User talk:Timwi/Archive/Aug 04 - Sep 04

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[edit] "Osaka prefecture" v. "Osaka Prefecture"

I noticed that you're decapitalizing "prefecture" in all the article titles related to prefectures of Japan. As far as I know, the word "prefecture" should be capitalized in both American and British English since it is part of a proper name. We have discussed this in Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style for Japan-related articles, and I encourage you to explain your reasoning there for the benefit of the rest of us. -- Sekicho 18:15, Aug 6, 2004 (UTC)

Before I started, half of them were capitalised and half weren't, but all the article texts themselves consistently used the word "prefecture" in lower-case. Hence the easiest way for me to achieve consistency was to move those that were capitalised to be non-capitalised. — Additionally, I really don't think they should be capitalised. The reason why we put "prefecture" there is to distinguish it from a city of the same name. This is done with other sub-country entities too: districts, oblasts, etc. Diverging from geography a bit, I also see it like for example German language or Pascal programming language — certainly you wouldn't consider that part of the name and capitalise it too. — To be fair, I should point out that the issue was brought up here on my Talk page before, and has been moved to Talk:Prefectures of Japan; notice how nobody replied to the request for a link to the supposedly previously-reached agreement. — Timwi 18:31, 6 Aug 2004 (UTC)
Capitalizing the full name is a convention for every geographic article in Wikipedia. Note that you don't see titles like Dominican republic, New York city, Cook county, Illinois, Hong Kong special autonomous region, Narita international airport, Amazon river, Ural mountains, Irish sea, or Subic bay. Capitalizing the word "prefecture" is a rule of English grammar, not just a Wikipedia convention. (The word was left uncapitalized in those articles because the articles were created by a non-native speaker of English.) - Sekicho 20:30, Aug 6, 2004 (UTC)
OK, well, as I said, all I really wanted is consistency within that set of articles. If you want them capitalised, please do feel free to change it back, but do it everywhere, including the article text. — Timwi 21:23, 6 Aug 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Prefectural messup

Under the guise of making the article names match the Template:Japan, I have moved the following articles out of their new positions... (before I was kindly informed I was in error)

Saitama Prefecture, Chiba Prefecture, Aomori Prefecture, Akita Prefecture, Okayama Prefecture, Hyogo Prefecture, Mie Prefecture, Kyoto Prefecture, Nara Prefecture, Aichi Prefecture, Wakayama Prefecture

I apologize for any inconvenience. -- EmperorBMA|話す 21:15, 8 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Nevermind, the articles timed out so I am reverting. -- EmperorBMA|話す 23:06, 8 Aug 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Lojban language file

Could you check the file which I posted to wikipedia-l on 7-30? It's not complete, but it should have the stuff that appears most often translated, and the internal links should be consistent. Also, initial capitalization should be turned off, as that's not normally done in Lojban. -phma 13:22, 10 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Sorry, you're talking to the wrong person. I don't have any access to the servers. — Timwi 16:38, 10 Aug 2004 (UTC)
Who is the right person, then? Angela says you have CVS access, and then someone who has shell access can update the code on the server. -phma 19:11, 10 Aug 2004 (UTC)
I've had a look at the file. It is old-style. I can only commit it to the 1.3 branch. — As you already pointed out, someone else will have to do the work on the actual servers, including setting the capitalisation option. — Timwi 19:31, 10 Aug 2004 (UTC)
How do I convert it to the latest version? I'll also need to know this so that when Wikitravel (which is currently running 1.2.3) is upgraded, we can upgrade the French file (which is a bit different from the one in Wikipedia). -phma 04:20, 11 Aug 2004 (UTC)
If you are upgrading to 1.3, you still want the old format. — As an example for the new format, see LanguageDe.php in CVS HEAD — in particular, notice how almost all of the arrays like the month names and the math rendering options have been moved to the general messages array so they can be customised using the MediaWiki namespace. — Timwi 14:44, 11 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Hi Timwi. I pointed Pierre to you for help with the lojban language file as I thought the most time consuming part of this was checking the language file before committing it, and I knew you would be able to do this, which would make it a lot easier for someone with access to put it live. Also, I had the impression you were more accepting of the controversial languages than Tim Starling was since you were involved with the Klingon Wikipedia. enjylys. 23:09, Aug 10, 2004 (UTC)

Ooh, I like it! A little problem (besides that a lot of it isn't translated yet): in the edit form "galfi djunoi" (Editing help) goes to the "uikipedias" namespace, which should exist, but doesn't. As that namespace is referred to by the variable $wgMetaNamespace, I wasn't sure how to get it to work right. "prenu:" and "User:" go to the same namespace, which is good as it keeps links on my talk page from breaking, as do "pixra:" and "Image:". -phma 03:05, 12 Aug 2004 (UTC)

I have some more translated (most of what users see most of the time). Should I put it on meta (the page of language update requests claims to be deprecated) or email it to you? -phma 21:31, 17 Aug 2004 (UTC)

[edit] "Edit this box"?

