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Thank you very much!
So I am a long time user and lover of Wikipedia, and I truly believe that community sourced knowledge is going to be one of the great cruxes of the on-rushing information age, and that reputation will one day replace currency in many respects. I am a timid editor of Wikipedia; mostly because I am old and much of the syntax/code shorthand is cumbersome to me, but I have a stellar education and a vast personal library in addition to a very good memory. I will work through your suggested tutorials and I hope that this will give me all I need to become less shy in my work. I really just want to say thank you for contacting me and keep up your good work, for it is the work of ages and more important than most people would believe. Truly, and withouth hyperbole, I think that Wikipedia is one of the most important things in human history. — Preceding
unsigned comment added by
Silverstairs (
talk •
contribs) 05:22, 17 February 2016 (UTC)
History of the Poles in the United States
Given your high fluency in Polish, I am reaching out to you in regards to the
History of the Poles in the United States article. It has no Polish equivalent, and any time you can spend towards translating in any capacity would be much-appreciated. I would be more than happy to help any way that I can.
Thank you!
Pola.mola (
talk) 20:14, 19 February 2016 (UTC)
Thank you. Its on my to-do list.
Marek.
69talk 03:14, 16 March 2016 (UTC)
AWB
Marek, please don't use AWB to make undiscussed changes to citation style, which is a breach of
WP:CITEVAR. Can't you change your settings? The thing is a menace.
Johnbod (
talk) 14:49, 20 February 2016 (UTC)
Hi
Johnbod, thank you for your message. I hope you are well.
I'm using several scripts with AWB at the moment, I'm not sure exactly what you are referring to. Could you give an example?
Best Regards --
Marek.
69talk 18:17, 21 February 2016 (UTC)
MFK Fisher, Food Writer
I have some issue with describing Mary Frances as a "food writer." Food and food preparation are, indeed, central themes in her work. However, she uses them as a tool to speak much more deeply about life.
Please let me explain my concern. A dear friend of mine was a crusty old Chicago newspaperman and talented writer. I discovered he wasn't familiar with MFK Fisher. I grabbed a couple of her books to share with him and told him she was known as a food writer, but that she was so much more than that designation.
"Hell, Susan. You know I don't read that stuff."
"I know, Owen. Just give her a try. I know you're going to enjoy her."
A couple weeks later, Owen called me and said he'd taken out everything the library had written by MFK Fisher. He said, "Susan, I'm in love with Mary Frances."
I've not contributed to Wikipedia editing at all. I'm not sure what to cite in defense of my stance, because the issue is subjective. (Frankly, this is the first time I've ever commented and I'm probably not doing this correctly.) But I fear that identifying MFK Fisher as merely a food writer is inaccurate. And it risks turning off readers like my friend, Owen.
Burrgold (
talk) 18:13, 21 February 2016 (UTC)
One of AWB's inbuilt features is to combine identical references; this is what happened for the two instances of: <ref>Fuchs, 104</ref>
On closer inspection, I see that in this article the refs are done slightly differently, i.e they are separate and ordered that way in the reflist. I'm sorry for messing that up.
The other edits, i.e. changing http: to https: (for Google and Internet Archive links only) was discussed on
Village Pump in an RfC
I'm sorry for any inconvenience in the couple of articles you encountered. Thank you for spotting and rectifying the problem.
Kind Regards
Marek.
69talk 18:14, 23 February 2016 (UTC)
Can I chime in here? The change to
Roman temple to put a comma after a sentence-leading "Therefore" is another problematic change with AWB. This is not good style. See, for example, "Chicago Manual of Style 5.69: "When [transitional adverbs] are used in such a way that there is no real break in continuity and no call for any pause in reading, commas should be omitted." Use of such a comma is at least a matter of preference. Can you revert the change, please? -
Eponymous-Archon (
talk) 21:23, 23 February 2016 (UTC)
Yep, and I just commented over there. My view is that this is a matter of preference and so should be left alone. We'll see! -
Eponymous-Archon (
talk) 23:52, 23 February 2016 (UTC)
Hi Marek, just like to note that your
AWB edit to Malaysia edited a measurement that was part of a filename by applying a convert template. I'm not sure how AWB works, but I suspect this is probably a very rare problem. Thought I'd note it nonetheless. Regards,
CMD (
talk) 06:31, 27 February 2016 (UTC)
Yes, thank you for spotting it. It's not an AWB problem - its a 'me' problem. I just missed it.
