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RFA -- do-over

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I was actually wondering about Crz myself. He asked about nominating me, then I saw his RFB, then I hadn't heard anything back from him. I didn't want to bug him about it, so I figured I'd just wait it out. I appreciate your offer to nominate me in his stead, and I'll forward you the answers to some questions that Crz asked via email. As you saw on his talk page, even if I don't make it, it'll be a great learning experience. Thanks for your support. ~ Amalas rawr =^_^= 20:21, 28 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Comment

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My apologies for my ill-chosen language earlier used by me regarding the work of your project, and of you in particular. At this point it's hard to tell, but I think that I was primarily trying to establish a rapport with the person I was speaking to, and may have crossed the line in terms of what I now realize probably could be seen as at least implied criticism. Such criticism was never actively willful on my part however. I can and do think that in general your project probably has more power in this field than may be ideally wanted; however, that could easily be changed by having more people join the project, and it is ultimatly pretty much as viable a criticism as saying politicians have too much power in politics would be. I was at one time myself briefly, if only minimally, trying to get in the flow of your project, and unfortunately found the complexities a bit over my head and withdrew. The fact that the members of your project are willing to devote as much time and effort to the complexities of this rather staggering task is something I am seriously and repeatedly grateful for. Badbilltucker 14:55, 29 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Importance

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I see the suggestion gets implemented. Cheers! --Dirk Beetstra T C 17:31, 29 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Charity org stubs cat

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I saw your note that it wasn't completely orphaned yet. All I saw that was left was some WP and User namespace stuff and I usually leave those things alone. As far as I saw, there were no articles that used it, so it should be safe to delete. Am I missing something? ~ Amalas rawr =^_^= 23:57, 29 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Importance

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Sorry about that. I've just done something similar for "unreferenced", although more rough and ready (I missed the nuance of cl_timestamp). We could move all the dec category to nov fairly simply, what do you think? Rich Farmbrough, 19:37 2 December 2006 (GMT).

P.S. Annoying that the dump has failed yet again. Rich Farmbrough, 19:39 2 December 2006 (GMT).
Good, that's exactly what I'm doing with unreferenced, for Nov, for Oct I used the 4/11/06 dump which is close enough, and so-on back through June. Rich Farmbrough, 19:45 2 December 2006 (GMT).

Numerical Standards

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I don't know why you insist on me having hard and fast numerical standards for RfA's. I have a few minimal standards but looking to put numbers to them is a mistake. Between different styles of editors some will have more inflated edit counts then others, and as such looking at numbers like that shows very little about the actuall editors skill or experience. As such I have decided decively against keeping any minimal edit counts for RfA's --T-rex 02:28, 5 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Uncategorised categories pileup...

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Yes, that is an AWB default thing. There is an option on the "Set options" tab that says "auto tag". It defaults to checked and it does things like "Auto tag Appends {{Wikify}}, {{Uncategorised}} and {{stub}} tags when appropriate. Removes stub tags from long articles. Adds the date parameter to the by-date sorted templates." (quote from AWB's page) I usually leave the option checked because it will auto-remove stub tags if the article is too long. I hadn't notice the uncat pileup, but I will definitely keep my eye on that and make sure to remove any redundancies. Also, we might want to bring this up at Wikipedia talk:AutoWikiBrowser ~ Amalas rawr =^_^= 03:05, 5 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]


BTW, as someone who spends a lot of time at Special:Uncategorizedpages, I just wanted to say that I'm loving your bot. Keep up the great work! :) --Elonka 21:03, 8 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I'm looking forward to seeing the next cache refresh. About twice a week, the list at Special:Uncategorizedpages refreshes, but unfortunately it only takes the first 1,000 articles in the alphabet. Because of how rapidly that new pages are being added to Wikipedia (thousands per week), it's been difficult to get any traction in the list. Over the few months, we've been making a concerted effort, so each time the list refreshes we ensure that every single article in the list gets some kind of tag to keep it off the next refresh, even if it's nothing more than {{uncat}}. As a result, each time it refreshed, we've been able to advance a bit further into the alphabet.  :) Unfortunately though, because of the limited number of pages in the list, and the infrequency of the update, these advances are small, and at a certain point we seem to hit just sort of break-even, which at the moment seems to be around the letter "F". See Wikipedia talk:Special:Uncategorizedpages#Stats/progress for a visual indicator of how we've been doing.
With your bot helping though, we may advance further on this round. I'm looking forward to see how it's helped! --Elonka 23:19, 8 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

RfA Thanks

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I don't like spamming pages, but I thought I'd give a little note to my co-nominators. User:Amalas/RfA Thanks. ~ Amalas rawr =^_^= 14:31, 6 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

