User talk:Rjwilmsi/Archives/2011/August

Bibcode bot back online

It's login in again. At least for now. I'm going to run it again your list. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 23:00, 10 August 2011 (UTC)

Great news! Thanks Rjwilmsi 11:33, 11 August 2011 (UTC)

Could you comment at Wikipedia:AN#Bibcode Bot needs blocked? Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 14:22, 12 August 2011 (UTC)

I'm not going to participate in an argument. I will readily contribute to a reasonable discussion about the value of additional identifiers, if the ANI thread or a linked thread becomes that discussion. Rjwilmsi 16:55, 12 August 2011 (UTC)

Lauris Reiniks

Hello! I'm not so knowledgeable on these things so I wanted to ask to you for help. Could you please read out this article and say if tag {{pov-check}} could be removed.--Edgars2007 (Talk/Contributions) 12:53, 11 August 2011 (UTC)

bibcodes

Rjwilmsi, you seem to be a genuine "tireless contributor" who improves WP. However, it has come to my attention during the bibcode bot dispute that many affected articles already had bibcode links recently added by you. And that these links were for journal papers unlikely to benefit from a link to an astronomy/physics journal database (e.g., medical or biology). I don't really know how AWB works and how it assists these edits, but can you configure it to be more selective? There doesn't appear to be any consensus for adding bibcodes to non-astronomy/physics paper citations, and a number of editors against this (myself included). Please note I'd have the same issue with adding PMIDs to astronomy/physics paper citations. I don't believe WP is benefited from having excess database external links cluttering the citations. Thanks, Colin°^Talk 20:22, 13 August 2011 (UTC)

You are entitled to ask me to suspend any such editing while a discussion is ongoing, I have already done that. I don't feel you're entitled to criticise me for earlier good faith work that some editors are now saying they do not agree with. I also don't feel that you are being balanced if you describe database identifiers as "clutter". You are entitled to think that the presentation of database links is sub-optimal or takes up more space than it might need to. To describe identifiers to databases as "clutter" is something I almost find offensive, I think these links are fundamental to the concept of verifiable and complete references, and are to support a wide range of readers and researchers, who will have familiarity with and tools using a range of databases. If you would like to collaborate on an improved design of identifier presentation and/or a balanced and objective discussion on the benefits/issues of use of bibcodes on articles in general (you should note that "astronomy/physics" is not really a good definition of the ADS database coverage) please do let me know. If you only feel able to comment in an IDONTLIKEIT style, or already think your comments on this one are balanced, we're unlikely to be able to work together. Thanks Rjwilmsi 20:49, 13 August 2011 (UTC)

I do hope we can work together but we can't if you won't accept any criticism. A good faith edit isn't automatically a beneficial edit. What are you hoping for with the term "balanced"? If it is that I shouldn't have an opinion then how does that help other than maintaining the status quo? If it is some perceived anti astronomy/physics bias then I can assure you that is not the case. The term clutter gets to the point of these links so please don't get offended by it. They are an obstacle to readers finding useful further information about the citation. They obscure the valuable details. A photograph that is cluttered is one where the subject is not clear and there are distracting elements.

• There are many journal databases in the world. Would you add links to them all to our citations?
• The only "fundamental" aspect of a citation is that it should uniquely identify the cited material. A plain text journal citation serves that need.
• We provide external links and database identifiers as an aid to the reader but they are not fundamental. If they provide no value over what the citation already contains, then they are up for criticism.
• WP has a longstanding consensus that there is no consensus on citation formatting. Consistency within an article is desirable but beyond that, it is up to editors how to format and what elements to include in a citation.
• Data is not information. A link to a database that contains a subset of the information contained in another database is merely adding informationless characters. Data that is not information is noise. Or clutter.

Thoughts? Colin°^Talk 21:14, 13 August 2011 (UTC)

Your two comments in your last post are fair: to say that multiple database links may make it hard for a reader to read the information they want is a good example of a balanced comment. To question whether the ADS database always provides enough information to be useful to a general reader is also an objective comment. I'm fine with you saying those things, I just consider "clutter" to be a very negative word. There are pluses and minuses to database links, there is no way that I think you can use "clutter" accurately in this case. Maybe this is semantics or a minor ENGVAR difference (to me "clutter" is like saying "all those edits were total crap"). I would be happy to use the term "crowded" to describe the concern: links that are somewhat to very useful versus citations that can display as somewhat to very crowded. Rjwilmsi 21:32, 13 August 2011 (UTC)

Byram, Chubb, Friedman 1966 Science 148:152

Hi!