Thanks for sorting it out.
Best Regards --
Marek.
69talk 10:47, 27 February 2016 (UTC)
A cup of coffee for you!
The quotations on your user-page are good. Regards,
Prof TPMS (
talk) 23:14, 25 February 2016 (UTC)
Thank you
Prof TPMS, that's just what I needed. Cheers! --
Marek.
69talk 23:23, 25 February 2016 (UTC)
http / https
Can you not refer to changing http URLs in citations to https as "typos"? They are not. Perhaps "converting URLs to secure links" would be better?
Ritchie333(talk)(cont) 09:20, 27 February 2016 (UTC)
So far I've just been using AWB's standard summary as the program is searching for typos. If it does something other than this (i.e. http: to https:) I have to enter this manually. As I'm not just searching for http:, then I'm not sure if it's possible to do the edit summary automatically (as spellcheck does).
Opted eventually for
Typo fixing, + 'general fixes and clean up' because I count the other edits as 'general fixes'
Do you know of a way of making the edit summary adjust to each edit?
Well if you've cracked it, that's good. I don't know much about automated tools really.
Ritchie333(talk)(cont) 11:15, 27 February 2016 (UTC)
Diacritics
Please stop adding diacritical marks to words such as "facade" and "melee". These words have been completely accepted into English and no longer take diacritics. Thanks.
BMK (
talk) 23:38, 27 February 2016 (UTC)
Best Regards --
Marek.
69talk 11:30, 28 February 2016 (UTC)
There is room for both.
SovalValtos (
talk) 12:10, 28 February 2016 (UTC)
Personally, I find "facade" to be ungainly, and my computer autocorrects it to "façade", which Firefox then considers a misspelling, but then again there's lots Firefox doesn't know how to spell. I wouldn't know how to write the cedilla in cursive, but in an age where our computers can easily fix words like "facade", I see no excuse for sticking with the Anglicized version other than denial. English is a language which abhors two different spellings of the same word that mean the same thing— façade has become one of the abhorrent exceptions. KDS4444Talk 16:02, 28 February 2016 (UTC)
I will give you the most obvious reason you using the Anglized version: we are the English Wikipedia. While it is truw that English occasionally uses diacritics fro loan words, once a word is taken in completely, the diacritics are dropped. The English word is "naive", with no accent.
BMK (
talk) 23:25, 8 March 2016 (UTC)
Wikiversity is now supported by Wikidata as well. Language links can be maintained on Wikidata now. Access to the data will follow. Welcome, sister!
Wikidata now has cross-wiki notifications as a beta feature. You can enable it in your preferences. Once enabled you will see notifications you received on the other Wikimedia wikis.
Property:P1367 ("BBC Your Paintings artist-ID") has become "Art UK artist identifier". Identifier values were replaced.
The number of claims on each item is to be included in the "page property" database table. For some items where it had been missing, it was recently added. This leads to improved coverage by
database reports: without claims by site.
Mix'n'match has new catalogs: Artists of the Nationalmuseum in Sweden and Encyclopædia Britannica
Wikidata Query Service now allows to view images linked from Commons and display image galley if the query result has images. Example:
Paintings by Gustav Klimt
Fixed a bug in Special:NewItem which prevented submission of the form (
phabricator:T128075)
More performance work
In diffs for mathematical expressions we're now also showing the TeX source to make it possible to see changes that do not affect the rendering of the formula (
phabricator:T125712)
More work on cleaning up languages for multilingual text values and labels/descriptions/aliases
Note: All columns in this table are sortable, allowing you to rearrange the table so the articles most interesting to you are shown at the top. All images have mouse-over popups with more information. For more information about the columns and categories, please
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SuggestBot's talk page with any questions you might have.
