User talk:Conrad.Irwin/i

I archive my talk page when it gets to ~75 topics by moving the first 50 to a new subpage. Please do not edit the archive pages, if you want to talk about something again - copy it back to my current talk page or just start a new topic there and link back.

• User_talk:Conrad.Irwin/1 Jan 07 → Feb 08
• User_talk:Conrad.Irwin/i Feb 08 → Apr 08
• User_talk:Conrad.Irwin/一 Apr 08 → Jun 08
• User_talk:Conrad.Irwin/α' Jun 08 → Jul 08
• User_talk:Conrad.Irwin/١ Jul 08 -> Nov 08
• User_talk:Conrad.Irwin/१ Nov 08 -> Mar 09
• User_talk:Conrad.Irwin/¹ Mar 09 -> Dec 09
• User_talk:Conrad.Irwin/₁ Jan 10 -> Mar 10

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new user messages

All this ruckus about CM has gotten be interested in putting some time where my mouth is. My first step is to look at the new user log for those making contributions and observe. As Yogi said, "You can see a lot just by observing." What are your thoughts about the right kind of message for a registered user whose first change was reverted? Is it not worthwhile to have a message? Is it counter-productive? Is there no standard one that would do the job? Any guidance would be appreciated. DCDuring TALK 23:17, 11 February 2008 (UTC)

Re: Template:R:Urban Dictionary

Hi Conrad,

Your point about Urban Dictionary not meeting WT:CFI is well-taken; I had been thinking of using UrbDict for samples of usage, not for attestation. Given the character of Wiktionary (which is relatively formal and terse, as opposed to frequently free-wheeling WP), perhaps it's not suitable, but for slang words it may provide some sample usage that would be useful but not suitable for Wiktionary.

It's currently cited on about 20 pages:

• http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=%22urban+dictionary%22&fulltext=Search
• http://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ASearch&search=urbandictionary.com&fulltext=Search

There should be some policy on such dictionaries, which are admittedly useful for slang, preferably in combination with other sources; in the absence of a policy or consensus, it seems we should allow it as an auxiliary source and support it with a suitable template; if nothing else, it makes removing it easier if we decide against it!

Nbarth (email) (talk) 00:18, 13 February 2008 (UTC)

I'm kinda with Nbarth here - Urban Dictionary is a pretty big and well-known dicitonary now. Having it as an extra source could bolster up quite a few entries. It could be a nice idea to ackonwledge one of our rivals (which I assume UDict is). Althought UD have slandered us.--Keene 00:36, 13 February 2008 (UTC)

I suppose it really comes down to "what is a reference" which is not something that is obvious in terms of building a dictionary, presumably a piece of text that explains the word could be used as a reference. Language is an odd thing, so does it need to be a published source, or will any of Joe Bloggs' stuff do is not a question that is quite so clear cut as it is with an encyclopedia. Copying definitions from another dictionary is copyright violation, however taking the meaning from their definition and rewording it seems to be acceptable - I am not really sure. Obviously we can use them as a place to find information about words, but whether it should be called a reference is what I am not sure about. Wiktionary's criteria for inclusion cannot be bypassed just because Urban Dictionary gives a meaning, but at the same time looking at Urban Dictionary may give people ideas of new meanings to search for, or that should have been included. In short I don't have a clue what I am on about and think that this should be subjected to a week or so of Beer Parlour wrangling to try and work out what the state of affairs is. Conrad.Irwin 15:23, 13 February 2008 (UTC)

• See Template:nosecondary (for use on WT:RFV) which reads:

Please see the description of what the request for verification process is for, at the top of this page. The purpose is not fact-checking, but to verify whether a sense meets our criteria for inclusion. "Occurrence in other dictionaries" is not one of our criteria. The word usage is there, not "listing" and was put there very intentionally. Blindly copying from other dictionaries leaves us vulnerable to copyright violations, allegations of copyright violation, Nihilartikels and invalid appeals to authority. Referring to other dictionaries is fine to clarify (or even correct) a definition. But other dictionaries are not valid citations for a request for verification. --Connel MacKenzie 16:16, 13 February 2008 (UTC)

For UrbanDict, I don't see how referring to them directly is ever helpful, unless you are trying to suggest that something is {{notaword}} (or at least, not a real word.) --Connel MacKenzie 16:17, 13 February 2008 (UTC)

Hi Conrad,

I've started a discussion at the beer parlour, as you suggested:

Wiktionary:Beer_parlour#Referencing_user-contributed_dictionaries_.28like_Urban_Dictionary.29.3F

Nbarth (email) (talk) 01:34, 14 February 2008 (UTC)

semmit

Thanks for the help! --Bazzargh 15:09, 14 February 2008 (UTC)

No problem :). Conrad.Irwin 15:09, 14 February 2008 (UTC)

WT:BB

Hi Conrad,

I added the {{Policy-TT}} (Policy Think Tank) template to WT:BB, as it was listed in the Policy Think Tank category.

Looking at the template, it's misleadingly similar to {{policy}}, unlike {{Policy-DP}} and {{Policy-RP}}, which are clearly distinct. {{Policy-TT}} has other problems (it doesn't include the right category).

I'll go fix these problems with the template (make it less misleading, and include the category), and then re-add it to WT:BB; sound ok?

Nbarth (email) (talk) 21:51, 14 February 2008 (UTC)

Re: "should we use {{Policy-DP}}" instead of {{Policy-TT}}?

Wiktionary:Policies and guidelines makes a distinction between these, with TT being for initial discussion, while DP is worked through draft, so seeing as many pages do use TT, it seems a useful distinction to make.

Nbarth (email) (talk) 23:23, 14 February 2008 (UTC)

Ok, done—trust it looks clearer now. Thanks for the catch!

Nbarth (email) (talk) 23:50, 14 February 2008 (UTC)

{{welcomepedia}}

Thanks for the {{welcomepedia}}!

Indeed, it certainly helps—I'm used to WP:BB!, while I now realize (after causing a bit of distress) that WT has rather different community standards.

Thanks again.

