User talk:Hydrargyrum/archive06

Guild of Copy Editors February 2018 News Welcome to the February 2018 GOCE newsletter in which you will find Guild updates since the December edition. We got to a great start for the year, holding the backlog at nine months. 100 requests were submitted in the first 6 weeks of the year and were swiftly handled with an average completion time of 9 days. >>> Sign up for the March Drive! <<< Coordinator elections: In December, coordinators for the first half of 2018 were elected. Jonesey95 remained as lead coordinator and Corrine, Miniapolis and Tdslk as assistant coordinators. Keira1996 stepped down as assistant coordinator and was replaced by Reidgreg. Thanks to all who participated! End of year reports were prepared for 2016 and 2017, providing a detailed look at the Guild's long-term progress. Requests (a total of 275 articles). As with previous years, the January drive was an outstanding success and by the end of the month all but 57 of these articles were cleared. Officially, of the 38 who signed up, 21 editors recorded 259 copy edits (490,256 words). February blitz: This one-week copy-editing blitz ran from 11 through 17 February, focusing on Requests and the last articles tagged in May 2017. At the end of the week there were only 14 pending requests, with none older than 20 days. Of the 11 who signed up, 10 editors completed 35 copy edits (98,538 words). Thank you all again for your participation; we wouldn't be able to achieve what we have without you! Cheers from your GOCE coordinators: Jonesey95, Miniapolis, Corinne, Tdslk, and Reidgreg. >>> Sign up for the March Drive! <<< To discontinue receiving GOCE newsletters, please remove your name from our mailing list.

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 00:00, 25 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Guild of Copy Editors June 2018 News Welcome to the June 2018 GOCE newsletter, in which you will find Guild updates since the February edition. Progress continues to be made on the copyediting backlog, which has been reduced to 7 months and reached a new all-time low. Requests continue to be handled efficiently this year, with 272 completed by the end of May (an average completion time of 10.5 days). Fewer than 10% of these waited longer than 20 days, and the longest wait time was 29 days. Wikipedia in general, and the Guild in particular, experienced a deep loss with the death on 20 March of Corinne. Corinne (a GOCE coordinator since 1 July 2016) was a tireless aide on the requests page, and her peerless copyediting is a part of innumerable GAs and FAs. Her good cheer, courtesy and tact are very much missed. March drive: The goal was to remove June, July and August 2017 from our backlog and all February 2018 Requests (a total of 219 articles). This drive was an outstanding success, and by the end of the month all but eight of these articles were cleared. Of the 33 editors who signed up, 19 recorded 277 copy edits (425,758 words). April blitz: This one-week copy-editing blitz ran from 15 through 21 April, focusing on Requests and the last eight articles tagged in August 2017. At the end of the week there were only 17 pending requests, with none older than 17 days. Of the nine editors who signed up, eight editors completed 22 copy edits (62,412 words). Requests (a total of 298 articles). There was great success this month with the backlog more than halved from 1,449 articles at the beginning of the month to a record low of 716 articles. Officially, of the 20 who signed up, 15 editors recorded 151 copy edits (248,813 words). Coordinator elections: It's election time again. Nominations for Guild coordinators (who will serve a six-month term for the second half of 2018) have begun, and will close at 23:59 UTC on 15 June. All Wikipedia editors in good standing are eligible, and self-nominations are encouraged. Voting will take place between 00:01 UTC on 16 June and 23:59 UTC on 30 June. June blitz: Stay tuned for this one-week copy-editing blitz, which will take place in mid-June. Thank you all again for your participation; we wouldn't be able to achieve what we have without you! Cheers from your GOCE coordinators: Corinne, Jonesey95, Miniapolis, Reidgreg and Tdslk. >>> Participate in the June elections! <<< To discontinue receiving GOCE newsletters, please remove your name from our mailing list.

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 13:26, 5 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Hydragyrum, thanks for your recent "script-assisted cleanups" of various pages.

Your script, for some reason, inserts a commented-out death date into living person's infoboxes. Of course, a commented-out date doesn't appear in the page, so it doesn't violate BLP. Nonetheless, if I were famous enough to have my own Wikipedia article, and out of curiosity I clicked on "edit" and saw that my death date was already listed but commented out, I might find it rather creepy! It's as if Wikipedia were just waiting for me to pass away.