Why did you put an "Edit this box" link in the Saffir-Simpson template? Are you putting these in all template tables? --Golbez 03:08, 12 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Well, I've put them in two or three before. I noticed that many boxes had them. — Why might you not want it? Clearly it's the perfect way of making editing it easier for newbies. Seeing {{blah}} doesn't exactly tell newbies they need to go to [[Template:Blah]]. — Timwi 03:11, 12 Aug 2004 (UTC)
It's a bit of an eyesore, that's all. Perhaps the best thing to do would be to give the URL in comments in the article? (Of course, that would require changing all the articles... hrm.) Maybe I'll look at making it prettier, if needed. But you do have a point, it can be difficult to find templates to edit them, and we do want them editing things. --Golbez 17:09, 13 Aug 2004 (UTC)


[edit] Naming convention for television articles

Hi. Seeing as you were once previously interested in a naming convention, I'd like to invite you to vote on adoption of Wikipedia:Naming conventions (television). Voting is taking place on the Talk page and ends on Sep 13 2004. -- Netoholic 23:21, 22 Aug 2004 (UTC)

[edit] List-of-people-by-name Glitch

Could you please take a look at LoPbN: Go's history and let me know whether you think this may have been done by an automated procedure to other similarly situated LoPbN-tree pages? I dread searching for them. TIA. --Jerzy(t) 02:57, 2004 Aug 27 (UTC)

I can't figure out what happened there, but since you fixed it, I don't see what's wrong? — Timwi 17:15, 27 Aug 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Translation request

I put it up on Wikipedia:Translation into English, but I'm asking here because (a) your name was listed, and (b) I kinda have an interest in this one. If you could merge de:Paragraph 175 (Geschichte) into Paragraph 175, it'd mean a bunch to me. Thanks! (Honest, I'd do it if I could speak a word of German...) grendel|khan 23:03, 2004 Aug 30 (UTC)

Sorry, I don't think I'll get around to this anytime soon. History isn't my field of interest. :) — Timwi 22:48, 1 Sep 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Wikipedia:List of Wikipedians by most recent edit

Hi there! I see you've had a lot to do with this page (Wikipedia:List of Wikipedians by most recent edit) in the past. Have you any plans to update it in future? Just a thought:-) David Cannon 11:20, 1 Sep 2004 (UTC)

I can't remember the SQL query I used. Do you know it? — Timwi 22:40, 1 Sep 2004 (UTC)
Never mind, found it. Page updated. :-) — Timwi 23:26, 1 Sep 2004 (UTC)
Thanks! It looks great! David Cannon 11:26, 2 Sep 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Edit attribution

Hi Timwi. Edits from your IP have now been reattributed to your username. Regards — Kate Turner | Talk 00:02, 2004 Sep 5 (UTC)

[edit] Asteroid moon double-redirects

When I put the redirect from S/2001 (22) 1 to Linus (asteroid) instead of directly to 22 Kalliope, I was thinking ahead to the day when the moonlet will have its own page instead of being integrated with its primary's article. Do we really need to set ourselves up for more work when that day comes? (This double-redirect-fix has happened with a couple of other asteroid moons before, I think) In other words, what, exactly, is the crying technical need for no double redirects? — Urhixidur 11:38, 2004 Sep 7 (UTC)

A double-redirect doesn't send the user to the destination page directly, but instead displays some confusing (for casual readers, at least) gibberish on the screen. Turning the redirect back when you create the article shouldn't be too much work. You might as well start the article already ;-) — Timwi 13:12, 7 Sep 2004 (UTC)
Hadn't bothered to test it before, but it seems Wiki follows the first redirect but doesn't process the second, right? In which case you're right that it was a bad idea to put in the double redirect in the first place.
Urhixidur 15:09, 2004 Sep 7 (UTC)
Hi Urh. I'm not Timwi :-) but see Wikipedia:Double redirect for a brief explanation. — Kate Turner | Talk 15:12, 2004 Sep 7 (UTC)


[edit] What's that for?