Nbarth (email) (talk) 21:55, 14 February 2008 (UTC)

Browser-integrated search

Hi, Conrad. Was the browser-integrated search code interfering with something or otherwise causing problems? You removed it in this edit, so WT:CUSTOM no longer lets users add broser-integrated search. Rod (A. Smith) 21:46, 17 February 2008 (UTC)

Hmm. I see now that the code was appropriately refactored to MediaWiki:CustomSearch.js. Unfortunately, that code doesn't seem to run for me on WT:CUSTOM. Is there a known bug? Rod (A. Smith) 21:55, 17 February 2008 (UTC)

Never mind. Fixed. Rod (A. Smith) 22:44, 17 February 2008 (UTC)

Ok, I think User:Mike Dillon made that code, so it might be worth letting him know. I just moved it around as he wasn't a sysop at the time. Conrad.Irwin 23:25, 17 February 2008 (UTC)

What was the error? Were you getting "This feature is not supported by your browser. Sorry!" or was something breaking? If you were getting the message, what was the browser that this change made it work on? (P.S. sorry to reply on your page, Conrad) Mike Dillon 23:39, 17 February 2008 (UTC)

Oops, cross-posted to your talk page now :). I didn't look into it at all. Conrad.Irwin 23:41, 17 February 2008 (UTC)

Paper view

First, let me just say, "Fucking fantastic!" Ok, now that I've said that, I feel justified in doing a brutal critique of an excellent piece of programming which would be well beyond my skills if I devoted the next five years of my life to computer programming. So, first of all, I think that a variant of this should absolutely be incorporated into the overall wikt structure. I think that we need to do a merger of your three options on "paper view", so that they're all part of a dynamic structure. However, I think that mashing all the def's together is a bit much. I think that paper view (with the definitions still enumerated), should be the default view that all users initially see when they first start looking at wikt. There should also be boxes or something (it would be nice if these were visible no matter how far the user scrolled down the page, constantly harassing them with the option of expanding their minds with more information, but I have no idea if this is feasible) showing them which information they are not currently seeing. Then, the user could have the option of seeing any section (etymology, pronunciation, etc.), as well as unseeing it if they get information overload. It seems that there is some sort of system (cookies?) which keeps track of user preferences across entries. This is good. What might also be nice is if there was a page on which a user could manually alter their view. On this page, each language and section (etymology, pronunciation, etc) would have three options: Always view, always not view, do whatever I did last. If the user selects always not view for something, that something would always be hidden. They could unhide it if they like, but they would have to unhide it every time they looked at a new page. Vice versa for always view (the user could always hide something, but it would come back to them when they look at a new page). Do what I do last simply keeps track of what the user is hiding/unhiding and continues this pattern when they look at new pages. The default would be set to "Do whatever I did last" for all sections/languages. Finally, I think that liberal usage of tabs (as Hippietrail has done on wiktionary.dev) would be an exceptionally useful way to do things, especially with different languages. I feel sort of guilty just heaping work on you that I am in no way able to do myself, so feel free to work on my suggestions, read and then forget about them, or completely ignore me and not return my phone calls. Again, this is some grade-A programming. Atelaes 22:30, 17 February 2008 (UTC)

Also, you may want to check redirects. They don't seem to be working with the feature turned on. Atelaes 05:36, 18 February 2008 (UTC)

There is a known bug, that I can't work out how to fix yet, that #Language_name links are completely borked. Conrad.Irwin 11:09, 18 February 2008 (UTC)

Your User:Conrad.Irwin/feedback.js

Hello Conrad.Irwin,
great job! I have updated the German version (with some little changes):

• We do not use UTC, but local time
• fb_questions[1] is not really helpful (due to the random selection)
• fb_comment_url points to the appropriate talk page (they are made for that ;-)
• removed href='#' as totally redundant (browser will go to the top when clicking)
• sidebar.insertBefore(...p-tb...) instead of appendChild
• added confirmation (just a click is done too quickly ;-)
• a little bit of "artwork"

Or have a look on de:MediaWiki:If-feedback.js and de:tè...

Bugs:

• wgServer.replace(/https?:\/\/([^\.]+)\.([^\.]+)\.org/,"$1$2") will not work for wikipedias (because code is enwiki, not enwikipedia)
• encodeURI(wgPageName) still does not work on the tool server (php); try tè
• people can "vote" several times on the same page (by reloading), a server-side (no cookie) filter/blockage would be great
• How to view the feedback results for just one unique page?
• Please see Wiktionary:Feedback#Freezes_Internet_Explorer, too (by an IP)

Best regards, Melancholie 06:03, 18 February 2008 (UTC)

Hi! Thank you for so quickly adopting this. However useful this early version is, please keep in mind that it is very raw.

1. I'll take a look at the JS for Wikipedias in a moment.
2. I've fixed the Unicode handling on the PHP side - please use "encodeURI" from now on.
3. Allowing multiple votes is intended as we'd have to do privacy-invasive stuff, otherwise.
4. I haven't decided on a way to get one page's results yet. The "vote" should probably return the counts.
5. IE7 lockups seem unrelated to the voting thing.

--Connel MacKenzie 07:54, 18 February 2008 (UTC)

IE7 does not vote!

Important bug: With IE7 you cannot vote! The following code does not work for IE6?/7:

  var fb = false;
  try{
    fb = e.target.childNodes[0].nodeValue;
  }catch(e){ try{
    fb = e.srcElement.childNodes[0].nodeValue;
  } catch(e){ }}

The result always is "false"! No vote is made then... --- Best regards, Melancholie 11:35, 18 February 2008 (UTC)

Quit edit-conflicting me, this is my talk page ;). I have hopefully fixed the above, "window.event" not "e." for IE :(. The "#" link is necessary if you want ":hover" to work in IE6 - I have updated it so it hopefully jumps less. Thank you very much for your help with this. By the way, Connel is the one who wrote/is writing the server side stuff - I am just doing this bit. Yours Conrad.Irwin 11:53, 18 February 2008 (UTC)

Hi ya. Please, for the love of all that is good in the world, remove the "#".  :-)   Or at least make it IE6-specific. Pretty fantastic stuff, by the way. --Connel MacKenzie 12:27, 18 February 2008 (UTC)

Seeing as you asked so nicely :), It does look a bit off for IE6 - but the jump is very irritating now I pay attention to it. Conrad.Irwin 13:09, 18 February 2008 (UTC)

I never use href='#'! Just replace 'href':'#' with 'class':'fb_link' for example, then you can specify your hover effects with CSS (on wikt:de I just used #p-feedback a {cursor: pointer;}! The underlining effect is not important at all to me (not for trashy IE, let them know that they are using crap ;-)) Mentioned this, a further important bugfix for IE has to be done: Replace all 'style':'foo' with 'class/id':'bar' as the Internet Explorer is not able to understand it this way (IE only understands id.style.display = 'foo'!), so the frame is visible on IE6, for example. --- Best regards, Melancholie 00:33, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

Heh, yes, it needs a good tidy up - I wrote it in an hour on Saturday and have not had much time with it since. Conrad.Irwin 01:04, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

I dislike (moderately) the random switching of choice sets. Screws with my head when trying to track down caching problems.

Results are now returned after every "UPDATE" so you can put the numeric poll results next to the input strings.

Omitting the &fb_comment will also return all results for that &fb_page.

I'm beginning to think that entering a free-text string up to 40 characters will be OK. Maybe eliminate WT:FEED as too bogus. And I quote: "whole flow would demand more of the users perception, through enhanced and high resolutioon pixel 3d screen changing."

Entering that comment would pretty certainly mean the feedback thing *must* move to very bottom, centered, of the content frame.

Today's date is defaulted in, for UPDATEs, so you don't need to pass it in anymore.

--Connel MacKenzie 07:37, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

Little Russia

Hi, Conrad.Irwin.

I see you pared down my definition of Little Russia.

I think you removed an important point for sense 1, the definition of Little Russia as lands where "Little Russians" (Ukrainians) lived. I think the definition has ethnicity at its root, and not vice versa.