SuggestBot picks articles in a number of ways based on other articles you've edited, including straight text similarity, following wikilinks, and matching your editing patterns against those of other Wikipedians. It tries to recommend only articles that other Wikipedians have marked as needing work. We appreciate that you have signed up to receive suggestions regularly; your contributions make Wikipedia better — thanks for helping!
If you have feedback on how to make SuggestBot better, please let us know on
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talk), SuggestBot's caretaker. --
SuggestBot (
talk) 15:10, 5 March 2016 (UTC)
Inappropriate precision
Could you check your convert template script? It's using way too much precision in some cases. Here is an example, from
De Long Islands: {{convert|700|to(-)|1000|km|mi|0|abbr=off}} -> "700 to 1,000 kilometres (435–621 miles)". In this case the "0" should be a "-2" but it's probably better to just let the template choose the precision.
Kendall-K1 (
talk) 20:25, 6 March 2016 (UTC)
Lucie and Charlie handed in their Bachelor theses on the Article Placeholder and Editing Wikidata from Wikipedia. Work on both topics will continue. We'll publish both theses soon. A big congrats to both of them!
Careful on the cleanups with AWB. Per consensus on wikipedia, we go with Ana Ivanovic's preferred and sourced English language choice of Ivanovic, not Ivanović. Thanks.
Fyunck(click) (
talk) 22:57, 8 March 2016 (UTC)
OK, thank you for that information. I will update my settings.
Kind regards --
Marek.
69talk 23:05, 8 March 2016 (UTC)
So, you need to stop
Your judgement about when to add diacritics to words is very, very poor. "Debacle" is your latest faux pas. In English, it is not written "débâcle". Please do not continue this behavior: other editors who had the same problems with diacritics have been topic banned by ArbCom.
BMK (
talk) 23:21, 8 March 2016 (UTC)
You flagged the article
Franciscus Monachus as an orphan. This is strange because there was already (before your edit) a link from the page
Gerardus Mercator (apart from links from user or talk pages). You may wish to explore this but life is short.
Peter Mercator (
talk) 11:25, 11 March 2016 (UTC)
Hmm, I'm not exactly sure how
WP:AWB works out whether an article is an orphan or not. The link you mention does appear to be the only one (from mainspace anyway) linking to the article, so I don't think there's any harm leaving the tag as is, as it might encourage people (or bots) to link to it.
You're absolutely right about life being too short... :-)
Kind regards --
Marek.
69talk 11:35, 11 March 2016 (UTC)
Automated edits with non-default settings
Thanks for your work to fix articles, but please stop making automated edits that introduce {{convert}} with non-default settings. Obviously someone working on an article might choose to use "to(-)" rather than "to", or they might tweak the default precision by adding something like "|0". But automation should not be used to apply settings like that across multiple articles because each case requires careful consideration. If "to(-)" should be applied to all articles, convert should be changed to achieve the desired result without a special setting.
Here is an example from
Lupinus mutabilis (which also currently shows two errors).
{{convert|500|to(-)|1,000|kg|0|abbr=on}} → 500 to 1,000 kg (1,102–2,205 lb) this was added to the article; the output has false precision
{{convert|500|to(-)|1,000|kg|abbr=on}} → 500 to 1,000 kg (1,100–2,200 lb) the default precision gives a much better result
I'm sorry, I misunderstood this particular setting with convert.
I will avoid applying these settings in the future.
Thank you for pointing it out.
Kind regards --
Marek.
69talk 05:40, 13 March 2016 (UTC)
Thursday Island, Queensland 14:05, 11 March 2016
diff added unit Mi to a convert that did not need it, and which broke the convert. Editors using AWB have to check that their edits do not break articles. I think many of the |abbr=off that you add to converts give a good result, but they are not the default and should not be described as "clean up and general fixes using AWB". Why did that edit introduce precision values into two converts? Were they needed, or are they inserted by an automated script that you are using?
