User talk:Andrew Gray/Archives/11

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Thanks for the barnstar. As you probably guessed, I was inspired by the Independent article about the coverage of women in science. Southdevonian (talk) 21:49, 23 September 2012 (UTC)

Hey Andrew Gray/Archives. This will be, if not our final newsletter, one of the final ones :). After months of churning away at this project, our final version (apart from a few tweaks and bugfixes) is now live. Changes between this and the last release include deletion tag logging, a centralised log, and fixes to things like edit summaries.

Hopefully you like what we've done with the place; suggestions for future work on it, complaints and bugs

I see this as basic market research that can be easily and quickly done by testing with web analytics and anonymous cookies. It is surely WMF's responsibility to do usability testing and market research, and even A/B testing a small number of popular pages with and without diacritics in the title could resolve this issue. It doesn't only affect Wikipedia users and supporters, it is also a hit on editors who believe in following guidelines and keeping a neutral POV vs. those who believe in mob rule—whoever has the biggest private army. No publisher would be so stupid as to use complex Vietnamese diacritics in the title of a book intended for English readers. Article titles, book titles, and movie titles are not a "content" issue, any more than book cover design and layout. Most publishers understand how important such issues are.

Started this. Need help expanding. Can you help looking in google books and making references using http://reftag.appspot.com/?♦ Dr. Blofeld 20:27, 28 September 2012 (UTC)

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 — Crisco 1492 (talk) 16:05, 29 September 2012 (UTC)

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Hi Andrew- I'm editing the Brick Lane Market article for a class project. Our teacher warned us that our contributions could be deleted if we don't have backing from other Wikipedia editors. As a resident of London, I was wondering if you could help my project group by looking over our additions to the article in the next few days. Any advice you have would be much appreciated. Thanks! User talk:D4n2elle/BrickLaneMarket Joey236 (talk) 20:50, 1 October 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for getting back to me! We will be compiling the article in the draft space User talk:D4n2elle/BrickLaneMarket, unless you think we should do it on the article page itself. Joey236 (talk) 23:04, 2 October 2012 (UTC)

Most of our content is up on that draft pg. Thanks again for helping us out! Joey236 (talk) 20:10, 3 October 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for your suggestions on our

I would have liked to be able to leave an edit summary, but unfortunately doing it via rollback doesn't seem to allow one! However, given the complaints about formatting, I decided it was best to mass-rollback and then overwrite with the "correct" edits as soon as possible, which will hopefully minimise the impact on watchlists.

Apologies for the inconvenience! Not the best solution however I did it, I guess. Andrew Gray (talk) 21:10, 4 October 2012 (UTC)

That is an abuse of rollback, which is only for reverting vandalism. It should not be used for reverting edits that made the ultra-trivial mistake of leaving certain elements in article source in the "wrong" order - something that isn't even visible to readers in the rendered article.

Phil Bridger (talk

) 21:22, 4 October 2012 (UTC)

My apologies again - this isn't the sort of thing I handle often! I had asked for advice (on IRC) and the recommendation had been to use mass rollback - I'm currently investigating better mechanisms for future, but I hope not to have to do this again anyway!

Regarding abuse, though, the guideline gives one case as "revert[ing] widespread edits (by a misguided editor or malfunctioning bot) which are judged to be unhelpful to the encyclopedia". While I would tend to agree with you that non-rendered changes aren't particularly problematic or unhelpful in and of themselves, I know that the ordering of elements has been a very sensitive issue in the past, and I was very keen to avoid causing any additional conflict over this... Andrew Gray (talk) 21:35, 4 October 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for the reply on my talkpage. I've posted about another issue that I think you know about on the Bot's talkpage. Happy botting! Lugnuts ^{And the horse} 09:23, 6 October 2012 (UTC)

Hi, I've a list at

Great - I'll try and merge some of them in. And thanks for producing the article on Andrews! Andrew Gray (talk) 13:17, 7 October 2012 (UTC)

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• From the team: Results of the This Month in GLAM survey (part 2)
• UK report: GLAMcamp London; brief news
• Spain report: Edit-a-thons in Spain
• Italy report: Smithsonian Institution, Brooklyn Museum and WikiAfrica
• Germany report: WikiCon; GLAMcamp London; Science 2.0
• Sweden report: Sweden report
• Switzerland report: Botanical Garden Lausanne;CERN
• India report: Wiki Loves Monuments 2012 in India
• Mexico report: Edit-a-thon at the Salón de la Plástica Mexicana
• Africa report: A month in Africa's GLAMs
• Open Access report: Open Access per default; Open Access Media Importer tests finished; Preparations for Open Access Week
• Calendar: October's GLAM events