In sense 2, you removed the expansion, which would answer the reader's question "which subdivisions", and "when?".

Also see my recent rewrite of Ruthenia

Thanks. —Mzajac 21:39, 18 February 2008 (UTC)

Unreconstructed

Perhaps you can explain to me your reversion here. I think that even a quick web search will show you that the definition I gave is by far the predominant use of the word, and that the trivial definition previously given is rather uncommon. Indeed (I just looked, in the course of doing such a web search) the American Heritage Dictionary gives roughly the definition I gave and omits the trivial definition you have restored. Jmabel 21:28, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

Your partial restoration is fine. Does this mean that Wiktionary does not want citation of usage? That surprises me: most scholarly dictionaries rely on that (the OED being the epitome of that, but same for several others I can think of).

I don't think this particular idiom merits an encyclopedia article; that's exactly why I made my entry here rather than there. Perhaps the sort of thing I added falls between the two stools. - Jmabel 23:38, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

In terms of the Wikipedia article on Reconstruction, I think this would qualify as trivia that does not belong in the encyclopedia article. As I say, it may fall between the two stools. It is not a significant fact about the Reconstruction; it is of only lexicographical importance, which is precisely why I put it in the Wiktionary, not in Wikipedia. - Jmabel 06:32, 20 February 2008 (UTC)

How can I help?

I am thrilled that we are getting feedback from users. I have been using it to direct my attention to specific entries for improvements. I am attempting to make some inferences from the text comments and ratings. Simplicity seems to be one common thread.

I would love to be able to help with the process of making the user views work better. Unfortunately, I am not very knowledgable about web programming (php, java, even wiki templates). I am willing to invest a certain amount of time in familiarization, but I fear that I may still waste your time.

Two suggestions that don't seem to me (in my ignorance) to be insuperable:

1. to generate something like Flesch-Kincaid readability scores for sense lines, perhaps at time of preview. This would provide almost instant feedback to editors and provide some video-game-like encouragement to editors to keep it simple.
2. to create yet another citation-like (but not user-editable) space for storing metadata about entries, such as were mentioned, to capture bot-created statistics about the entry. I imagine the contents as beng the mirror of the entry heading structure. Perhaps headings appearing as "English:Etymology 1:Noun:Usage Notes", sense lines appearing as English:Etymology 1:Verb:sense_1, with statistics about each piece of sentence-like text {etymologies, senses, usage notes) (length, readability) and counts for the headings by level and text. This would provide much opportunity for locating entries by structural characteristics and for storing feedback and usage information. I don't understand what would be involved in updating such metadata. It would be best it if were done after each edit. It would be sufficient if it could be done on demand for an entry. If the metadata for all changed entries were updated periodically (daily!!! weekly! monthly ?) that would be fabulous.

As I understand it, PHP would allow you to recombine the text in ways that essentially provided different views for different users at time of viewing. I would think that that would be difficult if the user is permitted to edit in that semi-custom format. Is that what you were saying in BP? I keep on hoping that it would be possible to restructure the underlying data to achieve the proximity of information at sense level there so that less complexity was required in the user views.

Is there any validity to my thoughts on this? I know that uninformed wishes are very frustrating for someone who would face the problem of converting them into a form suitable for understanding what is involved in doing them. I am really concerned with trying to make wiktionary useful to a larger part of the on-line population. The portion of the wiki model that implicitly assumes that the user population is a lot like the content-creating community needs modification for WP and esp WT to keep improving in a relevant way. DCDuring TALK 16:56, 20 February 2008 (UTC)

Well, I am not going to turn down anyone who wants to help, I think this is something that we need to take quite seriously. I wouldn't worry about learning web programming, we have a fair few who are very good at it I can think of five off the top of my head.

1. I really like the idea of rating definitions on readability - I don't think we can get the exact w:Flesch-Kincaid test, as I don't know enough rules about syllables, but we can certainly do something with words and tinker with it until we are getting sensible scores (in the same way the definition<=>gloss matcher in the parser.js works) probably based on word-length, and sentence length - with marks down for lots of short words; it's going to be a case of finding good definitions and bad definitions and sticking them in to see how to mark them.
2. More in depth analysis of articles is probably best done through the XML dumps [1] and if you can work out which statistics are most needed then I (or others with more experience) can try and extract them and publish them, though it probably wouldn't be to Wiktionary itself. The usage information is stored somewhere, there is certainly javascript that sends some anonymous requests to a counter somewhere in the depths of the WMF

In terms of different views, the world is literally our oyster - I have done enough work on it to know that we can extract the data from wiktionary pages and shuffle it into any format desired - though my design skills are lacking. I think that if this were to happen, and it should, we need to get ourselves an editor abstraction - i.e. people edit pages in a GUI and not in vanilla wikitext - though for experienced users the wikitext should also be available. This is something that gets a lot of discussion on IRC and it is merely a case of waiting until someone has the time to actually do it (It is not at all trivial unfortunately - as the wikitext has to be read and processed before editing can begin - though I think User:Hippietrail may have some tricks up his sleeve).

I agree with you that Wiktionary in its present form is not as useful to the online community as it could be - I would like to get a PHP extension that lets us send out definitions like http://ninjawords.com - though we then may run into the problem that people do not realise that they can get back into real Wiktionary and edit it.

In conclusion do you, or do any of the other talk page eves droppers, have any idea how we can get a computer to rate our definitions, basically by counting the number of words, number of letters in words, number of links. (I necessary we can do a bit of basic string manipulation, remove 's,ing, or ed' from words to make the score more accurate etc.etc., though I doubt it will be). Probably best to find some top-notch definitions, and some utterly rubbish ones and compare them. We need to remember to strike a balance between simplicity and accuracy though, "Vehicle: things like cars" <-> "Vehicle: A conveyance; a device for carrying or transporting substances, objects or individuals."

I am encouraged by what you say. Your comments and efforts have made me think that you were going in a direction I like. I am not wedded to any particular way of doing readability. I viewed readability as only a counter-balance to the natural tendency of some of our contributors (me included) to sometimes take joy in showing off their vocabulary in the definitions. The other alternative of one word synonyms or a string of them, forcing users to click to get some meat on the definitions isn't very appealing either, which is why ultimately user feedback and some other data about usage patterns that indicate satisfaction would be nice. The readability indices that I know of mostly have scores that correlate to "grade level" of education required to understand the text: 16 being a college grad. They are not affected by the length of what is being scored. We seem to have other factors that influence us in that regard, like keeping defs. to one line (what's that in characters? Looks like 96 in this edit window) for multi-sense definitions, keeping glosses to < 30 characters, etc.

About the editor abstraction, CM had mentioned the desirability of soliciting user requests for entry in a more structured form. I don't think that we are going to get ever requests from many users unless we make the interface easier that our normal wiki edit window. The request could also feed a more attractive and intuitive search for a word that might already be in WT.