Thank you for pointing this out. I'm not sure what Morrison is doing with ref 17 of Bibcode:1967ARA&A...5..325M. My speculation is that while Morrison was preparing his paper, he received a preprint, probably from Byram of his forthcoming article in Science to be in volume 148 at p. 152. Then, Byram and Friedman decided on, or an editor at Science suggested, splitting the article into two parts: Bibcode:1966Sci...152...66B and Bibcode:1967Sci...156..374F. For the two articles: Visibly_dark_X-ray_source#cite_note-Byram-7 and X-1_X-ray_source#cite_note-Byram-16, the actual reference should contain Ara XR-1 and Leo XR-1, and only the second one does that. I will change the citations. Marshallsumter (talk) 21:51, 13 August 2011 (UTC)

That would be great, thank you. I feel particularly proud when Wikipedia is more accurate than well known published sources. Rjwilmsi 21:55, 13 August 2011 (UTC)

Diacritics translated into capital letter

When RjwilmsiBot translated ČEZ Aréna (Plzeň) into non-diacritics for a redirect in November 2010, it translated the "ň" in the "Plzeň" part into "N", i.e. an upper-case N. The created redirect is CEZ Arena (PlzeN). Why? HeyMid (contribs) 20:00, 14 August 2011 (UTC)

Error in AWB's diacritics list. rev 7807 fixes it. Thanks Rjwilmsi 21:08, 14 August 2011 (UTC)

Edit summary not quite accurate...

See [1]. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 13:42, 15 August 2011 (UTC)

Also, it seems you haven't changed to revision 7807 yet – your recent edit summaries state 7806. Or does the first revision/build count as "0"? HeyMid (contribs) 13:48, 15 August 2011 (UTC)

@Headbomb, occasional edit summary stating more than was actually done due to my decision to (temporarily at least) not add bibcodes. Rjwilmsi 17:05, 15 August 2011 (UTC)

@Heymid, current tasks do not involve diacritic changes. I don't think you need to police my editing at this level. Rjwilmsi 17:05, 15 August 2011 (UTC)

RFC on identifiers

There is an RFC on the addition of identifier links to citations by bots. Please comment. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 16:06, 15 August 2011 (UTC)

Lookaheads and summaries on AWB

Hi!

Do you know if this is still true after this change? Helder 01:27, 4 August 2011 (UTC)

Will not affect AWB 5.3 and later. Rjwilmsi 16:57, 5 August 2011 (UTC)

Thanks! Helder 14:53, 16 August 2011 (UTC)

RjwilmsiBot

I was referred to you for help

On several articles, I accidently placed the name of the physical location of the book (like university or library) in the location parameter on the template:cite book, the location parameter was actually for the city of publication or printing, as I later found out.

I have been manually fixing my mistake by deleting the name of the university/library from the location parameter, and placing in the city in which the book was made, however, this is going to be tedious, I request you modify RjwilmsiBot to fix this error, just program him to remove anything containing the words "university", or "library", from the location parameter, since the location parameter should only contain the name of a city.DÜNGÁNÈ (talk) 01:24, 10 August 2011 (UTC)

Not appropriate to bot it, but I'll do using AWB. Now in progress, ~30 pages done, ~140 left to assess. Rjwilmsi 21:13, 13 August 2011 (UTC)

Now all done. Rjwilmsi 17:43, 16 August 2011 (UTC)

Unnecessary fields in citation template

Rjwilmsi, in the physical sciences it is rather unusual to have issue numbers in journal references. Volume and page are almost always all one needs. The fact that there is an issue field in the citation template does not imply it is always a good idea to fill it. I wouldn't care if you only inserted issue numbers in references you provided to support text you authored. However, I dislike the way you use automatic tools to reconfigure the reference section of articles you are otherwise intellectually unconnected with. -- Marie Poise (talk) 15:49, 17 August 2011 (UTC)

Please link to documentation or discussion of this standard for issue numbers in physical science articles. It's the first I've heard of it. Rjwilmsi 16:55, 17 August 2011 (UTC)

If it's the first time you hear how citations are formatted in physics, then perhaps the best solution would be you stay away from physics articles. The second best solution might be you look into the most important journals in the field, Physical Review, Reviews of Modern Physics, Journal of Physics, European Physical Journal, and so on and so on: they all use the volume,page system. No need for issue numbers. So simple, boy. -- Marie Poise (talk) 20:50, 17 August 2011 (UTC)

Could you be anymore patronizing? Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books}

Marie, your comments are coming across as sarcastic and I don't think that's reasonable. Anyway, I had a look at existing articles: I checked with a database dump for the journals you mention and 70% of the citations using citation templates to these journals had the issue number specified. I also made a brief review of some of the featured articles linked on Wikiproject Physics and the use of issue numbers seemed common across all the journals they cited. So I don't see support for your opinion in the existing physics articles. Consensus may have recently changed, though you didn't answer my request to link to any discussion about it. So, if you would like to make a centralized discussion on the use of issue numbers in physics articles, or in articles more generally, with a view to clarifying the use or not of issue numbers in physics articles, please go ahead and do so, and drop me a link here. In the meantime I don't think I will do anything about your comments as they do not reflect the current majority status of physics articles. Rjwilmsi 21:13, 17 August 2011 (UTC)

Sorry, I meant to be neither patronizing nor sarcastic. I have seen above that you are very sensitive to improper wording and I tried very hard to be as friendly as possible, perhaps too much. Please take also into account that English is not my native language: I am perfectly capable of writing scientific prose in English, but when it comes to the finer nuances of interhuman controversy, I am challenged.

