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Barnstar

The Original Barnstar
This barnstar is awarded to everyone who - whatever their opinion - contributed to the discussion about Wikipedia and SOPA. Thank you for being a part of the discussion. Presented by the Wikimedia Foundation, January 21, 2012.

A barnstar for you!

The Technical Barnstar
Congratulations, Tom.Reding, you've recently made your 1,000th edit to articles on English Wikipedia!

Thank you for all the great DAB work you've been doing recently, and for all your contributions to the encyclopedia. Keep it up! :) Maryana (WMF) (talk) 23:17, 16 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

A barnstar for you!

Working Wikipedian's Barnstar
For your incredible WikiGnoming over the past few months. I am in awe. A2soup (talk) 23:25, 22 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you! :)   ~ Tom.Reding & his 200-some-odd lines of regex (talk ⋅contribs ⋅dgaf)  02:03, 23 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]

A barnstar for you!

The Tireless Contributor Barnstar
You have nearly single-handedly eliminated the minor planet notability problem, which had stood for seven years before you decided to tackle it, because nobody wanted to do the massive amount of work required. If this doesn't deserve a barnstar, I'm not sure what does. StringTheory11 (t • c) 17:49, 3 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

A barnstar for you!

The Tireless Contributor Barnstar
For dealing with the minor planet clusterfuck as efficiently as you have! Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 04:13, 1 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

There's nothing quite like cleaning up a good, 'ol-fashioned clusterfuck. Thanks for pointing me in the right direction :)   ~ Tom.Reding (talk ⋅dgaf)  04:17, 1 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

BTW, this isn't just for the recent banner tagging, but for the shear amount of effort involved in cleaning up the mess for the past year or so. Possibly longer. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 00:27, 2 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

A barnstar for you!

The Technical Barnstar
thanks for helping me with the search codes! Jennica✿ / talk 20:10, 9 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for being one of Wikipedia's top medical contributors!

please help translate this message into your local language via meta
The 2016 Cure Award
In 2016 you were one of the top ~200 medical editors across any language of Wikipedia. Thank you from Wiki Project Med Foundation for helping bring free, complete, accurate, up-to-date health information to the public. We really appreciate you and the vital work you do! Wiki Project Med Foundation is a user group whose mission is to improve our health content. Consider joining here, there are no associated costs.

Thanks again :-) -- Doc James along with the rest of the team at Wiki Project Med Foundation 18:08, 3 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Rcat shell bot isn't perfect

Hi, just a heads-up, here's an edit where you added the Rcat shell around one template, but left the other ({{R to section}}) outside. -- intgr [talk] 09:48, 7 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks! I'll do a complete retroactive search & fix for this and apply it going forward shortly.   ~ Tom.Reding (talk ⋅dgaf)  10:32, 7 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Fixed! I found ~50 edited pages with this & other predictable errata.   ~ Tom.Reding (talk ⋅dgaf)  20:43, 7 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Barnstar awarded

The Redirect Barnstar
Your diligent work in the area of redirect categorization and improvement is duly recognized and greatly appreciated. You are truly one of the unsung heroes of Wikipedia, and we hope you continue to enjoy your improvement of this awesome encyclopedia! On behalf of your fellow editors—and the millions of readers of our work—I sincerely thank you for your contributions that have improved the encyclopedia for everyone. Senator2029 “Talk” 08:33, 8 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Redirect shells

Sure they make sense when you've got multiple R from... templates, but surely it's unneeded in cases like [1]? Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 02:15, 10 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