I will undertake to find out about the various readability scores that are used for normal prose and see if there is anything available outside of the lexicographic giants that would be well suited for the peculiarities of definitions. One would think that words are already associated with grade level by textbook publishers and the educational testing services. DCDuring TALK 23:28, 20 February 2008 (UTC)

A little progress on readability. There are recognized approaches based on word frequency. Something like the TV script corpus might be the basis for a good corpus for us once we have removed the scannos, proper names, and some American TV culture-specific references. The redlinks would be the first and easiest set to remove. First I need to determine how many words should be in the frequency list. I don't know whether we need 5K, 10K, 20K, 50K, 100K words (inflected forms). Could you tell me whether an approach that required looking up an attribute for each word in each sense would be considered excessively data-access intensive? At some point soon I want to run this by CM and put it on BP, but I need to do a little more research. Are there other folks who like this kind of thing? DCDuring TALK 16:05, 21 February 2008 (UTC)

Hippietrail may also be very actively interested, and there are others who will look favorably on it. In terms of frequency lists it depends what technology we are using to analyze them - sending anything above a thousand words is not practical for Javascript (as the download time for the analyzer is too high), however if we were to build a server-side tool (which would be much slower from a user point of view) then the number of words ceases to be that important provided we have a friendly server (toolserver might feel that this is an unnecessary waste of their resources), it really depends on how far you need to go down the frequency lists until you get to an arbitrary "obscurity". So - if this was the case, planned way to give a score to a definition would depend on "number of words", "usage frequency of word", "red links" (probably a bad thing), "wikpedia links" (which are probably a good thing), internal links (which can be overused, but are good in moderation). However, if we were to analyze the sentences as users were building them, then the approach would have ot be javascript based, and revert to more simplistic length counting. Sorry, not making much sense at the moment - hope you can understand. Conrad.Irwin 17:28, 21 February 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. I think I got your meaning. Both the freq and other ratings would serve a role. The server-side rating is an example of why I like some kind of meta-data space for this kind of thing, preferrably containing a rev no. for the version scored. I like the components of rating that you mention. For the javascript-based version, average word length (+), number of wikilinks to words of more than 5(?) letters (-), number of redlinks (+), number of references to word with same stem (+) (where + increases "grade level" required). Which of those too resource-intensive? DCDuring TALK 18:38, 21 February 2008 (UTC)

I got put off track a bit about this. I had read up on readability and was not as keen on the idea of Javascript readability ratings. There might be other more important things to do with Javascript to put more structure into new entries, new languages, new etys, and new PoSs. OTOH I have been looking at Longman's outstanding Dictionary of Contemporary English, aimed at intermediate+ ESL learners, I think. They have a 2000-word defining vocabulary and had software 20 years ago to make sure that the definitions used only that vocabulary. We have Simple which seems similar to their controlled vocabulary. I was wondering how hard it would be to analyze our groups of our definitions using a similar tool and Simple. If it is easy then we shouldn't need to get much support from the community. If it seems hard then we had better make sure that it would be used enough to warrant the effort. Is there someone else who likes this sort of thing?

I have noted various kinds of problems with our definitions: Webster 1913-ism (which probably needs little explanation); synonyms as definitions; very low-frequency words in definitions of medium and high-frequency words.

As for technical help for simpler definitions, how resource-intensive would it be to look at all words being entered in definitions and differentially color them on "Preview" if misspelled, not in Simple, or not in WT. There are issues with inflected forms. DCDuring TALK 15:08, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

You might be interested in a paper by Adam Kilgarriff about choosing good examples sentences.--Brett 15:01, 18 April 2008 (UTC)

Definition-improvement tool idea. By double-clicking on a word I can get a window to appear for the entry for that word. If I could in a similar way get information about the word (frequency, inclusion in various lists, an overall suitability rating, simple synonyms) that would be a material help in simplifying a definition. To this from our main entry would require adding data that we don't have now and might not want. But in yet another space ..... ? Anyway, it's a direction of thought, even if not practical at the moment. DCDuring TALK 21:50, 18 April 2008 (UTC)

Yes, something like graph of the use of the noun 'market' would be nice too.--Brett 13:26, 19 April 2008 (UTC)

Re: Namespace balance

Hi Conrad,

Thanks for the note. Apologies if I seemed to be laying down the law; I was just writing down common practice as I understood it. I'm a big fan of codification—as has been mentioned elsewhere, Wiktionary's "common practice sans code" culture is opaque and discourages newcomers—so I was hoping to help myself and others by looking around (existing policies and guidelines, various mainspace pages, previous discussions) and writing up what I saw. Apologies for errors.

I'll make sure to discuss (in Beer Parlour) any changes to guidelines (policy-esque) pages before making any in future.

Nbarth (email) (talk) 23:01, 20 February 2008 (UTC)

Hi Conrad,

No problem; WT:BITE seems to not exist (^.-)

Nbarth (email) (talk) 23:25, 20 February 2008 (UTC)

Also, I just copied some policy from WT:REDIR to Wiktionary:Idioms; trust I didn't butcher the wording too awfully.

Nbarth (email) (talk) 23:25, 20 February 2008 (UTC)

Good point about my (talk) link; I had it on WP so people could contact me if I didn't come by for a while, but it seems most messages are when I'm around, and I seem to keep coming by (...and I thought I actually spoke English!). I've changed it to make everyone's life that much easier—thanks!

Nbarth (email) (talk) 23:34, 20 February 2008 (UTC)

JS request

A useful widget (for many projects) would be to find all text strings on a page in the form HH:MM, DD, Mounthname YYYY (UTC) and convert it (the displayed text only) to one's local timezone. --Connel MacKenzie 23:20, 21 February 2008 (UTC)

It would be useful, but would require parsing the whole document body - which might make it quite expensive for such trivial behaviour. Though, if there was a template {{time}} which created a class=ed span, it would be easier to do. Conrad.Irwin 23:55, 21 February 2008 (UTC)

Preloadtitle

Thanks for your help and encouragement with the preloadtitle thing. :-)

FYI, I've adjusted your feedback script to put a simple link in the preloadtitle; however, you might want to change that to be a sentence or at least a fuller phrase (maybe "Comment on [[___]]" instead of just "[[___]]"). I don't know. I leave that to you. :-)

Thanks again,

—Ruakh_TALK 02:15, 23 February 2008 (UTC)

Thank you very much, that should eliminate the problem of random comments on that page. I am very busy at the moment but will look into it more in the next few days. Thanks again. Conrad.Irwin 21:23, 23 February 2008 (UTC)

Derived terms

I think it's generally okay to remove derived terms that aren't likely to pass anyway. If anyone were to challenge it they could just turn the link blue. DAVilla 00:46, 27 February 2008 (UTC)

Fair enough, I am sure a lot of them are citable, but if we allow everything for that entry it will be utterly overwhelmed. Conrad.Irwin 00:49, 27 February 2008 (UTC)

everybody's

This is not a noun. It is no different from its, besides spelling. Moreover, waht about forms like makes or making? You can do that with just about every verb too. Jcwf 152.1.38.46 14:19, 27 February 2008 (UTC)

I am puzzled: why did you nominate it for deletion then?