I've fixed the two instances of this that I found: [1] [2] If there's any way to tell your script not to do this, that would be great! Thanks. — Lawrence King ^(talk) 23:22, 9 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

@Lawrence King: They're not "imaginary death dates". They're placeholders for inevitable death dates. Nobody escapes it — not you, not I, nor even Jesus of Nazareth. Yes, I can fix the script. — Quicksilver (Hydrargyrum)^{T @} 23:38, 9 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

My bad. When I saw the form, I saw that it wasn't blank -- it had dates already filled in, like this: Death date and age|YYYY|MM|DD|1950|01|09. But now I understand that the filled in dates are not the anticipated death dates, but rather are the birth date which is used to calcuate the age. Nevermind! — Lawrence King ^(talk) 00:22, 10 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

@

Find A Grave, which includes visiting local cemeteries to snap photos, where one will find headstones of living people, already inscribed with their birth date and a blank space for the death date. One can think of them as placeholders, too. — Quicksilver (Hydrargyrum)^{T @} 15:26, 10 July 2018 (UTC)[reply

]

lol I was reading Norm's talk page for some reason and saw your old comment from 2010. You might want to talk about John A. Macdonald, Canada's first prime minister and a Scotsman.24.137.114.17 (talk) 02:36, 30 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

This otherwise good edit that you made removed {{cvt}} and {{convert}} and replaced them with plaintext, which should not have happened. Was this an error in the script you were using? Pi.1415926535 (talk) 23:09, 14 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

@Pi.1415926535: It was deliberate, and I only do it in the lede section, i.e., the first 200 words, or so, because tool-tip previews suppress display of templates. Putting inline templates in the lede results in run-together text or a puzzling syntax discontinuity, defeating the purpose of tool-tip previews. — Quicksilver (Hydrargyrum)^{T @} 00:56, 15 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

And by that you mean

WP:POP? It has a setting to attempt to render templates. If the default settings of the gadget are causing problems with the convert template, the solution is to fix the problem in the gadget, not to remove widely used templates from articles without explanation in the edit summary. Pi.1415926535 (talk) 01:48, 15 August 2018 (UTC)[reply

]

@Pi.1415926535: Yeah, perhaps I should have written a summary paragraph, or broken down the edit into 20 steps, each with its own detailed summary. The correct solution is not to use inline templates in the lede in the first place, and being an experienced computer user and programmer since circa 1970, I can guarantee you that 99.9% of Wikipedia users will never figure out how change the default behavior of Navigation popups or even take the time to read the relevant Wikipedia page. Wikipedia isn't and shouldn't be a site for nerds only. — Quicksilver (Hydrargyrum)^{T @} 02:41, 15 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

You're making a potentially controversial and non-obvious edit by removing those templates - the onus is on you to explain it in whatever way that you best can. (You don't have to break down all the parts of the edit, but explaining unusual aspects is a reasonable thing to ask.) In this case, I strongly object to you worsening an article for all readers and editors in order to accommodate a buggy opt-in script. Why not fix the popups instead of hurting the articles? Pi.1415926535 (talk) 03:26, 15 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Alternately, you could comment out the replaced convert templates. The comment would explain the purpose of the substitution, and make it easy to reverse when the popups fixed. Pi.1415926535 (talk) 06:13, 15 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

@Pi.1415926535: I like your suggestions. — Quicksilver (Hydrargyrum)^{T @} 15:30, 15 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Guild of Copy Editors August 2018 Newsletter Hello and welcome to the August 2018 GOCE newsletter. Thanks to everyone who participated in the Guild's June election; your new and returning coordinators are listed below. The next election will occur in December 2018; all Wikipedia editors in good standing may take part. Our Requests and articles tagged for copy edit in October 2017. Of the eleven people who signed up, eight editors recorded a total of 28 copy edits, including 3 articles of more than 10,000 words. Complete results, including barnstars awarded, are available here . Thanks to everyone who participated in the July drive. Of the seventeen people who signed up, thirteen editors completed 194 copy edits, successfully removing all articles tagged in the last three months of 2017. Final results, including barnstars awarded, are here. The August blitz will run for one week, from 19 to 25 August. Sign up now! Thank you all again for your participation; we wouldn't be able to achieve what we have without you! Cheers from your GOCE coordinators, Reidgreg, Baffle gab1978, Jonesey95, Miniapolis and Tdslk. >>> Sign up for the August blitz! <<< To discontinue receiving GOCE newsletters, please remove your name from our mailing list.