  • It did seem a little odd to me that Grutness added his co-nom considerably after the fact, but I wasn't really going to make a big fuss about it. I can see the huge debate over co-nominations, and I didn't want that to be a big deal in deciding whether or not I should be an admin. I mean, really. What does co-nominations have to do with a person's ability to be an admin? That sits more on the nominator(s)' head as opposed to the nominee. Eek, I'd better stop myself before my little diatribe goes on too long. In any case, I still appreciate all the support. ~ Amalas rawr =^_^= 17:08, 6 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]


Oddity

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Take a look at this page. I don't understand why there is a picture of a woman masturbating and I can't find the link to the picture. Very confusing.--Thomas.macmillan 22:49, 8 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Do you not watch The Real World/Road Rules Challenges?

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That is a load of crap that guy from 151 is leaving and you jumped down my throat because he added bull to the pages. When have anyone from Survivor or ANTM appeared on anything Real World? I think it's wrong Alai, that you stick up from him. I find it amueterish. Get him!74.195.3.11 16:29, 9 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Alaibot and {{previouslycategorised}}

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Hi,

I have gone through about 20 of the articles that your bot automatically tagged with {{previouslycategorised}}, and my conclusion is that this feature should be turned off until you can address the problems I have raised on User talk:Alaibot. Specifically the bot should:

  1. not tag articles that have only previously been categorised due to maintenance tags
  2. understand articles that have been tagged when they were a redirect

...and ideally:

  1. where the last change has caused the categories to be removed, and only contains deletions, an alternate tag should be applied in such a way that does not cause the wikipedia undo capability to fail
  2. handle stub removals differently.

Sorry to put a damper on an otherwise good feature. John Vandenberg 06:13, 10 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I don't regard these as "false positives", just as "behaving as advertised"; the basis for tagging these, as having had any-category-at-all is pretty explicit on the cleanup category. This is just a different tagging of "uncategorised" articles, per this discussion, that used to have a category (of any kind). Said discussion is also why I'm not just tagging them all with "uncat", which is certainly the simplest from by perspective. If you disagree with the balance of benefit in said separate tagging, that might be the best place to comment. It's not by any means a guarantee there's a "good" version to revert too (which seems unlikely to be automatable). I've certainly no objections to tweaks to the wording on the template; or perhaps better if a lengthy explanation is required, to the category page.
I see nothing inappropriate in applying this to previously-stub-categorised articles; in that case, it encodes genuine per-topic information, which is the whole point. I could further split this up by previously-categorised-with-only-stub-cats and otherwise, but that might be a little over-engineered. Some of these tag removals may be revertible, some perfectly OK (aside from the loss of categorisation); I don't see any reliable way to automate that, either.
Category redlinks may be completely spurious, it's true, or as in the case you cite, the results of category deletion. In that case, the deleted category is again a plausible by-topic starting point for recategorisation. (Ideally, people or bots depopulating such categories wouldn't leave articles without categories in the first place...)
Old applications of "maintenance" categories may not be especially helpful, I'll grant you (unless their removal was inappropriate), but it's not straightforward to automatedly determine what's a "real" category, and what's not. (Almost every category seems to be a descendent of both "trees", by some route or other.) If I come up with a fairly reasonable way of doing this, I can try to exclude these from future runs.
In the case of Wrong Number it was moved to Wrong Number (movie) after any of the database dumps I was working from; the categorisation, and loss of categorisation occurred to the latter, and it just so happened that the former was also uncategorised. As it's not possible (as far as I know) to query the live database by page_id, as distinct from title, there's not much that can be done about such cases. But it should be pretty clear from any manual examination of the history that that's what's happened, they're likely to be extremely rare, and the overall "harm" seems pretty small.
I'm not sure I follow your comment that the bot should "understand articles that have been tagged when they were a redirect". I'm not tagging redirects, and redirects shouldn't in general be categorised. If you mean articles that have at some earlier point categories like "unprintworthy redirects", see my comments about maintenance cats in general. On the comment that "where the last change has caused the categories to be removed, and only contains deletions, an alternate tag should be applied in such a way that does not cause the wikipedia undo capability to fail". That seems to be a) impossible in general, because any change will have that effect, and b) is especially not possible for pywikipedia bots, as they don't deal with article histories in any way. The only way to deal with the former would be for people to work from a cleanup list rather than a cleanup category, which tend to be less popular overall. Those are easy for me, though, so again if you want to argue for that rather than the other at CAT:NOCAT, I'm happy either way.
But you may be glad to hear that I'm not currently tagging any more of these, and won't be (at least) until either I work out how best to handle templatised articles (so as to avoid "real" false positives, i.e. tagging an article that transcludes a category from a template), or else there's a more recent database dump with some "fresh meat". When I do, I may try to look into adding the older categories, and/or the "timestamp" of said categorisation into the template. (The latter would be easier, as it'll be consistent for a particular run.) Would you find that useful? Alai 01:50, 11 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Hi, thanks for the detailed response.
I dont buy the "behaving as advertised" argument, because if your bot didnt tag these articles, another bot would have added {{uncategorised}}. Your bot performs a better analysis of the article, but due to the problems I pointed out, it is causing as much work as it is solving. In the above analysis, I defined "False positive" as any case where the previouslycatagorised tag was applied to an article where there was no benefit in looking into the history of the article. For each of these false positives, I wasted maybe 5-10 minutes trying to find a useful previous categorisation in the history, to no avail. For each of these, it would have been better that your bot tagged the article with uncategorised, or left that for another bot to do so.
Regarding "maintenance" categories, it should be possible to programatically build a list of all such categories under Category:Wikipedia cleanup and Category:Wikipedia maintenance, or maybe Category:Wikipedia administration.
Regarding "previously-stub-categorised articles", I agree that the bot is doing a great job. If it could also distinguish these from the other types of {{previouslycategorised}}, that would be even better.
Regarding "understand articles that have been tagged when they were a redirect", that was due to the Wrong Number vs Wrong Number (movie) mixup, which I can now see is a very tough bug and as you say, probably isnt worth caring about as there is no harm.
In regards to the case where 'previous edit only deleted text, including categorisations', instead of tagging the article the bot could do either:
  1. automatically restore the deleted text (I think it is fair to assume that if a "deletion" removed categories it was probably either vandalism or accidental damage),
  2. add the article to a User:Alaibot/Deleted text list, and people to watch the list and manually fix the problem, or
  3. do nothing, as there are other bots that automatically restore deleted text
As a result of such a high rate of false positives, all of the recent contributions of Alaibot will need to be combed through carefully in order to fix the _real_ previous categorisations. It would be really cool if you could extend your bot revise the articles that it tagged with previouslycatagorised, and automatically find those that should be instead tagged with something like {{previouslycatagorised|stub=...|date=...}} or {{previouslycatagorised|tag=...|date=...}}. As we manually work through the remainder of the articles in the category, we may find other parts of this task that can be automated.
I am happy that this feature has been put on hold, but I will be even more happy when this feature is back in action with these improvements in place. It has a lot of promise. John Vandenberg 02:54, 11 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