152.1.38.46 18:05, 27 February 2008 (UTC)

Regexp by URL?

Is there a way to use regural expresions to edit a page via the URL line? I thought there was using w:User:Lupin/popupsdev.js, is that true? I know w:AWB has regexps but I wanted a url tool. Thanks. --Bequw → ¢ • τ 20:53, 29 February 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for the helpful link my talk page. --Bequw → ¢ • τ 15:30, 3 March 2008 (UTC)

Re:

Thanks for the welcoming, the template as you can see on my userpage wasn't designed by me the original template was from Meta by another user but since the codes can be freely copied I've decided to use the template so i have the template on nearly all wikimedia sites, i'll read through the policies and see what I can do. Terra 11:08, 1 March 2008 (UTC)

MediaWiki:Monobook.css

Your reversion at MediaWiki:Monobook.css reverted your change of 8 January; was that intentional? (If it was, that's fine by me; it just looked like it might not be, so I thought I'd call your attention to it just in case.) —Ruakh_TALK 14:06, 1 March 2008 (UTC)

No it wasn't. Thanks for letting me know - I'll go and see what it did. Conrad.Irwin 14:48, 1 March 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for the note

I contacted that person by email. We'll see what he says. --Dvortygirl 06:57, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

Admin

Sorry, but I am not an administrator on polish wikipedia. You bad understood me:) I thought my conflict with administrator on wikibooks:) And do you speak polish? I asking, because I like know can peoples speaks in polish. Prasuk historyk 11:07, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

I forgot, if you would write to me, the bet bes is q:pl:Dyskusja użytkownika:Prasuk historyk, because I rarely edit english wiktionary, and I don't know, when I can answer on your questions to me. Prasuk historyk 11:43, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

chuck

Well, chuck you, Farley. But seriously folks, I thought the idea of the tongue-twister was multiple repetitions of "wood/would" and "chuck". I'll see what b.g.c. says. BTW, thanks for the improved "show"/"hide". DCDuring TALK 00:14, 5 March 2008 (UTC)

I remember learning a tune on the piano to which it could be recited; and it was definitely a could (I think Google agrees too) though I agree it is easier to say than the would which does thus defeat the point a bit, ah well - such is life, feel free to revert me. Conrad.Irwin 00:18, 5 March 2008 (UTC)

b.g.c. supports you 4:1. I'm leaning toward leaving the sense in. I'll bet there is usage in this sense derived from this rhyme. I also suspect that the "chuck you Farley" jocular euphemism might be supportable. DCDuring TALK 00:23, 5 March 2008 (UTC)

Wiktionary:Entry layout explained

Hi, could you be more specific please and give me some examples? 16@r 18:36, 5 March 2008 (UTC)

only Wikipedia

I think that these entries would need a ==language== entry, and the template a lang= parameter, so that we can add foreign people and places and link to foreign Wikipedias. SemperBlotto 12:30, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

Hmm, I was not sure that we do actually want to link to foreign Wikipedia's, this is supposed to be a site where English speakers find information. In terms of a Language heading, I was trying to imitate something like MediaWiki:Noarticletext, though I am having second thoughts about that now. Conrad.Irwin 12:34, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

citizen of a state

I really must insist that this entry be deleted. The sense that the contributor is trying to put forward is a hoax. Cheers! bd2412 T 17:52, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

I don't really mind, I cast my vote as keep because it looked true - but the RfD seems to lean towards delete, thus it should be deleted. Conrad.Irwin 18:55, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

WOTD

If you look at yesterday's WOTD flagrant, there is a "was wotd" link at the top right corner. If you click that, it goes (correctly) to Wiktionary:Word of the day/Archive/2008/March#8, but once on that page, incorrectly jumps to the feedback anchor for "Definition is too complicated"...aligned with March 3rd. Please remove those named anchors. --Connel MacKenzie 08:23, 9 March 2008 (UTC)

There are no named anchors in the Feedback thing, its a "feature" whereby the #syntax also works for elements with id's (and this very irritatingly overrides any names which are there). I will try and fix it by changing the id to "FB1" and using regexp to extract the number correctly. Conrad.Irwin 11:48, 9 March 2008 (UTC)

Fixed. Conrad.Irwin 12:16, 9 March 2008 (UTC)

Template:polytonic

May I ask what the purpose of the edit was here? Don't most script templates include a list of fonts? Bear in mind, I really have no idea how the whole fonts thing works. All I know is that my Ancient Greek words look less pretty now. -Atelaes λάλει ἐμοί 06:29, 12 March 2008 (UTC)

Looks like Template:grc-cell needs to be normalized, but it contains an extra font in addition to calling {{polytonic fonts}}... Mike Dillon 03:09, 13 March 2008 (UTC)

All of them do, so if you are ever feeling bored... :p. 09:19, 13 March 2008 (UTC)

Template:grc-cell was the source of all the other links. Template:polytonic fonts is now orphaned. Mike Dillon 04:54, 14 March 2008 (UTC)

Decommissioned

Can you reconsider? The roads project is trying to resolve an extraordinarily complex problem, and this usage of "decommission" is not considered by its specialists, the same as existing defs. It does not mean simply "remove or revoke a formal designation". That Im told is incorrect in the roads world. It apparently implies the entire process, including revokation, but more importantly removal of signage, and most importantly, transfer of designation to some local body, which is different than the usual meaning.

Thus I'm told, "revokation of formal designation" is not the definition in this area of use. It is the removal of signage and reattribution as a local road, that is apparently the "definition" of the point decommissioning takes place.

Any chance of a review?

FT2 ^{(Talk | email)} 20:20, 13 March 2008 (UTC)

Hmm, I don't really know - let us ask in the Tea room. Of course if it meets WT:CFI, but I don't have the energy to check that right now. Conrad.Irwin 20:24, 13 March 2008 (UTC)

Thanks :) Appreciate it. FT2 ^{(Talk | email)} 20:42, 13 March 2008 (UTC)

This use of "decommission" is a neologism that is videly used by "roadgeeks" but not by professionals. See talk:multiplex for a similar case. --NE2 23:07, 13 March 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for the warm welcome

Sure was better than that unjustified ban. Actually, why is Wiktionary more strict than Wikipedia? Seems the block was for edit warring but I didn't even break 3rr. Thoughts? Sesshomaru 21:42, 13 March 2008 (UTC)

Autoedit

Hi Pistachio, if you want to play with autoedit you should turn on the WT:PREF called "Use w:User:Lupin/popups.js", this does a lot of extra things too - but that doesn't really matter (don't be surprised to see orange boxes floating around). To replace the FAchar with fa-Arab, you need to use the following url: http://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=%s&action=edit&autoedit=s~FAchar~fa-Arab~g&autoclick=wpDiff&autominor=true&autosummary=FAchar->fa-Arab%20(using%20[[mw:Extension:Autoedit|autoedit]]) where %s is the name of the entry.