In the case of David Morris (Conservative politician), the problem seems to be in the VIAF record itself (assuming that he didn't write the "Gift of America" book, as seems likely!). The VIAF record has the link to his Wikipedia article. I don't know how those links were added, but I hope it isn't symptomatic of too many wild assumptions that any two persons of same birth year and name are identical. But it can't be blamed on the bot which is assigning VIAFs to WP articles - should that be a distinct category of Wikipedia:VIAF/errors? (And what a lot of librarians there are around on Wikipedia - nice to meet yet another one.) PamD 15:13, 10 October 2012 (UTC)

I've had it confirmed from his office that he didn't write the book! What mechanism is there for getting the VIAF database corrected in cases like this? PamD 15:44, 10 October 2012 (UTC)

In this case, log it on that page - Max is working directly with OCLC, and we have a commitment from them to feed these corrections back into the system.

Regarding the content, we're using the list generated by VIAF/OCLC themselves, so it'll be the same as the links on the record (modulo the occasional pagemove). Errors like this should go in the first section - "Wikipedia article is not the same as the VIAF identity"

Their system uses Wikipedia articles as "nuclei" to cluster groups of authority records around, as I understand it, though I'm not massively clear on the details of the algorithm - it works well for major figures, where we have a lot of extraneous data, but can sometimes be shaky for less well-recorded individuals. (Counterintuitively, Wikipedia has vastly more - and vastly more reliable - data on most people than our lovingly curated authority files!) I always suspected we'd find a number of these, but it's interesting to see which are turning up. I'm hoping to do some sampling in the next day or two to get an idea of what the error rate is like in practice (and what we have to do about that). On the plus side, once we've got through these teething stages it'll result in much cleaner data for both sides.

As to librarians, indeed! There's a lot more of us than it seems. :-) Andrew Gray (talk) 15:49, 10 October 2012 (UTC)

Of course, Wikipedia will be much stronger on people who don't happen to have written any published books - such as MPs in this case, and other notable people who aren't authors, aren't academics, and haven't yet produced a ghosted autobiography or celebrity cookbook etc! It seems an interesting collaboration, though with plenty scope for getting things wrong. PamD 18:08, 10 October 2012 (UTC)

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Hello, Andrew Gray. You have new messages at A Thousand Doors's talk page.
Message added 23:08, 11 October 2012 (UTC). You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{Talkback}} or {{Tb}} template.

This thing has been in draft form on one of my userpages for months if not years. Now making the push to add it to all the articles... :-) Lozleader (talk) 21:36, 11 October 2012 (UTC)

That looks quite good... I'm not sure why World War I has its own template and WWII doesn't, so that arrangement kind of makes sense.Lozleader (talk) 21:59, 11 October 2012 (UTC)

Hello. Most of the ones I've listed have very "common" names (David Smith and suchlike), so it's perhaps not unlikely statistically that software finds matches on name/vital dates.

Hey, Andrew! Thanks for putting up the geonotice for the GWU Wikipedia Loves Libraries events! Specific coordinates for the corners could be: Washington DC area: lat:39.303416, long:-76.470337; opposite point: lat:38.740088, long:-77.486572. Thanks again! Lisa N Marrs (talk) 14:26, 12 October 2012 (UTC)

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Hey all :).

We're (very shortly) closing down this development cycle for Page Curation. It's genuinely been a pleasure to talk with you all and build software that is so close to my own heart, and also so effective. The current backlog is 9 days, and I've never seen it that low before.

However! Closing up shop does not mean not making any improvements. First-off, this is your last chance to give us a poke about unresolved bugs or report new ones

Again, it's been an honour. Thanks :). Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 12:18, 17 October 2012 (UTC)

This is so cool :) – SJ +

Thanks all the same. We have someone in Boston who might be able to help - where do people sign up to join the set of maintainers / how are updates applied? emw used to do some of this but is busy off-wiki these days. – SJ + 12:53, 17 October 2012 (UTC)

I noticed you commented on the mess that is our COI guidance. I've started a rewrite at WP:Conflict of interest/draft and would appreciate input and collaboration. Gigs (talk) 01:27, 19 October 2012 (UTC)

Please be careful about the commas in JS pages. This is the most common cause of JS errors. Kaldari (talk) 01:25, 20 October 2012 (UTC)

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Hi Andrew,

I was looking at the article you created for Alice Everett, you did a really great job and there is lots of information, but none of it is referenced. Could you please include the references so everyone can link to where you obtained your information, as the key to Wikipedia is that everything is verifiable. (I know this is a pain, but there is a shortcut toolbar for templates for references and you can just put in the web address to make an easy reference).

Many thanks, --Geneticcuckoo (talk) 13:41, 21 October 2012 (UTC)