record label stubs

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I've been creating a lot of country specific stubs for record labels. Currently there are hundreds of record label stubs under this main heading, where previously there were only country specific stub categories for UK, US and Canada. I realise that there might not be many record labels for Iceland, Austria, etc, but I think it's better than lumping them under the general record-label-stub for non UK/US labels. I've only been adding in countries that I find a stub for. Lugnuts 12:21, 11 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

do you think I was too depressed to actually finish tagging them all?

To be honest, it looked like no-one had even bothered to start tagging them! IMO they're as useful as categories that have only 2 or 3 articles within them. Lugnuts 20:28, 11 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Greetings, fellow bot operator!

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I see that you are listed as a fellow bot operator. I have been regorganising the wikipedia bot help pages to try and provide more information for those who want to learn how to create a bot or have quesitons relating to how to run a bot on wikipedia (more nuts-and-bolts than the existing policy page, which deals with what you are allowed to do, not how you would go about doing it). I've made a start at Wikipedia:Creating_a_bot but could do with any feedback at all. I could do with any programming-language specific information that you can provide as well as any suggestions for improving the article. I'm leaving this same message with 5 other bot operators, to encourage them to pass on the knowledge we have learned developing our bots to the "next generation" of wikipedia bot-builders! Cheers - PocklingtonDan 15:19, 12 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

help!

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your bot did something to my article Kremzeek. how to i fix it an put it in a category so that warning message disappears? There isn't an exact category for fictional energy beings created by mad scientists. Any chance of answering on my talk page (yes, i'm a newbie if you hadn't already noticed) Reillyd 08:57, 13 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Please hold the bot

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Alai, please hold off the bot on the Haitian material. Many of the "writers" are in fact historians which are not counted as "writers" for other countries. I'm trying to sort this out but please hold off the bot. Valentinian (talk) / (contribs) 21:18, 13 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Done. There are still more than 50 left, so it is probably not worth the while to list the category for deletion. Valentinian (talk) / (contribs) 21:57, 13 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

NSW geo stubs

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Left a note with a link on WP:WSS/P about how NSW is split into 14 regions that have some degree of government recognition. Might prove more useful than a Lake Mackery stub. Caerwine Caer’s whines 07:02, 14 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Removing stub parent cats...