If you are using Firefox, and save the above string as the Location of a new bookmark - and set the keyword of that bookmark to "edit", then you can just type "edit Pagename" into Firefox and it will do everything happily. Hope this is helpful. Conrad.Irwin 17:07, 14 March 2008 (UTC)

Thanks, it has worked. :] Pistachio 18:25, 14 March 2008 (UTC)

Changes to la-verb

I've realized that there is a problem with the way {{la-verb}} handles variant patterns. For one thing, every verb must have (1) all four parts, or (2) be deponent, or (3) be "irregular". Howveer, there are two special cases that ought to be specifiable in the inflection line: "no passive" and "semi-deponent". A verb with no passive voice will still have all four primcipal parts (the first 8 arguments); a semi-deponent (like deponent) will only have 6. Could the template be set to do this? I'd go to IRC and discuss this, but I can't log into the IRC anymore. --EncycloPetey 20:32, 14 March 2008 (UTC)

FYI - I think Atelaes has solved this with his new template. (Just in case you were off-line) --EncycloPetey 01:56, 15 March 2008 (UTC)

Sorry, I wasn't paying much attention to anything - I'm glad it is resolved and please let me know if I can be of any further help. Conrad.Irwin 09:15, 15 March 2008 (UTC)

Translation bar discussion

If you at some point have time could you think about the new messages on translation bar discussion please? Best regards Rhanyeia♥♫ 16:29, 17 March 2008 (UTC)

What do you think about my latest message there? Best regards Rhanyeia♥♫ 10:49, 6 April 2008 (UTC)

Sorry

I am simply a newcomer to Wiktionary, but I am experienced with Wikipedia. I am sorry for the edit on Scientology and I won't do something of that nature again. Are there any other policies besides no redirects? I have added commas and added links to other definitions, but what else should I do to contribute? --Liist 14:10, 22 March 2008 (UTC)

{{polytonic}} and {{Grek}}

Hello Conrad, I recently did a little check of the changes to these templates since your last edits. It appears that any noticeable differences between text formatted with these templates has now disappeared. I believed that the differences were purposeful because Ancient Greek and Modern Greek are written in slightly different fonts. I'm no expert of Greek or Ancient Greek but just wanted to make sure why the changes were made.--Williamsayers79 21:26, 22 March 2008 (UTC)

I was in conversation with User:Atelaes and User:ArielGlenn on IRC at the time, and they were both ok with it ;). In some ways it is nice if ancient greek looks different from modern greek - however I found the fonts that were specified (particularly for Ancient Greek) were very ugly. The current situation means that a user's operating system/web browser can choose the default font for the script - which works better for everyone though means we have no control over what they see. (Except of course for internet explorer - which hopes that one of the fonts listed in MediaWiki:Common.css is available). If you want to customise your fonts then you can add them to your Special:Mypage/monobook.css (something that wouldn't have worked well previously). Conrad.Irwin 21:46, 22 March 2008 (UTC)

The same objection was recently raised regarding my changes to Template:Cyrl. I think the main issue is that in cases where the sole/primary use of a CSS class was in a template where the fonts were also being forced with inline styles, we need to actually remove the "inherit" hack from MediaWiki:Common.css. I've done this with the ".RU" rule for class="RU" and will remove the inline style from Template:Cyrl once the changes to MediaWiki:Common.css have made it past all of the caching layers (some time around mid-April). I was convinced that the font needs to be forced in the case of Cyrillic because accents don't display correctly in common fonts (see Template talk:Cyrl#Removal of Russian font template for the discussion).

It isn't enough to simply ensure that the fonts are the same since the inherit hack means that those fonts will only be seen in IE6 (as opposed to in all browsers when they are inline styles). In the case where users don't have any of the listed fonts, it's basically the same as "inherit" (i.e. the default "sans-serif" font will be used).

It seems like it may make sense to bring this stuff up at WT:BP since there seem to be strongly-held opinions on all sides regarding the font issue. Mike Dillon 21:51, 22 March 2008 (UTC)

The topic "Should Wiktionary force font choice for non-IE6 users" would make interesting discussion on the Beer Parlour, and would I hope come to the conclusion "it all depends" on which language. (We obviously don't have a choice and have to force IE6 font selection). At the end of the day we need to choose the option that works best for not logged in users, for the majority of scripts this will be the font that the browser/operating system has been set to choose (as it should know what it is doing). There will be some circumstances where Windows + IE7's default font is actually wrong, not just slightly less pretty, and we will have to specify the font for them as they make up the majority of internet users. The issue of "slightly less pretty" is meaningless, everyone has their own preference, and so Wiktionary should not force a "nice looking" font on people unless the default font renders incorrectly. For the IPA templates no-one noticed, for Grek and polytonic it changed slightly , for Cyrl it actually broke it. There is no general decision that can be reached. Anyway, feel free to BP this thread - that's my opinion. Conrad.Irwin 22:31, 22 March 2008 (UTC)

drag racing

Actually, I've seen such an event held regularly as part of a charity fundraiser. I do not know that it meets CFI, but it is a real term, surprising as that may be.

On a more serious note, I may need help with reworking two of the Latin templates. I've realized that they have an unaddressed problem of not including wikilinks, so pages for those Latin entries may not get counted for ous pagecount statistics. If you'll be around for the next few hours, and have the time, let me know and I can fill you in on the details. --EncycloPetey 23:42, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

Heh, well I wouldn't revert you if you were to add it. I'm not going to be up much longer, maybe tomorrow at some point, sorry. Conrad.Irwin 00:34, 26 March 2008 (UTC)

Sure. This isn't a problem I expect to be solved in a single day anyway. It could take a while and will almost certainly involve one or more bot runs. --EncycloPetey 00:38, 26 March 2008 (UTC)

User:WOPR

Hi There, I notice you have created an account for a bot, however you have as yet not entered into any discussion about what this bot will do - why - or whether people actually want it to do so. By adding {{bot}} to the user page it adds the page to Category:Wiktionary bots which it should not be in, as it cannot be a bot here yet. Could you please remove the template from the page or explain. Yours. Conrad.Irwin 21:10, 26 March 2008 (UTC)

In order to keep track of well over 200 accounts I mark my bot accounts with this template. Please for the love of madness leave it as is. I will request a bot flag in a few days. Bots can operate without a bot flag. Please do not make my job more complicated than it already is. Thanks. -- Cat ^chi? 21:31, 26 March 2008 (UTC)

Template:bot

On the English Wiktionary, three letter templates are reserved for language codes. This is to make a lot of our automated editing and templates work. Please do not change them. Conrad.Irwin 21:14, 26 March 2008 (UTC)

Why do you even need templates for that? I believe Mediawiki has ISO codes built in to it. -- Cat ^chi? 21:32, 26 March 2008 (UTC)

It does not have them all, unfortunately. It is the way we do things here and is unlikely to change for a long time. Conrad.Irwin 21:33, 26 March 2008 (UTC)

I checked w:Bot and saw no ISO code for a Bongo language. No mention of such a language on w:Bongo. I wager there was never an ISO code for it. Does that language even exist?