The reasons the documentation give are independent of the # of {{R}}s {{Redirect category shell}} contains (namely, #R standardization, automatically sensing, describing and categorizing protection levels, and to help editors learn more about redirect categorization by use of the manifold sort), and the documentation explicitly states that it can and should be used with single-{{R}}-redirects, and even to use it when no {{R}} is present (to auto-populate Category:Miscellaneous redirects).   ~ Tom.Reding (talk ⋅dgaf)  02:36, 10 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]
So why do this manually, rather than by bot? Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 02:55, 10 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Easier to just do it myself. Should I stop?   ~ Tom.Reding (talk ⋅dgaf)  02:58, 10 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]
I'd argue it's certainly less of a waste of your time to get/demonstrate consensus, get a bot to do this (which you can probably run yourself as TomBot or RedirectBot or whatever), and let it loose while you sleep. There are tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands such redirects. There's also the many benefits of those being flagged as a bot edit. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 03:25, 10 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Ok, I'll isolate the multiple-{{R}} #Rs and do those at least, and submit a bot request at some point for the singles.   ~ Tom.Reding (talk ⋅dgaf)  04:03, 10 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Well, the multiples are also very bot-friendly, and those ones certainly have community approval. Again, there's no rule that you can't do this manually, but near-mindlessly clicking "save" 140492 times must be awfully tedious. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 06:08, 10 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Headbomb, I just put in an RfA for TomBot. Thanks for remembering it :)   ~ Tom.Reding (talk ⋅dgaf)  14:43, 17 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Please be careful when you make edits like this that you don't create duplication. The {{Redirect category shell}} template automatically detects the protection level, so if you leave {{R semi-protected}} in place, it displays twice. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 09:45, 12 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I see, thank you. I'll remove protection-level {{R}}s from edits I've made and going forward.   ~ Tom.Reding (talk ⋅dgaf)  14:34, 12 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]
7 pages found & corrected with redundant protection-level {{R}}s and their aliases.   ~ Tom.Reding (talk ⋅dgaf)  11:19, 13 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 11:34, 13 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Breed name redirects

Hi again! I see you're going around doing something to the hundreds of animal breed redirects of the form Laticauda (sheep). Perhaps it'd more useful if you just removed the {{R from incorrect disambiguation}} from any such redirect unless there actually is an error? There's nothing wrong with "Laticauda (sheep)", for example. Justlettersandnumbers (talk) 11:46, 14 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I'm just adding {{Redirect category shell}} to redirects with multiple {{R}}-templates, not judging/evaluating the validity of each {{R}}-template. However, Laticauda (sheep) does indeed seem undeserving of {{R from incorrect disambiguation}}, and if you can provide a list of all such redirects (I only found ~34 of my edits which end in "(sheep)", as opposed to the hundreds you mention), I can remove the offending {{R}} if warranted.   ~ Tom.Reding (talk ⋅dgaf)  13:17, 14 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks! Here's a list, only very cursorily vetted, but a glance through it doesn't reveal any errors.
List
Also, I haven't checked each one individually to be sure that they actually carry the template, rather than simply transcluding it via {{R from alternative disambiguation}}. If I've made mistakes, complain or something! Thanks again, Justlettersandnumbers (talk) 14:21, 14 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Yup, they all contain {{R from incorrect disambiguation}}. What I'll do is remove that template iif the title of the #R matches the target after removing the #R's parentheses. When I'm done I'll separate the list into those I did and did not edit.   ~ Tom.Reding (talk ⋅dgaf)  16:04, 14 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Justlettersandnumbers, I've created the code to do this, but after looking at {{R from incorrect disambiguation}}'s documentation more closely, it does seem valid because the #Rs in the list above are of a format that does not follow Wikipedia convention; the only difference being the absence/presence of parentheses, a Wikipedia convention.   ~ Tom.Reding (talk ⋅dgaf)  16:45, 14 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]
What convention is that? There's no consensus on how these articles should be disambiguated, though there was a lot of argument about it a couple of years ago. Justlettersandnumbers (talk) 17:56, 14 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]
The convention is to not put the animal's common name in parentheses. These redirects don't follow that convention (which is fine), and therefore require {{R from incorrect disambiguation}}, per the documentation. Look at all of the other non-animal examples in Category:Redirects from incorrect disambiguation.   ~ Tom.Reding (talk ⋅dgaf)  18:33, 14 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]
What I mean is, where do think you see such a convention? Usage in the actual articles is mixed. No consensus was reached in the interminable arguments at the time, nor has it been since. Justlettersandnumbers (talk) 21:09, 14 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]
The easiest way to find a/the formal convention is to ask the largest associated WikiProject(s) (WikiProject Agriculture in this case). Similar to WikiProject Astronomy's naming convention for minor planets, they will point you to where it is written; and if it isn't written somewhere you can determine consensus there.   ~ Tom.Reding (talk ⋅dgaf)  21:24, 14 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Also, a large set of standardized page titles trumps mixed-use in the respective articles when it comes to determining the prevailing convention.   ~ Tom.Reding (talk ⋅dgaf)  21:28, 14 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]
You misunderstand. There's already been interminable tedious discussion of this topic (see Talk:Teeswater sheep). No consensus was reached. The very last thing any sane person would want to do is to start all that all over again. Anyway, please forget I asked. Justlettersandnumbers (talk) 21:43, 14 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I'm quite unfamiliar with the goings-on over at WikiProject Agriculture, so perhaps some exposition would have been useful, no? I can make 4 observations:

  1. Going solely by the closing admin's statement at Talk:Teeswater sheep#Requested move 25 August 2014, and not knowing whether any intervening discussions occurred on this topic at that WikiProject: there is no consensus.
  2. Going on the fact that, after a cursory search, I find many fewer articles which include (<common name>) (like Wensleydale (sheep)) in the title than <common name>: there is no consensus or there is consensus +/- a few unfixed outliers.
  3. The larger convention in question appears to be whether or not to even include the common name after the breed (with or without ()) - for which there are examples of (Beltex et al. on Talk:Teeswater sheep). The best way to find out which one is more prevalent is to simply count all the breed articles with and without their common name in the article title and set some threshold for 'prevailing'. Consensus undetermined/unclear.
  4. Perhaps this consensus exists: if the name of the breed is unique among Wikipedia topics, don't put the common name (i.e. Beltex et al.) because it's redundant; if the name of the breed isn't unique among Wikipedia topics, put the common name (i.e. Welsh (pig) in your list above) because disambiguation is necessary.

Given this state, and especially #4, please:

  1. don't remove {{R from incorrect disambiguation}} until such consensus has been reached, nor solicit others to so for you, and
  2. undo your removals of {{R from incorrect disambiguation}} and {{Redirect category shell}} (at most ~108 by my count as of ~4 hours ago), the latter of which should be on all redirects, regardless of how many redirect templates they have, per documentation. If you prefer, I'll do this semi-automatically in the near future.

  ~ Tom.Reding (talk ⋅dgaf)  23:02, 14 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Redirects from unnecessary dab

Hi Tom, thanks for your housekeeping of redirects. I notice some of them are being marked up as redirects "from a page name that has a currently unneeded disambiguation qualifier". I should perhaps explain why I created some of these. I translate a lot of articles from German Wikipedia. Occasionally they are disambiguated in German because they have several articles with the same name e.g. "Polenz" is the name of a river and also of 2 settlements. In English Wikipedia the settlements don't have articles, so "Polenz" is the title of the river article. But translated articles referring to it will often have "Polenz (river)" (the translation of the German link). Allowing these links speeds up translation (because the link automatically works) and prepares for the time when the other articles are created. I often do this down the line. So I'd say that, while these redirects are not strictly necessary, they are still useful. Bermicourt (talk) 07:47, 16 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I agree; keep it up. After a quick look to find an {{R}}-template that matches your situation, {{R from another language|de|en}} looks relevant. Namely, the second bullet's text This redirect leads to its target in accordance with the naming conventions for titles in other languages and can help writing and searches. Consider placing these on the redirects you've created and that fit this criteria. If you produce a list, I can help add the template semi-automatically.   ~ Tom.Reding (talk ⋅dgaf)  14:52, 16 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Pinging Bermicourt, in case you missed my response.   ~ Tom.Reding (talk ⋅dgaf)  14:44, 17 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]
That's really helpful, Tom, thank you. Bermicourt (talk) 17:18, 17 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Curious