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 22:25, 15 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Please stop your disruptive editing. If you continue to vandalize Wikipedia, as you did at Talk:Stefan Molyneux, you may be blocked from editing. Grayfell (talk) 00:39, 25 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]

@

WP:NPOV. Furthermore, your charge of vandalism constitutes an unwarranted threat against another editor that can bring penalties on its own. — Quicksilver (Hydrargyrum)^{T @} 01:35, 25 September 2018 (UTC)[reply

]

Insinuating that another editor is hateful, and has a jaundiced view of reality, is a personal attack, which you should know is not allowed. Take it to a noticeboard if you think this is a legal issue, but do your homework first. Grayfell (talk) 01:42, 25 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]

@Grayfell: My mistake: If someone were to publicly describe you as a dirty, rotten —, that would be construed as hateful and possibly actionable, and we would immediately remove any such wording from your Wikipedia article. However, if that same someone were to quote a source that his or her bigoted, biased friends have determined to be "reliable", and such source publicly describes you as a dirty, rotten —, then it is deemed within Wikipedia's guidelines and entirely acceptable. Got it. — Quicksilver (Hydrargyrum)^{T @} 03:02, 25 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]

You want to make actionable suggestions for how to improve the article, do that. Your post to that talk page was just complaining, however. If you want to complain about "shitty articles" and Wikipedia's "bad reputation" and how seriously you take your own editing, you can start a blog or something. If you think the article consitutes defamation, as a serious editor who's been around a while, you should't have any trouble finding a better venue. Grayfell (talk)

@Grayfell: — I don't even write about inanimate objects in Wikipedia in the manner of the present Stefan Molyneux article. As for "actionable suggestions", perhaps you'd like to peruse the talk page history and editing history of the instant article and tally how many such suggestions have been suppressed or reverted, or where editors have gone out of their way to reinstate disparaging remarks about the subject. "... start a blog or something ...". That's precisely the advice I would give to those who write such articles, using Wikipedia as their personal soap box, and to those who defend such writing. In reviewing the article editing history, it appears you've done your share. As such, I don't need any more hypocritic lecturing from you. — Quicksilver (Hydrargyrum)^{T @} 03:52, 25 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Please take the time to check the sources used to support the article's content. If they are misrepresented or contradicted by a number of other reliable sources, there is room for specific improvements and legitimate criticism. —PaleoNeonate – 22:53, 25 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for uploading

).

Note that any non-free images not used in any articles will be deleted after seven days, as described in section F5 of the criteria for speedy deletion. Thank you. --B-bot (talk) 17:26, 3 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]

ArbCom 2018 election voter message

Hello, Hydrargyrum. Voting in the

2018 Arbitration Committee elections

is now open until 23.59 on Sunday, 3 December. All users who registered an account before Sunday, 28 October 2018, made at least 150 mainspace edits before Thursday, 1 November 2018 and are not currently blocked are eligible to vote. Users with alternate accounts may only vote once.

The

topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy

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If you wish to participate in the 2018 election, please review the candidates and submit your choices on the voting page. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:42, 19 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Problem with your script

Just wanted to let you know ... the script you used for your cleanup should recognize that the US English term for a ground-level intersection of railroad tracks and a road is "grade crossing". I had to change four instances of that back. I know the idea was to avoid redirects, but

MOS:TIES takes precedence there. Daniel Case (talk) 15:22, 27 November 2018 (UTC)[reply

]

@Daniel Case: — The script handles correction of repetitive, common syntax errors in articles, and while the edit session is open, I often perform additional changes manually that are not conducive to automation. It's not a problem with the script; it's a problem with the level crossing article quality by not explaining that "grade crossing" is a preferred term in the United States, although I doubt that's even true. Many things in Wikipedia that editors may insist are axiomatic usually turn out to be merely personal preference. — Quicksilver (Hydrargyrum)^{T @} 18:49, 27 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]

ndash

Hi! I noticed that you are replacing the ndash with the name "ndash" followed by the ndash itself, why is it better than just the — itself? Also, you are putting spaces to the sides of the ndashes, which is not what our