Johnuniq (
talk) 02:15, 14 March 2016 (UTC)
Re
diff, please see
MOS:FRAC which says to use "two-thirds" or {{frac|2|3}} → 2⁄3.
Johnuniq (
talk) 02:20, 14 March 2016 (UTC)
Copying within Wikipedia requires proper attribution
Thank you for
your contributions to Wikipedia. It appears that you copied or moved text from
Pre-Columbian era into
History of South America. While you are welcome to re-use Wikipedia's content, here or elsewhere,
Wikipedia's licensing does require that you provide attribution to the original contributor(s). When copying within Wikipedia, this is supplied at minimum in an
edit summary at the page into which you've copied content. It is good practice, especially if copying is extensive, to also place a properly formatted {{copied}} template on the talk pages of the source and destination. The attribution has been provided for this situation, but if you have copied material between pages before, even if it was a long time ago, please provide attribution for that duplication. You can read more about the procedure and the reasons at
Wikipedia:Copying within Wikipedia. Thank you. —
Diannaa (
talk) 02:21, 26 March 2016 (UTC)
OK, thank you for that
Diannaa Useful information. I'm still working on that article, so will incorporate the {{copied}} templates as you suggest.
Thank you. :-)
Marek.
69talk 02:31, 26 March 2016 (UTC)
Thank you. If you could be sure to mention the copying in your edit summaries in the future, that would be perfect, as it makes reviewing the edits much quicker. These edits triggered a bot report on
User:EranBot/Copyright/rc/24. Thanks, —
Diannaa (
talk) 13:27, 26 March 2016 (UTC)
Worked on creating mediainfo entities on demand when a file is viewed that doesn't have an associated mediainfo entity yet. This is needed for structured data support for Commons.
Worked on making it possible to embed query results in other websites. You can get a preview at
https://jonaskress.github.io
Added timeline as a possible visualization for the query service.
Investigated issues with downloading query result sets in Safari.
Got ArticlePlaceholder ready for the second round of Wikipedias.
Fixed bug where map wasn't enabled as a possible visualization for queries with cooridnates.
You can soon specify the color of the bubbles in a bubble chart visualization. (
phabricator:T137061)
Fixed a bug with terms sometimes not showing up, language fallback not working correctly in Lua modules and connection to master database
Fixed a bug with URL encoding in the query service.
ORDER BY RAND() LIMIT 100 can avoid timeouts on Wikidata Query Service (
source)
Development
Worked on making it easier to add new query examples right from the query service by just clicking a button. There are some technical issues with it still though. Will take a while to sort through.
More work on creating new Media-Info entities (the equivalent of item for media file data) on the fly (
phabricator:T134259)
ORDER BY RAND() LIMIT 100 can avoid timeouts on Wikidata Query Service (
source)
Development
Worked on making it easier to add new query examples right from the query service by just clicking a button. There are some technical issues with it still though. Will take a while to sort through.
More work on creating new Media-Info entities (the equivalent of item for media file data) on the fly (
phabricator:T134259)
I contacted Wikipedia about a necessary edit to the page of Pope John Paul II. It says on his page that the Pope had the intention of creating a religious "armada" of Christians, Muslims and Jews. This is new age doctrine and the Pope never said or did anything to express that desire much less was it one of his main goals. Wikipedia contacted me back and said that you wrote much of this page.
The Pope's catechism says in article 1129 that the sacraments are necessary for salvation. Therefore, Pope would not align himself with religions that do not offer the sacraments. The Catholic Church competes for souls with Protestants, Jews and Muslims. It teaches there is no salvation for them but that they must convert to Catholic. So please change the page. — Preceding
unsigned comment added by
12.216.254.226 (
talk) 13:10, 23 June 2016 (UTC)
EasyQuery is now a gadget that you can enable in your preferences. It gives you an icon next to each statement value. That gives you a list of other items with the same statement.
Stats have been updated and show a significant jump in references.