Just wondered what happened with this edit and how widespread it might be, since you were using AWB.  Paine Ellsworth  put'r there  19:15, 20 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

That's definitely a weird one...I'll take a look.   ~ Tom.Reding (talk ⋅dgaf)  21:11, 20 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Paine Ellsworth, towards the end of my list I relaxed some of my skip-settings that auto-skipped pages with > 1 #REDIRECTs and/or > 0 {{Redirect category shell}}s so that I could take care of a small subset of redirects like this. I forgot to reinstate those protections after I was finished, but it was towards the end of my run. Also, my edit was a case of garbage in, garbage out, since it already contained 2 uncommented #REDIRECT statements. Both of these factors combined to produce a very rare error. I looked through all of my edited pages which currently have > 1 #REDIRECT and/or > 1 {{Redirect category shell}}, and I literally found nothing! How did you find it?   ~ Tom.Reding (talk ⋅dgaf)  17:39, 22 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]
That's all good to hear! I found it because I monitor the Miscellaneous redirects category, and the lower version of the {{Redirect category shell}} on that page had no templates inside it. I'm glad it turned out to be just a small thing, and thank you very much for checking!  Paine Ellsworth  put'r there  17:51, 22 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Excellent.   ~ Tom.Reding (talk ⋅dgaf)  00:17, 23 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Redirect shell

From the discussion at the VP, it seems fairly unlikely that you'll get consensus for single redirect templates, but the way I read it, I'd say there is consensus to use the shell when there are

  • Multiple redirect templates
  • Single redirect templates, when they have some form of protection
  • Some other non-cosmetic change (e.g. when fixing double redirects?)

There seems to be no need to update redirects otherwise, either semi-automatically, or automatically. Would that logic be fine with you? Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 02:44, 28 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Headbomb, as far as auto & semi-auto edits go, yes. There still seems to be agreement for using the shell on #Rs without any #R-templates, but only if they're done manually. Even the 3rd bullet should probably be caveated with "if the cosmetic change doesn't affect a very large # of single-{{R}} #Rs" or something along those lines (to please the largest # of people while displeasing the least).   ~ Tom.Reding (talk ⋅dgaf)  11:25, 28 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]
From my reading manually here means "added organically by editors" rather than added "semi-automatically on large scales", since that would effectively be the same thing as a bot, without the benefits of a bot. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 13:38, 28 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Yup.   ~ Tom.Reding (talk ⋅dgaf)  14:08, 28 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Eastern Anatolia Observatory

Dear Sir/Madam,

I am writing to you behalf of Eastern Anatolia Observatory (DAG) directorate. First of all, we thanks to edit DAG page on wikipedia. But we are kindly asking to you correct some statement about DAG if you can make. In second paragraph part of "... with the scientific and technical coordination of TÜBİTAK National Observatory and financial support of the Ministry of Development..." is not correct. Could you please remove this part? Thanks in advance, for further information, please mail me: tugrul@atasam.atauni.edu.tr

Sayın beyefendi/hanımefendi,

Doğu Anadolu Gözlemevi (DAG) adına sizlerle iletişime geçmiş bulunmaktayım. Öncelikle DAG hakkında wikipedia girdileriniz için teşekkür ederiz. Ama yanlış olan bir kısmı düzeltmeniz için sizden ricada bulunuyoruz. İkinci paragrafta "... with the scientific and technical coordination of TÜBİTAK National Observatory and financial support of the Ministry of Development..." kısmı taxmen yanlış olup tarafınızca kaldırılmasını rica ediyoruz. Şimdiden teşekkür ederiz. Haberleşebilmek için lütfen mail yazın: tugrul@atasam.atauni.edu.tr

IP, in the time it took you to write this, you could have made this edit yourself. Just say something like "does not appear in the reference" in the edit summary, if that is indeed true. All I've done is improve a reference on the page.   ~ Tom.Reding (talk ⋅dgaf)  14:12, 5 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Your BRFA

Hello Tom.Reding, your BRFA (Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/TomBot) was denied due to lack of community support. Should you want to propose new tasks in the future, please file a new BRFA. Thank you, — xaosflux Talk 12:04, 8 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

rcat shell vs. Redirect category shell

Regarding your edit on 0 (year):

What exactly is the problem with the redirect {{rcat shell}} compared to calling its target {{Redirect category shell}} directly? Is there some general policy or guideline that discourages the use of template redirects? Is there a catastrophic (as opposed to minor) caveat for the performance of the MediaWiki software? Or is it just a readability issue?