So long as wiktionary is a wiki change will always happen, slow or not ;)

-- Cat ^chi? 21:37, 26 March 2008 (UTC)

See this list. It is one of the w:Papuan languages. Conrad.Irwin 21:41, 26 March 2008 (UTC)

Re

No problem. I'm getting into Wiktionary more (I'm a word nerd), and I quite like the atmosphere here. :) I've been creating entries for more obscure words and keeping an eye on recent changes and new pages, is there anything else I could do around to help? Thanks for the pointer on deletion policy, I'm still sorting that out as it's different from en.wiki policy. Hopefully I'll see you around! Best regards, Keilana^Parlez 01:47, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

Re: username

Hi, Conrad.Irwin,

I hadn't seen the close conformity rule. Thank you for pointing it out. No, there's no good reason I can't recloak, and I have done so. Sorry for the trouble and confusion. Snakesteuben 12:20, 2 April 2008 (UTC)

---

This I had seen.

In general, avoid requesting a change. It is much easier to create a new account, or even easier, change your signature (in your preferences), which will change your "public appearance". Bear in mind that renaming a user is resource-intensive and at all times done with reluctance.

I believe you should change the part in bold. I think it's misleading, since apparently it contradicts your true policies.

I do not believe it's necessary to put anyone through something resource intensive just to make on-line life conform to real life. As I already said, I've recloaked my account. I'm starting to think that perhaps karma is telling me that in fact I should do so and keep a lower profile. Snakesteuben 15:50, 2 April 2008 (UTC)

I have rewritten the intro to that page which was very out of date, I am sorry to have mislead you. Conrad.Irwin 17:18, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

isblocked.js

Thanks (again) for this. Is there a way to get it to work on action=edit pages, too? (There's some need for it; e.g., if I go to add {{subst:test}} to a page, it'd be good to know that the user's blocked first. Even better would be to have "indefinitely" in that little pink box for cases where it's true, but that maybe asking too much....) Anyway, thanks again.—msh210℠ 16:09, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

Should have fixed both of those now. If you want to format the date nicerly, I'm sure you can work out some funky regexp to insert into the code, please feel free to edit it. Conrad.Irwin 17:17, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

Thanks!—msh210℠ 18:04, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

categorizing

Hi, you're getting an _ in the infl template parameter "verb_form", as in this edit. You can use %20 in URL syntax to get a space. Robert Ullmann 16:10, 6 April 2008 (UTC)

Fixed - was just having fun with Wiktionary:Categorizing/Autoedit, Mutante's excellent effort. Conrad.Irwin 22:14, 6 April 2008 (UTC)

Show on left and IE7 freezing

Thanks for finding a way for us to experiment. Running a large-scale experiment to test user reaction is also nice, though it may not be too productive on this matter. If you make it system-wide, then you could leave some code allowing folks who like the old way to go back.

I find that IE7 freezes whenever I refresh a wiktionary page. (As I write this I realize that I haven't experimented with WP and WSp.) Do you have any idea why it might or where else I should go to make enquiry. DCDuring TALK 12:37, 7 April 2008 (UTC)

It can be made into a WT:PREF reasonably trivially. I believe Connel also has a problem to do with refreshing on IE 7, though that was only the WOTD template. Is it something that has started recently, or has it always been this way, it may be that we can track down a JS or CSS change that caused it. Conrad.Irwin 12:42, 7 April 2008 (UTC)

No wonder he was so interested when the IE freeze complaint came in from Feedback. I thought he was thinking of users. It has been this way for a while. I just tested refresh at WSp and WP and it works fine there. Do you have a list of admins or heavy users who use the various browsers for your testing purposes? I'm too lazy to change to Firefox, but the inconvenience of trying to get IE to terminate using Task Manager might change that. It takes a couple of minutes to terminate. I get two images of IE in the applications window of Task Manager. CPU utilization is 98-100% for iexplore.exe. I'm fairly sure that it started happening right after I started using the admin tools (Jan 2008), so it might well be from some time ago. But it could also be from some suggestion about using WT:PREFS before I became an admin (perhaps Nov-Dec 2007). That's my best recollection, which isn't even reliable in its vagueness. DCDuring TALK 12:57, 7 April 2008 (UTC)

Do you need me to tell you what options I've selected in WT:Prefs or elsewhere? DCDuring TALK 13:00, 7 April 2008 (UTC)

Well I run linux, so the old copy of internet explorer six that has been imported is (if you can imagine it) even less stable than on Windows, so I'm not sure if any problems I have with it are caused by the site or it just generally dieing. For testing in IE, I tend to rely on the IRC channel, as there is generally someone in there who doesn't mind opening it up for me. If you are willing to waste a few moments experimenting, it might be worth trying a refresh first with Javascript turned off (which you can do in Internet Options, under Advanced I think) just to reassure us that it is the javascript causing this. Secondly, if you don't mind - re-enabling Javascript but clearing your cookies and cache for Wiktionary (again Internet Options, its easiest to clear everything - but you can selectively delete them) which will have the double effect of logging you out, and removing all the Javascript files that power WT:PREFS. If you (or anyone else reading my talk page) ever get round to testing those two things, please let me know what you find. Conrad.Irwin 13:23, 7 April 2008 (UTC)

Internet Tools Options Advanced lets me disable Sun's Java, but I saw nothing about Java as a whole. MS has its own, doesn't it? Disabling that and reloading caused a less dramatic, but also total freeze with a message about loading monobook.

I'm going to hold off until I see your response to the basic test and Bob's below. DCDuring TALK 14:37, 7 April 2008 (UTC)

With IE 7 (7.0.5730.13, WinXP Home + SP2 + current updates): without selecting WT:PREFS, (and having never done so it IE7), soft refresh (F5) works fine. Go to WT:PREFS (must refresh that page the first time to see the list), turn on, select Lupin popups, nothing else. Save settings works, go to another page (page ;-), and F5 causes IE to "freeze", 100% CPU and (not responding). Killed in Task Manager, died immediately. Restart IE, go to WT:PREFS, uncheck popups, but leave PREFS enabled, save settings, go to page again, F5 works correctly. Robert Ullmann 13:52, 7 April 2008 (UTC)

Ok, thank you both! I have started a thread at Wiktionary:Grease_pit#Refresh_crashes_IE7 to get more people involved. DCDuring, javascript != java (don't ask me why they chose the names that they did) - but I am fairly sure that Robert's findings will be repeatable, so feel free to unchange whatever settings and go back to normal. I think that this is likely caused by the popups pref, as it is absolutely huge and is being loaded from a remote site - but we'll try and find out more details on the WT:GP. Conrad.Irwin 14:48, 7 April 2008 (UTC)

{{trans-top}} and cie

Hi Conrad,

The gloss-text in translations tables used to have a bit of cushion on the left (I'd say “padding”, but I'm not sure if it was actually padding-left as opposed to margin-left or something), and no longer seems to. I'm guessing this is a consequence of one of your recent changes; do you have any thoughts what might have caused it and how to undo that without rolling back all the beneficial changes?