If I understand you correctly, you refer to the way papers from, say, the Physical Review are cited in Wikipedia, while I talked about the way physics papers are cited in, say, the Physical Review. Can we agree about the latter point: in the current practice of scientific publishing in physics and related fields, issue numbers are rarely used, and they are unnecessary and rarely helpful for retrieving cited papers?

Next I guess you will argue that WP is not a research journal, and does not have space constraints, so it is quite natural that different conventions emerge. Then I would argue: let things further evolve. But don't use bot power to impose your preference. -- Marie Poise (talk) 21:29, 17 August 2011 (UTC)

Let's try to cut this short: I'm all in favour of providing editor preferences so each editor can choose their preferred display of the citations e.g. hiding issue number, hiding additional identifiers, showing all additional identifiers, volume bold or not etc. I can understand that if you're familiar with a particular journal style you'd personally prefer to see that on Wikipedia, and I'd personally prefer to see mine. Can we collaborate on getting such editor preferences set up? It would probably need some minor tweaks to the template code to tag the relevant fields, then a couple of lines in each editor's personal display preferences file. This should then allow both of us to see our preferred display without having to change the underlying citation data in the articles, and there do seem to be a number of editors who would like to use such a feature. Rjwilmsi 21:57, 17 August 2011 (UTC)

I fully agree that we should aim for a technical solution. Either a switch in the viewer skin, or a link to a secondary page as for ISBN's. -- Marie Poise (talk) 22:06, 17 August 2011 (UTC)

Excuse me for butting in. In non-WP medical citations, such as that advocated by the ICMJE[2] "As an option, if a journal carries continuous pagination throughout a volume (as many medical journals do) the month and issue number may be omitted." Perhaps the same is true for many other fields, but it appears to depend on the journal rather than the field, and is also left as an editor preference. As I noted in the section above, the only thing WP seems to care about, once the essential details are present, is that the formatting is consistent within the article. That doesn't mean the month/issue need always be present/absent within the article, but that the decision as to whether to eliminate it if unnecessary should be consistent within the article.

My second point, which I made at the RFC, is that any scheme that relies on editor preferences will not picked up by the community. If people feel that a certain issue is bad for our readers, then a solution that only works for less than, I don't know, a tenth of 1% of our readers, isn't going to fly. Wikipedia is read by millions of people, and edited by a few thousand. Colin°^Talk 07:12, 18 August 2011 (UTC)

If we implement editor preferences first we should then be able in due course to make it a reader preference as well. I see no other way forward, and we have to start somewhere. Rjwilmsi 07:15, 18 August 2011 (UTC)

There's no such thing as "reader preferences" on WP. That would require our readers to identify themselves, in other words: create an account. You might as well say "and then we could recode this in Flash" for all the likelyhood of it happening. Colin°^Talk 07:32, 18 August 2011 (UTC)

The new image filter is an example of reader display preferences. We would first need to get editor display preferences operational. Though editor preferences may not in the first instance satisfy all of your concerns there are a number of editors who said they would be happy if editor display preferences were available. There is another option of moving to holding all citations in a sub-page and only showing the identifiers there, but I see more problems with that than display preferences. Rjwilmsi 11:20, 18 August 2011 (UTC)

You are right, I forgot about that. Only a referrendum so far. And a lot of work for something important, where as this.... And for anon users, this is cookie based so while I can see someone clicking the equivalent of Google's Safe Search button, I don't see them customising how their refs display. I mean, if you could customise how refs display, then folk would want to choose different ref styles, not just whether one field displayed or not. Ultimately, this is all very interesting and might lead somewhere in the years to come. But today, have have an RFC on bot activity with current tech. Which basically comes down to whether the bot owners want to respect the lack of consensus here, or else carry on forcing their prefs on the rest. BTW: one of the reason why many folk don't use citation templates is so that bots don't muck about with the citations. But those folk are capable of formulating a useful citation without help. Colin°^Talk 12:01, 18 August 2011 (UTC)

AWB

Hello. Sorry for bothering you if this is not something you're able to help with, but for the last few days I have been unable to use AWB - every time I start it, I get the message that it cannot connect to the Wikipedia servers. I have not changed any settings (it worked fine a couple of days before the problem started) and the internet connection is fine (I was manually editing at the time). I tried removing the programme and downloading a new copy and installing it, but exactly the same problem occured. Do you have any idea what may be causing this? Many thanks, Number 57 09:38, 19 August 2011 (UTC)

I've replied to your earlier post. Rjwilmsi 08:49, 20 August 2011 (UTC)

JSTOR url cleaner

I've tested things pretty extensively, and this regex cleans absolutely everything flawlessly. I highly-recommend you add this to an article "pre-cleaning" logic that would kick in before doing queries and whatnots.