I have been categorizing redirects using "rcat shell" for many months. Have I done something bad? --SoledadKabocha (talk) 22:05, 26 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Upon reading further, I guess this may be related to the denied BRFA mentioned one section above. (I see that you used AWB, but under your main account, for the edit in question here.) My questions still stand. --SoledadKabocha (talk) 22:09, 26 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

@SoledadKabocha: There is no problem at all with invoking a template via one of its redirects. It behaves in exactly the same way. If AWB is being used to bypass redirects (template or otherwise), this is not just against WP:NOTBROKEN but also WP:AWBRULES item 4, possibly rule 3 as well. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 07:10, 27 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]
@SoledadKabocha: Ah, that was at the very beginning of my run. I noticed this problem quickly and implemented checks to avoid such edits. Thank you for your vigilance.   ~ Tom.Reding (talk ⋅dgaf)  21:51, 1 August 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Sandbox

I monitor the two categories to which your sandbox has been sorted, and I wonder if you have completed your tests, so that your sandbox can be removed from these categories? I was going to blank the sandbox, but then I thought better of it and wanted to ask you first.  Paine Ellsworth  put'r there  16:18, 2 August 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Whoops...blanked!   ~ Tom.Reding (talk ⋅dgaf)  16:24, 2 August 2017 (UTC)[reply]
No problemo, and thank you!  Paine Ellsworth  put'r there  16:25, 2 August 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Authors vs author

Could you briefly explain the advantage to the author template, wherein each first name and each initial and each last name (whew!) is preferred vs my method of listing "authors"? Thanks, --Smokefoot (talk) 17:13, 12 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Smokefoot, sure—as Category:CS1 maint: Uses authors parameter states, Author names assigned to |authors= (or any of its aliases) are not made part of the template's COinS metadata. For this reason, use of |authors= is discouraged. Having that metadata is an asset (follow the link to learn more). Plus, the CS1 citation templates perform more checks on |author= than they do on |authors=, reducing common errors.   ~ Tom.Reding (talk ⋅dgaf)  23:11, 12 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Reverting redirect. OpenACS and ACS deserve two separate articles, particularly consider that OpenACS is alive and well

I just saw that you reverted my change to the OpenACS redirect. I really feel that OpenACS deserves to have its own separate article. It's alive and well, and many of us make our living from it. Having it as a mention in another article isn't sufficient, particularly given the original ACS is now dead. If anything, the ACS should redirect to the OpenACS article, and could feature in a history section. Can you explanation your intentions? --Brian Fenton (talk) 14:15, 2 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Brian Fenton, please show me the offending edit.   ~ Tom.Reding (talk ⋅dgaf)  14:19, 2 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Tom.Reding It's this one https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=OpenACS&oldid=prev&diff=797661250 --Brian Fenton (talk) 16:33, 2 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Brian Fenton, I was hoping that in your search you would discover that 1) it was not I that reverted your changes, 2) you would actually read the edit summary to see that it is a result of this already-closed AfD, and 3) the article has not been improved on since it contains only WP:Primary sources. I agree with the original editor, Onel5969, that this should remain a redirect, unless it is improved.   ~ Tom.Reding (talk ⋅dgaf)  16:50, 2 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Tom.Reding Sorry Tom, I'm not that familiar with the Wiki ins and outs. I just spotted a notification with your name on it. Anyway, I'm not going to argue with you. I have zero energy for dealing with deletionist nonsense. Apologies for misdirecting my irritation at you. --Brian Fenton (talk) 17:05, 2 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]
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