The reason for the HTML text in the Trinity College, Cambridge article (which you removed) was that it's an inline comment - see Wikipedia:Manual of Style#Make comments invisible. Its purpose was to enable all the Category statements for the article (there's only one so far) to be grouped under one invisible (except to editors) heading. You may find the same in some other articles, as well as a similar entry for the Interwiki foreign language links. I did not invent this. Ian Cairns 19:43, 9 Sep 2004 (UTC)

I know what HTML comments are. The Manual of Style section you linked to explains that HTML comments should be used to indicate missing information in an article or other things that are important to the actual contents of the actual article. It is pointless and wasteful to put something like <!-- Categories --> above a category tag. ("Look! The links that begin with "Category:" are category links! Didn't you know that?") Same for inter-wiki links. — Timwi 13:48, 10 Sep 2004 (UTC)
Thanks for that. The Manual of Style referred to "If you want to communicate with other potential editors" without specifying particular reasons. This was the relevant part to which I was referring. I understand that, for an article within a single category (e.g. Trinity College), the 'overhead' of the comment line is probably too great to bear. However, on articles with several categories and / or multiple interwiki connections, these comments can add some semblance of (albeit unofficial) structure to the article, and might just help avoid future editors dropping category / interwiki links at random places within articles, etc. Ian Cairns 22:28, 10 Sep 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Deletion

Please watch your tone. I'm well aware of the speedy deletion policy, so there's no need to talk down to me. The article, as it was, fitted exactly under speedy deletion #4. Apparently, there was a "satellite network" (red link), somewhere in the world, called Zee Network. Which tells you absolutely nothing, and is, thus, a speedy candidate, not a VFD candidate. Which I would've told you if you had *asked* me on IRC before making this condescending post on my talk page and simply undeleting it. I'm not undoing it now, as at least I now know that it's a *television* network, and thus, perhaps tips it out of the speedy deletion criteria. Ambi 09:32, 16 Sep 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Parsing wikitext

I was trying to bring the parsing expression grammar article to the attention of someone who was engaged in rewriting the Wikitext parser. Unfortunately I've been suffering lately from IE (in cahoots with our firewall) dropping out during edits and I now cannot recall who it was I was trying to contact. I notice that you have done some work on the parsing system, and I wonder if you could help me to identify the proper person to annoy talk to about this. --Phil | Talk 14:12, Sep 16, 2004 (UTC)

I'm not sure why you are specifically looking for someone involved in the development of MediaWiki. What you want is a computer science graduate. (Incidentally, though, I am one. :-) ) — You haven't specified what exactly you think is the problem with the article. Myself, I see the problem that it is very recursive-descent-parser-centric. It talks about look-ahead techniques (the & and ! operators) that are not available in LALR parsers, which are the most common due to the popularity of Yacc. Is this what you wanted me to help with? — Timwi 21:50, 16 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Sorry, my bad, I should have made myself clearer. What I meant was: is this type of grammar suitable for describing Wikitext, and would a packrat parser be a good replacement for the one Mediawiki currently uses? --Phil | Talk 08:28, Sep 17, 2004 (UTC)

This type of grammar is certainly suitable for describing wiki text. I don't know about packrat parsers (I might read that article later, don't have time now), so I can't comment on this. — But in practice, just about any grammar will be suitable for describing wiki text, and so it makes more sense to use the one that yacc (resp. bison) can understand and turn into a parser. I don't know of a parser generator that generates a packrat parser. Yacc/bison make an LALR parser, and so I'll be using that. — Timwi 10:05, 17 Sep 2004 (UTC)

OK, I was just wondering because of all the problems with the abortive dash-conversion feature and the well-known problem with nested apostrophes. I didn't know Yacc/Bison could generate PHP code, or am I misunderstanding the situation? (Having said which, the generators for packrat parsers are apparently all in Java or something, so not yet much help :-) --Phil | Talk 13:15, Sep 17, 2004 (UTC)

My parser will be in C and will be compiled into a static object which can be loaded into PHP. I would think that Java would be a very bad choice in this case. — Timwi 13:49, 17 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Aha! I was under the (obviously, now!) mistaken impression that Mediawiki was written in pure PHP. Won't that make it harder to port to other platforms? --Phil | Talk 14:24, Sep 17, 2004 (UTC)

MediaWiki is written in PHP, although it supports several extensions. For example, there exists already an external diff engine as a shared object. I'm not sure if Wikimedia uses it. Also, the mathematical formulae are generated by an extension that is written in Ocaml. — Another shared-object PHP extension won't make MediaWiki less portable because other sites can continue to use the old PHP parser. But if the lex/yacc parser's performance gain and bug decrease is significant, then portability is not a negative criterion for Wikimedia. — Timwi 14:48, 17 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Not quite certain I follow: are you saying that you're not bothered whether it's portable as long as you can make it fly on one particular platform? --Phil | Talk 07:53, Sep 21, 2004 (UTC)

