article (I was and am), nor did the nominator help much with addressing comments/objections to the FAC (I did). I also helped save this article from defeaturing by addressing comments at FAR. Anyway, no biggie. --mav 02:02, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

Of course. It's as easy as this (it will show up at WBFAN tomorrow). -- Rick Block (talk) 02:25, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

Cool, thanks. I didn't know if it was kosher to add myself. BTW, I changed my user name (from 'maveric149' to 'mav') a short time ago and have updated those archive pages. Hopefully the bot will not think I'm two people again during its next pass. :) --mav 03:10, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

Tokio

I hesitate in leaving this note. In any case, here is one resource for Tokio. I can not in good conscious edit, much less even read, an article that purposely misspells Tōkyō. It is unbecoming of an encyclopedia. So you'll need to do the edit yourself. (Ironically, I'll be passing by "Tōkyō station" later tonight, where the English spelling is crystal clear.) Bendono 08:33, 29 October 2007 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Recent additions 145/History (copied from here)

Hi - I have an updated version of the DYK tool which addresses nearly all your recent comments. I've created a new history table, see Wikipedia:Recent additions 145/History. There's at least one anomaly I'm still chasing (Boosey & Hawkes). As usual, let me know if there's anything that looks like the tool should have caught. BTW - there are more multiple noms in Wikipedia:Recent additions 147/History than you noticed. I've added two more rows. -- Rick Block (talk) 01:15, 29 October 2007 (UTC)

Thanks. Hopefully, the updated version of the DYK tool can catch the multiple noms (however they are configured). I'll try to keep an eye out for multiple credits, like this one. I'll get on Wikipedia:Recent additions 145/History and use this thread to post any comments. -- Jreferee t/c 14:05, 29 October 2007 (UTC)

Yes, multiple noms are now caught, although this was a distinct pain. There are cases where the original nom includes no bold entry, one, or multiple - all of these are handled. -- Rick Block (talk) 14:14, 29 October 2007 (UTC)

User:Jacklee received the credit for Boosey & Hawkes. This link reveals the DYK nom. This is the nom. I'm guessing the "&" symbol is causing the problem. -- Jreferee t/c 14:18, 29 October 2007 (UTC)

Found it. In the language I'm using "&" is a special character in a replacement, meaning "use the original match". I knew this, but didn't escape it properly so the code was replacing "&amp;" with itself. -- Rick Block (talk) 18:58, 29 October 2007 (UTC)

Possible change to peer review and bot implications

Rick, as you may know, there's a discussion going on at Wikipedia talk:Content review/workshop about reinvigorating Peer Review. I can point you at details if you are interested, but essentially the current situation is that the group on that page would like to suggest re-engineering the PR page to sort articles by category and only show a link for each article, rather than the whole review. Allen3, who (I gather) does most or all of the PR archiving work, commented that this would not work without a bot; and a bot has been suggested as necessary for other aspects of the change. Here's a mock-up of how the peer review page might look: Wikipedia talk:Content review/workshop/Peer Review mockup.

We're proposing to put a request on WP:BOTREQ to see if someone is interested in working on this idea, but SandyGeorgia pointed out that you, Gimmetrow and Dr pda are three users who have the necessary background and might be interested in doing the work. If you are interested in finding out more about what the bot would do, and possibly implementing it, please drop a note on the workshop talk page. In any case we'd be interested in your opinion about the proposals, because of your knowledge of the system.

I'm posting this note to Dr pda and Gimmetrow, too. Thanks -- Mike Christie (talk) 04:02, 3 November 2007 (UTC)

I have some other bot work queued up. I suspect adding a request at WP:BOTREQ would get faster turnaround. -- Rick Block (talk) 16:41, 3 November 2007 (UTC)

Idea: List of Wikipedians by good article nominations

• Hello, I noticed that you run the bot which updates Wikipedia:List of Wikipedians by featured article nominations. At Wikipedia talk:Wikiproject good articles/Newsletter/November 2007, some members of the Wikipedia:Wikiproject good articles have been discussing creating a similar list related to Good Article nominators, and/or reviewers. We would appreciate your input at the thread at, Wikipedia talk:Wikiproject good articles/Newsletter/November 2007, where one idea is to list Wikipedians by successful Good Article nominations, but give it a floor of at least (5) successful GA noms, so the list is not overly long at the bottom. Curt Wilhelm VonSavage 04:21, 4 November 2007 (UTC).
  • I addressed some of your points at Wikipedia talk:Wikiproject good articles/Newsletter/November 2007 - We could start with successful Good Article nominators with at least 5 successful noms, I think the people over there are agreeable to this. Curt Wilhelm VonSavage 16:57, 6 November 2007 (UTC).