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Huh.... That's odd... I really have no idea why I did that. I looked back through my contributions around that time, and this edit: [1] is about the only guess I have. It looks like I was organizing the alt/indie rock into by-era splits (as opposed to organizing the by-era stuff into by-genre splits). So I guess my thinking was that the appropriate parent would be the genre one, not the time one. That may have been back when I didn't quite grasp the idea that things can have 2 parents. Now, looking at that edit, it doesn't make any sense. Sorry to have caused any trouble with that. Feel free to restore those parent cats. Blech. ~ Amalas rawr =^_^= 14:33, 14 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

  • I don't think it would have caused an edit war, as I don't think I have those pages on my watchlist. If I was watching every category or template (or article!) I edited, my watchlist would be monstrous! In any case, thanks for asking me. Communication is always good. On a completely different note, could you take a look at a couple of the old SFD cases? Someone responded on the Mainland China one, and you were the one who put it up there, so you know more about it than me. Also, I'm not sure what to do with the Chicano one. It's really split, so I don't want to "unilaterally blah blah blah" that every hates new (or really any) admins doing. Thanks. ~ Amalas rawr =^_^= 15:44, 14 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Stub cat counts

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Hi Alai! (I bet you get that a lot...) Anyway, I've just finished cleaning up Category:Children's books and would like to tackle Category:Children's book stubs. I think Category:Children's novel stubs would be viable but CatScan is still down and I quail at the thought of hand-counting...so is there any way you, the Great and Powerful Oz, could get a count for me? And while you're at it, are there any other cats in Category:Non-fiction book stubs that can be split off? Cheers! Her Pegship (tis herself) 05:33, 20 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Vandalism help

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You've been kind to help me with previous concerns. After repairing significant vandalism to the Charlotte Latin School entry, my user page was vandalized with phrases referring to improper behavior towards students.

The vandal was Tarheelblue32242, who was also responsible for vandalizing the Charlotte Latin School entry.

I'm happy to post the vandalism warnings, but since it's a personal attack, I thought it best to check with an administrator before acting.

Warmest regards, and many thanks! Ezratrumpet 06:06, 23 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

TfD nomination of Template:Step

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Template:Step 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. --Night Gyr (talk/Oy) 07:27, 28 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Categorisation

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FYI: [2] (in case you haven't already noticed). :-) — Instantnood 22:00, 31 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

First Stub

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I have created my first stub (Wikipedia:WikiProject_Stub_sorting/Proposals#Amusement_park_stubs. Is there anything else to do. I.e., am I responsible for populating it? TonyTheTiger 19:58, 2 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Graphic on BC Protected Areas stub

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Hi. I see you're the creator of Template:BritishColumbia-protected-area-stub. Please see its talkpage for my comments. I'm currently trying to build other stubs and templates for Wikipedia:WikiProject British Columbia and would appreciate any guidance; for now I'm going to copy code from one of the others and change the text; maybe I'll figure it out on my own, but I was a little concerned that the image on the protected areas stub is from the American Southwest rather than BC....Skookum1 00:47, 5 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Unused new stub

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Note that the article for which gave me the impetus to create the stub has been deleted. I am sure the stub sorting guys will find many amusement parks. TonyTheTiger 05:54, 5 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Oceania-mil-bio-stub

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Hello there,

I have, for some time, been trying to wittle down the Military personnel stubs. I created a Oceania-mil-bio- template that has Oceania-bio and Mil-bio as subcats. However, after doing this, I realized that Australia, New Zealand and Fiji already have bio-stubs. Could you take a look and fix this problem? Thanks--Thomas.macmillan 22:59, 10 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

  • It is supposed to be an upmerged template. The problem, as I see it, is that it would be applied to an article that would include Australians etc so they would be sorted into the Australia bio's as well as the Oceania-bio, making it redundant. However, if we delete the Oceania-bio, a military person from the Solomons would not be sorted in Oceania-bio. Sorry if I was unclear with the problem--Thomas.macmillan 01:53, 11 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Hi. I just want to say thank you for defending the stub. This stub is definitely useful to Wikipedia:WikiProject Aquarium Fishes and we will populate more of them. --Melanochromis 03:46, 13 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Stub type unproposals