Perhaps you are confusing Wikimedia and MediaWiki. The Wikimedia Foundation will prefer a fast and bug-free parser over a portable one. Other sites that happen to use the MediaWiki software are free to continue to use the old PHP parser if portability is an issue for them. Since I have little interest in other sites, I will not focus on portability. — But even so, I highly doubt that any site will have any real problems using the lex/yacc parser. It might work even for users who don't have root access (since you can place the shared-object file in the wiki directory), and I'm sure that PHP for Windows and Mac OS X can also use shared objects/DLLs, and free compilers for these platforms exist. — Timwi 12:13, 21 Sep 2004 (UTC)

[edit] CSS

Any idea how to get rid of the external link icons using MediaWiki:monobook.css?--Eloquence

#bodyContent a[href ^="http://"] { padding-right: 0; background: none; } — Timwi 18:02, 18 Sep 2004 (UTC)
That kinda works, but it still leaves spacing in place where there is a link followed by a period or a comma. Is it possible to get rid of it entirely, or do we need to change the mother stylesheet for that?--Eloquence
This is, unfortunately, an actual bug in MediaWiki. It has been fixed in 1.4, but in the currently running code, that space is actually there. :( — Timwi 12:19, 19 Sep 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Talk:Grico

Hello, thanks for spotting and fixing the double redirect on this page. Etz Haim 22:59, 20 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Heh. I always find it amusing when I fix a few hundred double-redirects, and then someone thanks me for a particular one. :-) — Timwi 12:13, 21 Sep 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Polish Geography

Perhaps you might be interested in the Wikipedia:WikiProject Polish Voivodships. [[User:Halibutt|Halibutt]] 19:04, Sep 22, 2004 (UTC)

... Huh?! ... Why would I?? — Timwi 10:37, 23 Sep 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Philosophy of copyright

Why did you remove the cleanup template from the Philosophy of copyright article? This article should be deleted if it doesn't get cleaned up, imho. I'm relisting it on WP:Cleanup. ~leif 00:52, 24 Sep 2004 (UTC)

I deleted it because at the time I was under the impression that general concensus had shifted towards only listing the pages on WP:Cleanup, but not adding a pointless tag to the article in question. I suppose this concensus has not actually established, so feel free to re-add the tag. — Timwi 10:28, 24 Sep 2004 (UTC)

[edit] thx

Hi Timwi,

perhaps this is not the correct place but I'd like to think your for fixing the bug that images in templates showed up as unused. That's working wonderfully! TeunSpaans 09:32, 25 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Heh. This is indeed the wrong place. I didn't fix that bug. I didn't even know about it. But I'm glad I could be of help! ;-) — Timwi 09:39, 25 Sep 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Template:Disambig

I reverted you change to Template:Disambig, not because I necessarily disagree, but because there is currently a lively discussion on what the template should look like. (See Template talk:Disambig.) Many people have been making "bold" changes (that affect over 10,000 pages), and overwriting each other's changes. We're trying to work toward consensus on the talk page instead. – Quadell (talk) (help)[[]] 21:00, Sep 30, 2004 (UTC)

Feel free to work towards consensus as to what it should look like, and once you've reached consensus, make the necessary changes in the right places. The layout information should not be in Template:Disambig but instead in MediaWiki:Monobook.css. — Timwi 21:02, 30 Sep 2004 (UTC)
Timwi... the styles being defined in the template can be overridden by you changing your own User:Timwi/monobook.css file. As boilerplate text, this should not be defined in the global Monobook. Please discontinue removing style elements from the message. -- Netoholic @ 21:31, 2004 Sep 30 (UTC)
Styles cannot be overridden using User CSS if you specify them in the style attribute of a div element! This is the entire reason I am asking you to move them to Monobook.css. That way they are overridable, and they have the same effect for people who don't override them. — Timwi 23:10, 30 Sep 2004 (UTC)
I understand your reasoning, Timwi, but please stop making changes to the template without discussing. If there is a consensus to do so, then great. Until then, it's inappropriate. – Quadell (talk) (help)[[]] 22:05, Sep 30, 2004 (UTC)
No, it is inappropriate for style information to be forced by a style attribute, especially when we have the Monobook.css mechanism for exactly this purpose. Move the style definitions to Monobook.css. It will have the same effect visually. But it will be more customisable for advanced users. — Timwi 23:10, 30 Sep 2004 (UTC)
You may want to consider using the "!important" rule in your CSS - see http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/cascade.html#important-rules . -- Netoholic @ 00:41, 2004 Oct 1 (UTC)
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