Department of good catches

Hi, Rick. Thanks for this catch. I actually saw my mistake in the 'diff' but was too lazy to fix it myself: typical Conservative hypocrisy on my part. ;-) --Uncle Ed 15:38, 6 November 2007 (UTC)

Spelling & move

Hi! You moved Tomonobu Imamichi in order to "correct" the name, following the precedent user's change. This is, however, a mistake. The precedent user called as "proof" the "default sort": in fact, I had forgot to correct this spelling mistake which remained in "default sort" (I had at first mispelled it as it is now, but the correct name is the one which was before your move - see the sources linked to the article). Thanks, Spirals31 18:30, 8 November 2007 (UTC)

Searching Google both ways, apparently both spellings are used (with Tomonobu being the more common). Can you cite an authoritative source for the Tomonubu variant? -- Rick Block (talk) 19:10, 8 November 2007 (UTC)

Re: In case you're actually wondering

Re this edit - see Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Wikipedia:WikiProject Redirect/writing a good redirect. -- Rick Block (talk) 17:14, 10 November 2007 (UTC)

Ah, I see now. Thanks – Gurch 17:33, 10 November 2007 (UTC)

It's OK, I know 68.39.174.238 18:59, 10 November 2007 (UTC)

Japanese addressing system

Hi! The article is a mess. Could you fix it? Best regards. Oda Mari (talk) 07:05, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

A mess in the sense that it's not accurate (per the notes on the talk page)? I'm sorry, but I have absolutely no expertise in this area and wouldn't know what needs fixing. Perhaps a note at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Japan might bring some help. -- Rick Block (talk) 15:16, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

Thank you for the advice. I thought you know well about municipals in Japan and it's easy for you to copyedit. It seems to me that editors do not understand the difference between the special wards in Tokyo and big cities' wards. Not about the cho/machi as town and in the area names too. I think I maybe try edit the article. Oda Mari (talk) 06:44, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

Thank you for the reply. What I know is the system among big cities except Kyoto. Almost nothing about small towns and villages with large rural areas. They seems to be not as systematic as large cities. That makes me hesitate to edit the article. To think about the whole Japan, I'm not sure if it could be called 'system'. Anyway I'll try. BTW, I'm surprised to hear that you've never been in Japan and don't read and speak Japanese. OK, I never use Japanese when I talk to you. Hope my English is understandable. That is my big concern working in here. Best regards. Oda Mari (talk) 15:58, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

PS When you need translation from J material, just tell me. Oda Mari (talk) 19:00, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

forthcoming books

Well, because it's pretty standard practice. There's no reason why not. And it then proves a pretty useful resource for people who want to know about not only the author's backlist but forthcoming work. If we've got information, there's no reason why we should withold it if it's relevant and of interest, which it is. Especially considering the release in question is "very likely", even coming from the author himself. Barbara Osgood (talk) 19:50, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

Infobox

Hi. Well, do not most country subdivision articles have their own infoboxes? --escondites 16:21, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

Konnichiwa! Yeah, I solved it by myself, I forgot to close the tags using }}. I always forget such things :-) Yes, the municipalities of Algeria are not the same thing as the municipalities of other countries, see 1 and 2 and you'll see that they're competely different from the Municipalities of Japan.. --escondites 17:00, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

Erin Dolgan

I am very Sorry Rick. It was not my intention to violate any guideline of the site. I simply wanted Erin listed as an award winning author. It was not my intent to promote her book, that is why I did not offer any futher information on where to purchase her book, it's cost, or links to her website where it can be purchased. I do admit to using some lines from a Press Release I have written for her so there are no copywrite issues. I thought authors were allowed to be listed.

I just now saw this message. I thought I would be contacted by e-mail if there was a problem and believed there was no problem with this post. Is there anyway we can get this approved with just her being a medal winning children's book author who is unique in her field of writing to kids about avoiding child sexual abuse? She is also the local expert in Denver for all local news to use when they have stories about child sexual abuse.

Any help you can give would be greatly appreciated.

—Preceding unsigned comment added by RKChesnutt (talk • contribs) 01:19, 26 November 2007 (UTC)

Wikipedia:List of Wikipedians by featured list nominations

Do you think you'd be able to get your bot to update this list like does for the articles one? There used to be a user who maintained a list in her namespace, but she gave up on it. -- Scorpion⁰⁴²² 01:25, 1 December 2007 (UTC)