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I take it, you're talking about {{Slovakia-footy-bio-stub}} and it's category. The proposals page already had this proposed, with two supports and no negative votes. It sat in proposals untouched for ten days, so why not go ahead and make it, it isn't a surprise that this was gonna be made. The only reason I see these proposed stubs hadn't been made yet, was because of the Scandinavia/Nordic countries debate, which has little to do with Slovakia. I notified the proposals page that I was going to make/in progress of making the stub and its cat, and followed through with systematically going through every article in the Slovak footballers cat. I see no wrong in making a proposed stub that had support for ten days, and was done according to the guidelines. Poulsen 09:54, 13 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

That sounds fair, and I did try to be more informational about it with the recent Slovakia stub, so I have moved just an inch, but not following Grutness' arguments. I just get defensive when I get told what to do, when the criticism appearently isn't about the actual work done, but the level of control and bureaucracy that Grutness wants, to cause him less annoyance.. But I did communicate the stub making to proposals this time (and will in the future), I just didn't know I should list it afterwards, which I think is the only reason it subsequently popped up in discoveries and gave Grutness the excuse to fling insults. Poulsen 10:23, 14 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Category:Argentine film stubs now has 100+ articles. I tagged many earlier films which hadn't been stub sorted. I have been filtering out unontable films leaving me with a full list of notable films to add to wikipedia and am currently as far as AM.with 100 already! Ernst Stavro Blofeld 21:23, 13 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I aim to expand everything into full detailed articles later. I beleive Template:Argentina-film-stub is a perfect category for this with the relvant image. Ernst Stavro Blofeld 21:25, 13 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Radio Station Uncategorised

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I have noticed that a couple radio stations have been listed as uncategorised. With the exception of WINC (which I am in the process of fixing), WWEG, WPPT-FM, WAFY are all categorised under the Hagerstown and Frederick, MD markets and their respective templates. Each page, including WINC, have proper information and website links. Further categorisation would be monotonous.

I will be adding templates for the Washington, DC market (as WINC serves it clearly) and adding links to the Virginia Radio Station Wiki page as well.

Rock on....SVRTVDude 04:33, 14 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Moon stubs

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Hi. I wonder if you know of a way to quickly remove the "Moon-stubs" from those articles that also have "crater stubs". As it is now, when you look at the category of moon stubs, there are so many crater articles that it is almost impossible to find those articles that really need attention. I assume that there is some kind of bot that can do this, but I'm not that advanced. Thanks. Lunokhod 23:31, 14 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

West Virginia stub for deletion

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I believe you placed your vote in the wrong place here: Wikipedia:Stub_types_for_deletion#.7B.7BWest-Virginia-school-stub.7D.7D_.2F_Cat:West_Virginia_school_stubs I think you may have intended your "Keep" vote at the one directly above. TomTheHand 14:15, 15 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Populating the Uncat album cat

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It would be pretty helpful if you could populate (as you once did) the Category:Uncategorised albums based on stub status. If you could do it based on infobox status, that'd be pretty slick too. Thanks.--Fisherjs 13:18, 17 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I'll look to see what I can do, but I suspect that I'll have to wait until the next database dump, to be able to get meaningful input for the 'bot. And it's been a month and a half since the last one, with no indication of when the next one is due (mutter, mutter). Alternatively, I might be able to get something from the toolserver people -- I must get 'round to putting a request in. On the infoboxes: you mean populating a cleanup category based on which album articles don't have one? Alai 14:31, 17 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for looking into it. On the infoboxes, I mean tagging articles for Category:Uncategorised albums based on IF they have an album infobox AND no cat.--Fisherjs 14:37, 17 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I've belatedly followed your talk page instructions and moved this to my talk page, since the "watch the other person's page" is disasterously useless as far as I'm concerned: I'm firmly in the "split it up and be darned" camp, I'm afraid. So if they have no category and no infobox, then do what with them, precisely? Alai 14:44, 17 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Not "if they have no category and no infobox" but if they DO have an album infobox BUT NO category, then add [[Category:Uncategorised albums]] to the article. Sorry if I'm not being clear with the logical operators. Make sense?--Fisherjs 15:55, 17 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
D'oh, sorry, my bad: reading without due care and attention. OK, I'll have a look at that, too. Alai 16:14, 17 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I've had a trawl through the most likely-looking stub categories, and not really found much. As there's on the order of 50,000 album infobox usages I'm not sure I want to trawl all of those on the live database: I'll tackle those when I have a "fresh" db dump. Likewise then I'll be able to tag the albums in categories with no infobox. There's probably also many of the stubs that specifically lack a by-artist/genre category, or a a release-date category, I can have a look for those. If I don't get back to this in a week or two, drop me a reminder. (If there's no db dump by then, I'll re-moan on the wikitech list.) If you're at a loose end, there's lots of other articles to categorise, of course... Alai 00:05, 18 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]