WP:MoS indicates. Cheers! --ExperiencedArticleFixer (talk) 11:29, 28 November 2018 (UTC)[reply

]

@

spaced ndash}} and variations thereof with the HTML symbol entities, as the templates are a waste of computing cycles and slow the entire system down compared to using HTML entities directly. Moreover, if such inline templates are used in the lead section, such as in separating a birth date and death date, their display is suppressed in tooltip previews, making them essentially useless, while the HTML symbol entities display as intended without producing run-together text. I have no idea why somebody thought it would be smart or cute to package such simple HTML sequences within templates. In the past I have edited the documentation sections of such inline templates to warn editors to avoid using them in the lead section of articles, but my edits have usually been reverted. Go figure. — Quicksilver (Hydrargyrum)^{T @} 19:25, 28 November 2018 (UTC)[reply

]

Comprehensive answer!! --ExperiencedArticleFixer (talk) 22:08, 28 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Spacing around images

Please stop removing the spacing around images on the Bush article. As I noted here, spacing makes it easier to find the beginning of paragraphs, especially where there are long captions. Laszlo Panaflex (talk) 20:19, 1 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]

@Laszlo Panaflex: — If you're not already doing so, I suggest you enable the "Syntax highlighter", found under Preferences > Gadgets > Editing. — Quicksilver (Hydrargyrum)^{T @} 20:24, 1 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Spacing around images makes it easier for everyone to find the beginning of paragraphs, whatever their settings, and does not change the output. Please retain the spacing. Laszlo Panaflex (talk) 20:29, 1 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]

@Laszlo Panaflex: — Nice, but have you activated syntax highlighting for your account yet? It makes editing much easier for you and you don't have to pester other editors about formatting a certain way to make it "easier for everyone". — Quicksilver (Hydrargyrum)^{T @} 20:35, 1 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]

OK, but with the spacing, someone does not have to know about this setting to fix the difficulty. And most new editors surely will not know – I've been editing for over a decade and didn't. So why not make it easier for everyone to begin with. Laszlo Panaflex (talk) 20:43, 1 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]

December 2018 GOCE newsletter

Guild of Copy Editors December 2018 Newsletter Hello and welcome to the December 2018 GOCE newsletter. Here is what's been happening since the August edition. Thanks to everyone who participated in the Requests and the oldest backlog month. Of the twenty editors who signed up, eleven editors recorded 37 copy edits. For the September drive (results), of the twenty-three people who signed up, nineteen editors completed 294 copy edits. Our October blitz (results) focused on Requests, geography, and food and drink articles. Of the fourteen people who signed up, eleven recorded a total of 57 copy edits. For the November drive (results), twenty-two people signed up, and eighteen editors recorded 273 copy edits. This helped to bring the backlog to a six-month low of 825 articles. The December blitz will run for one week, from 16 to 22 December. Sign up now! Elections: Nominations for the Guild's coordinators for the first half of 2019 will be open from 1 to 15 December. Voting will then take place and the election will close on 31 December at 23:59 UTC. Positions for Guild coordinators, who perform the important behind-the-scenes tasks that keep our project running smoothly, are open to all Wikipedians in good standing. We welcome self-nominations, so please consider nominating yourself if you've ever thought about helping out; it's your Guild and it doesn't run itself! Thank you all again for your participation; we wouldn't be able to achieve what we have without you! Cheers from your GOCE coordinators; Reidgreg, Baffle gab1978, Jonesey95, Miniapolis and Tdslk. >>> Sign up for the December blitz! <<< >>> Participate in the Coordinator elections! <<< To discontinue receiving GOCE newsletters, please remove your name from our mailing list.

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 17:04, 3 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]

WP:INTDABLINK

violation

Please do not make direct links to disambiguation pages, as you did here. This creates false positive reports of disambiguation errors needing to be fixed, which involves the time and effort of disambiguators. If you have done this anywhere else, please pipe the links per

WP:INTDABLINK. bd2412 T 16:40, 4 December 2018 (UTC)[reply

]