Hmmm. Like FAC, I think parsing FLC to determine the nominator would be difficult to fully automate. The bot makes a guess at the FAC nominator and I manually check it before letting the bot create an entry in the appropriate table in the by-year nomination lists (e.g. Wikipedia:Featured articles nominated in 2007). The bot creates the WBFAN table completely automatically, but using the by-year lists which are created only semi-automatically. If there were a template for the nominations that included a well defined spot for the nominator(s), the bot could reliably parse the nominator from the FLC logs. I think as it stands, to replicate WBFAN for lists I'd have to create by-year nomination lists (for lists) and do the same sort of "guess and check" thing to identify the nominators. I could perhaps do this, but it is mildly time consuming (on a perpetual basis). I might rather try to get a standard nomination template adopted so that the processing could be fully automatic. Are you the "feature list director"? -- Rick Block (talk) 04:21, 1 December 2007 (UTC)

Nope, I'm not officially a featured list director, I just promote lists. There are considerably less FLs then there are FAs, so it wouldn't take as long. As well, it wouldn't really be that helpful if there were some kinf of nomination column, because it wouldn't fill in the nominators for the 500 other lists. And couldn't the bot just check who created the individual pages? Usually the page creator is the nominator. -- Scorpion⁰⁴²² 04:41, 1 December 2007 (UTC)

The bot could use the creator of the nomination page as the nominator (or somebody could go back and reformat the historic noms to use a template). I'm not sure how often using the page creator wouldn't work for FLs, but for FAs there seem to be an increasing number of joint noms (which this technique wouldn't catch). There are a fair number of other things I have queued up, but I can add this to the list. -- Rick Block (talk) 04:52, 1 December 2007 (UTC)

Wikipedia Interview

Hi Rick,

I sent you an e-mail yesterday about participating in an interview for my thesis, and I just wanted to make sure you got it. It would be great if you'd be able to participate!

Jkomoros (talk) 14:46, 7 December 2007 (UTC)

Inclusion of CORE Magazine on Denver, Colorado Page

Hi Rick,

I reached out to the CEO of CORE Magazine, as I am very passionate about seeing its inclusion on Wikipedia. I am in no way professionally affiliated with this publication, rather I know the impact it has had on the local urban community and it deserves to be recognized for its merit.

Here is Bruce Hunter, CEO of CORE Magazine's reply to your last comments:

1. "CORE is not a large and important media outlet?" What is the criteria for large and important? They have included 5280 Magazine and Out Front Colorado newspaper. What was the standard or criteria for considering a publication large and important? Is the multicultural community not large and important? This demographic makes up 51% of the population in the Denver Metro Area. Why are there no references on Wikipedia's Denver Media page to any African American, Hispanic, or Asian publications?

2. "What a convincing reference would look like would be a mention of CORE in a list of Denver related media outlets published somewhere other than Denver and published independently from CORE." Again to demonstrate that there seem to be other "questionable reasons" to exclude CORE, I typed Denver Media Outlets in Google and CORE came up in the "first" reference http://www.easymedialist.com/usa/city/denver.html and this is published independently of CORE. I did not see 5280 magazine or Out Front Colorado on this list.

Additionally, I do not think that I should have to do this, but I will. According to Wikipedia, one of the largest media outlets is the Denver Post. They are one of our biggest competitors. I will ask the Editor of the Denver Post to email the Wikipedia editors directly to give his opinion on whether CORE is a large and important media outlet. I do not think I could provide stronger independent documentation than this. My only caveat is that if I am forced to do this, I will speak openly of what was required of me by Wikipedia.

3. " Wikipedia articles are not be used for advertising or promotion." I have never tried to use Wikipedia for this purpose and they do not document anything to suggest that I have. Again, CORE just wants the opportunity to compete for inclusion on the "same playing field" as 5280 and Out Front Colorado.

4. "Not to put an fine point on it, but this post (attributed to CORE Magazine) would suggest CORE pays attention to and is interested in its search engine rankings." First of all, the post they are referring to was plagiarized and stolen evidenced by the fact that there is no attribution to CORE Magazine. If I had tried to use this type of documentation on Wikipedia, what would they say? Secondly, an article on search engine optimization does not suggest that CORE pays attention to search engine rankings; it just means that we wrote about it for our readership. Thirdly, Wikipedia links are tagged with no follow so it is not possible to get a search engine benefit. What is the relevance of this "fine point" for consideration for inclusion on Wikipedia? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Amylopan (talk • contribs) 21:27, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

Copied to talk:Denver, Colorado. I'll reply there (later). -- Rick Block (talk) 21:50, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

Contextual jokes

I've been removing them, to be honest, sorry, it just made more sense. And yes, that beer will be good one day, if you can accept it in the company of a man standing in the shadows wearing sunglasses and a hat pulled low. Hiding T 14:12, 11 December 2007 (UTC)

User Category for Discussion

Toolserveraccount

Hello Rick Block,
please send your real-name, your wikiname, your prefered login-name and the public part of your ssh-key to . We plan to create your account soon then. --DaB. 00:17, 22 December 2007 (UTC)
P.S:Merry Christmas! :)