Thanks in advance! :-)
—Ruakh_TALK 01:13, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

Oh, wait, n/m. I just hard-refreshed (which I should have done before commenting!) and it's O.K. now. I guess I must have gotten an in-the-middle-of-changes version of something. Sorry about that! —Ruakh_TALK 01:15, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

Sorry, it was a non-essential change, partly to allow people to experiment properly with the appearance of the toggles, and partly just to make it neater codewise. It was either going to leave a silly left-margin for a month or however long it takes for cache's to clear, or no left-margin until the next refresh, I went with the latter in the hope that it would be over sooner. Conrad.Irwin 10:56, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

Harshing my mellow

The term is generally expressed by an individual. A neutral term is not the best choice. Do a google search ands see. Evrik 17:18, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

Re: popups.js

Ah, superb. That's exactly what I was looking for, and no amount of Googling led me to it! Thanks! Matt.smart 10:48, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

phyto-

Hi - thanks for your messages. It sounds as though you may have a different editing culture here than at Wikipedia - over there we welcome the kinds of edits I'm making, and don't discourage new editors from making them - we just get on and do the cleaning up. I want to add this content with the minimum amount of work for me (selfish, sorry!), and then go away; I hope that explains the nature of my edits.

It's been agreed over at Wikipedia that this content should be transwikied - it's no longer in Wikipedia as article content. If its transwikied, please could you tell me what I need to do regarding source acknowledgement? Thanks 82.46.24.62 17:42, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

Hi again. I'm afraid I can't see the content in the Sandbox. Can you copy it back to the article page so I can continue working on it there? If I get no interruptions, I'll be done in about 10 minutes. 82.46.24.62 17:50, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for tracking down Phyto-, that explains where the trasnwikied content went. What's the best way forward, given that that exists? 82.46.24.62 17:57, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for the header suggestion - that's only one extra cut & paste per page, so won't be too onerous - I'll do that for future pages I create. Are you happy to sweep up the mess at the pages created so far, or do you want me to do that as well? 82.46.24.62 18:05, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

OK, I'll do those as well. I think that means all the issues you raised are resolved - is that correct? 82.46.24.62 18:10, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for the latest two replies. I do need to add the content to the bottom of the phyto- page temporarily though, in order to complete this task. It'll be there for a maximum of fifteen minutes - or alternatively we can do this in smaller bursts if that's an unacceptably long amount of time for the page to remain messy in one go. Maybe we can put something on the page to indicate that the content below the Derived terms heading is in the process of being edited? 82.46.24.62 18:18, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

I can't edit phyto- and view the other two pages at the same time. 82.46.24.62 18:22, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

User:Keene has suggested a compromise and made an edit to phyto- accordingly. I'm happy to support his approach; can you let me know whether you would be too? If so, I'll do the same for the other prefixes/suffixes and then I can get out of here and leav you in peace. 82.46.24.62 18:29, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

"Failing to understand something basic" ... possibly, yes - or it's my inability to communicate the problem. If you were sat here with me you'd realise the problem, I'm sure. Anyway, happy to go do this either my way or Keene's way, whichever you prefer. 82.46.24.62 18:32, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

Re: userboxes

Hi, Conrad. Thanks much. I've made (what's probably a rather annoying) request for waivers on the discussion page.

But I'll compromise with you, and I'll forego the next one I was going to create. (Seriously) "If this user picks on you, then she probably likes you."

;-P Snake Stubborn xx 2008-04-13 T 06:49 UTC

Yeah, I'm pretty certain that "If this user picks on you, then she probably likes you" would be deleted within, ooh, maybe 2 hours maximum. Keene 06:57, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

Space

I didn't notice that you had removed the space from the beginning of trans-top just a few days ago when I wrote it's different from rel-top. What do you think if they both had one "nbsp;" instead of two that used to be there? At least when the "show" tag is on the left it's good to have some little space in between. Now these two templates are anyway different in this regard so they would need to be edited. You commented in your monobook file that 'I wish there was a "disable personal css" checkbox' and I agree with you very much. If I have something in my monobook file and I'd like to look at how things look without it, I needed to edit that file every time (of course to log out works for a brief check). Best regards Rhanyeia♥♫ 13:09, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

I forgot that there might be other hacked in templates ;). The spaces should be removed as they are not part of the content of the page, just artifacts that can be exactly replicated using CSS. I will remove them from rel-top too, this will give us more flexibility. Maybe a bug report needs filing ;). Conrad.Irwin 13:18, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

To add some space in between when the "show" tag is on the left is done from the monobook file? Could you advise me how to do that please? Best regards Rhanyeia♥♫ 17:37, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

I'm not sure quite what you mean, but you should be able to add margin-left: 10px; or margin-right: 10px; to the example I gave to add space on the left and right of the [show] tag. If you meant something else, I'll try and guess again. Conrad.Irwin 17:39, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

Thank you, that's what I meant. :) Can I also somehow test to get the letters of "show" bigger? I tried that earlier but I couldn't make it work. Best regards Rhanyeia♥♫ 17:49, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

Phew! At the moment the font-size is set to smaller, you could try font-size: inherit !important; to get it the same size as the title, or font-size: 120% !important; to make it bigger. Conrad.Irwin 17:53, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

Thank you very much, and I'm sorry if those questions seemed stupid. I can usually use margins, I still don't know why I didn't just test it first, maybe I wanted to know what would be the so called "right" way to do it so that I could write about it to the Beer parlour conversation. When I tried the font-size earlier I didn't add "!important" after it. I wonder where the font is set and could I maybe test different font styles for it too. Best regards Rhanyeia♥♫ 18:14, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

The font is the site default, and I would think that changing it from "sans-serif" will just lead to compatibility problems for someone. If you want to try it out though font-family: "Times New Roman" !important should work. Conrad.Irwin 18:17, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

It wasn't using "sans-serif". When I made the font size normal I noticed that it used a different font than the rest of the text, but I couldn't find it from MediaWiki:Monobook.css. I tested "sans-serif" now, and with bold it looks quite good. But I have to go now, I'll probably get back to it later in the Beer parlour. Thank you for your help, and fixing the templates. :) Best regards Rhanyeia♥♫ 18:45, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

Re: Deletions, etc.

Eeek! I keep forgetting how observant, conscientious, and proactive a few of you can be! I had thought my boss was the one doin' the deletin' over there, and that space was serving the dual purpose of keeping him informed. Maybe not, huh? Oeps! (Anyway, I've edited the page now, and I'll send Ivan a standard minion report later.) Many thanks, though! <giggle> Winter/User:Snakesteuben 17:26, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

Wiktionary appendix:Geologic timescale

There are lots of references to this. Could you fix them please? SemperBlotto 22:15, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

Yes, I will do it now. Thank you for pointing them out, I'll see if I can review the list of pages that I've left in this state. Conrad.Irwin 22:18, 15 April 2008 (UTC)