Find

• \|(\s*)url(\s*)=(\s*)(http://)?www.jstor.org/(stable|pss)/(view/|pdfplus/)?(\d+)([^(\s|\||})]*)

Replace

• |$1jstor$2=$3$7

Find

• >\s*\[?(http://)?www.jstor.org/(stable|pss)/(view/|pdfplus/)?(\d+)([^\s]*)\]?\s*</ref>

Replace

• >{{cite journal|jstor=$4}}</ref>

Also, if you can implement this into the AWB general fixes, that would be pretty damned awesome too. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 06:03, 20 August 2011 (UTC)

1. it fails when the url is to a jstor doi (e.g. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/gfc.2003.3.3.20 from Falafel) where it should be |url= to |doi=. I'll write my own implementation rather than your regex.
2. when there is already a JSTOR DOI do you think we need to have a |jstor= too, or isn't it duplication? (there are some articles, but not that many I think with the duplication) Should we clarify on the cite journal/citation documentation what's best?
3. before we do this conversion/clean up where do you propose to post first to handle any other editors' comments? I can provide a list of known affected articles. I suggest template talk pages, citing sources talk, wikiproject talk (dependent on which articles affected).
4. Is this worthy of a bot task, or just a gradual cleanup by AWB genfixes? Thanks Rjwilmsi 08:23, 20 August 2011 (UTC)

Stupid doi ruining things... searching for (10.\d\d\d\d) should match those, although I'll need to think a bit about how to implement things. Anyway, if there was a jstor link, it should be converted to a |jstor=. I doubt it would be easy to have both jstor + doi from regex. As for "other editors comments", I don't really see what could be said. This doesn't add/remove information, it just cleans it up.

BTW I already have lists of affected articles. The first regex matched ~3,000 pages [I cleaned up a few, but there's too many to do by hand], while the second matched ~100 (as of late July) [those I cleaned up]. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 09:10, 20 August 2011 (UTC)

For DOIs one skip if JSTOR url has 10. in it, and do these by hand then: 1761 in science, Aeromancy, American Journal of Sociology, Amphicoelias, Bunker Hill Mine and Smelting Complex, Disinfectant, Eliezer Steinbarg, Evolutionary biology, Falafel, In an Antique Land, Kelewele, Loire Valley chansonniers, Madeleine de Scudéry, My Heart Leaps Up, Organized crime, Persoonia lanceolata, Revolt of the Barretinas, Sodium bicarbonate, Species, Spruce Production Division, The London Jilt, Trammel of Archimedes, Trekkie, Vinegar, Virginia Association. Rjwilmsi 09:15, 20 August 2011 (UTC)

Thanks

Thanks for the cookie :) I appreciate it! Cheers, FASTILY ^(TALK) 18:51, 21 August 2011 (UTC)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogroup_J1_(Y-DNA)

Please review and comment:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogroup_J1_(Y-DNA)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Haplogroup_J1_(Y-DNA)
JohnLloydScharf (talk) 23:36, 21 August 2011 (UTC)

Journal names in italics

Hi, while I also prefer journal names in italics, I'm not sure that doing that manually is a good idea. The formatting is supposed to be done by the template. Is there a reason you are not instead seeking a consensus to change {{cite journal}}? Zero^talk 00:06, 23 August 2011 (UTC)

I don't understand you. The cleanup is to remove italics that have incorrectly been manually added, such that the italics applied by the template logic are applied and the journal name does show up in italics. Rjwilmsi 05:05, 23 August 2011 (UTC)

Sorry I didn't look carefully enough. Keep up the good work. Zero^talk 09:47, 23 August 2011 (UTC)

Random survey

Hi, This is a random survey regarding the first sentence on the Wikipedia policy page Verifiability.

"The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is verifiability, not truth—whether readers can check that material in Wikipedia has already been published by a reliable source, not whether editors think it is true."

In your own words, what does this mean? Thank you. Regards, Bob K31416 (talk) 05:39, 24 August 2011 (UTC)

Copied from WT:Verifiability/First sentence:

I understand what the existing sentence means – we can only be certain about verifiability, not necessarily certain about the truth, so that's the basis of our requirement for inclusion. Whether the phrasing could be better than the current one, I don't know, it's currently clear enough to me. Rjwilmsi 07:38, 24 August 2011 (UTC)

Thank you. Regards, Bob K31416 (talk) 13:18, 24 August 2011 (UTC)