User talk:Topbanana/Archive

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This page contains haphazardly archived content from User talk:Topbanana

I think you missed something on Loch Leven (highlands): "There are seven small near the western end." Seven small what's? Rmhermen 16:09, Apr 29, 2004 (UTC)

Ah, islands. Good catch, ta. TB 16:36, 29 Apr 2004 (UTC)

(Discussion of the Glen Albyn article with Eoghan moved to Talk:Glen Albyn)

The 216.239.89.* vandal (Frederick Lowy) has also targeted Concordia University, perhaps you could consider adding that page to your watchlist? (Not to mention Paul Newman and Holocaust, but I think lots of people already watch those pages). P.T. Aufrette 18:13, 6 May 2004 (UTC)

Sure thing. TB 23:12, 6 May 2004 (UTC)

TB, thanks for your kind comments. Adam 07:47, 7 May 2004 (UTC)

Hi, you marked Christina Ferrare as being a candidate for speedy deletion, which I'm not convinced it is. What grounds were you trying to delete it on? I think you should go through VfD if you want it deleted on account of the person not being famous enough, or cleanup if it just needs more work. Angela. 00:32, May 25, 2004 (UTC)

  • Eeep - I meant {{msg:stub}}, not {{msg:delete}}. Good catch, well spotted. - TB 05:48, 25 May 2004 (UTC)

Wikipedia database inconsistencies

It isn't something I can fix but I asked Tim Starling about it and he suggested that, as the IDs are consecutive, it may have been caused by a race condition; just someone hitting the move button four times in a row. I don't know if it will be fixed though. Angela. 15:49, May 26, 2004 (UTC)

Okay, ta. The duplicate IDs can be seen here - is there any way this cn be fixed, perhaps by deleting and recreating the articles or similar? - TB 21:12, 27 May 2004 (UTC)

List of Gulag camps

Item 446: (1) Actually, it is mostly Polish, autamotacally conveted from a Polish offical document. I started "decyphering" it, but unfortunately got distracted fo a long time. Yes; item 446 is two items (messed in the original as well). Mikkalai

Image:Image: reports

Hello! Your reports are very valuable, good job! I have a small request: could you run a search for all articles including images with a double Image:. This worked with the old parser, but no longer works in 1.3. Thanks ✏ Sverdrup 11:18, 5 Jun 2004 (UTC)

  • See User:Topbanana/Reports/This page contains an odd-looking image link. This is a very quick report, simply checking form "Image:Image:" anywhere in an articles text. If this is a common mistake I'll work up something cleverer that shows *links* starting with the offending string. - TB 23:29, Jun 5, 2004 (UTC)
    Excellent quick work! I will work my way through the list. ✏ Sverdrup 11:02, 6 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Your reports are great. Have you thought about advertising them some more, such as on the scripting requests page, and possibly moving them into the Wikipedia namespace? Angela. 01:48, May 25, 2004 (UTC)

If you'd like to restock most wanted stubs (and you appear to have the capability to do so) I'm currently offering a reward. Even if not, I'll be busy for a long while with the great reports you have up now. --Ben Brockert 02:45, May 25, 2004 (UTC)
Thanks all for your kind comments - I do intend to advertise these reports, but have a number of problems to fix yet - for example links containing HTML character codes. They'll be done in a week or two, at which point I intend to write up instructions on how to recreate them and move the the wikipedia namespace. In the meantime you're very welcome indeed to make use of the lists and/or copy them on an ad-hoc basis to the editable wikipedia pages. - TB 05:48, 25 May 2004 (UTC)

Double words

It would be interesting with a report for pages with repeated words, for example "a test of the the report". It is a fairly common mistake. Perhaps it should initially be limited to common prepositions and other short english words (e.g. "of", "the", "at", "with", "on"). - David Remahl 13:35, 6 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Sure thing, an easy one to do. There a list showing just repeated the's, of's and and's (eek, there's another one!) at User:Topbanana/Reports/This_article_contains_a_repeated_word. Other than picked three rnadom articles to check they do contain the problem being searched for, I've not tested the accuracy or usefulness of the list, so all feedback welcome. - TB 08:50, Jun 8, 2004 (UTC)
Works fine! I've looked at 38 so far. 32 of them were actual faults, five were false alarms (mostly due to The The) and one has apparently been corrected since the database dump. Seems like a nice addition to the report suite! I'll work through some more soon (I think I'll write a python script for the purpose of working through them efficiently :-)). David Remahl 10:08, 8 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Excellent news, thanks. If there are other repeated words you'd like listed, add sections to the report and I'll fill them in when I get a chance. - TB 10:15, Jun 8, 2004 (UTC)

Link to back-redirect

Some pages may have wikilinks (for example under See also), that #'redirect back.

Example: Page1 links to Page2, Page2 contains #'REDIRECT Page1.

An adjacency matrix where only REDIRECTs are counted as incoming edges and all links as outgoing, doing M^2, and then finding all non-0's along the diagonal seems like an efficient way to solve it...

David Remahl 22:13, 9 Jun 2004 (UTC)

A nice idea. However, with over 175000 redirect pages in the en database alone, that's a 175000^2 bit = 3.5GB adjacency matrix - my humble little database server just couldn't cope with that, sorry. I've run a more conventional database query looking for 2-loops and 3-loops and found none so far. A check for 4-loops will run overnight. - TB 22:58, Jun 9, 2004 (UTC)
Oh, are there _that_ many redirects! I await the results. The reason I thought about it, was that I saw someone fixing a problem like it earlier today. At least that should appear in your search (since the database is old). I don't remember the exact one. David Remahl
Ah I see what you mean now - I had been looking for closed loops of redirects. Over 2000 instances found, listed at User:Topbanana/Reports/This article links to a redirect back to itself. Enjoy - TB 02:17, Jun 10, 2004 (UTC)

Mis-spelled Links

Happy to help! Like I said on the Village Pump, I actually find it quite a relaxing way to do something useful without stretching the brain too much. Look at the article, look at the suggested link, hit up Google or the IMDB or the All Music Guide or whatever for verification if it's not obviously right or wrong—then move on to the next one.. :-) —Stormie 00:09, Jun 5, 2004 (UTC)

TB, these lists are great. Mis-spelled links is a nice training-wheels task for me. :) Boojum 14:30, 4 Jun 2004 (UTC)


List of female boxers Hi, Top Banana! How are you? I found your name rather interesting, as a matter of a fact, it reminded me of a Puerto Rican music group, Top Banana, which scored a HUGE English hit on Puerto Rico's radio in 1989: Soooociety!! Killed by who?, aha, aha aha!..LOL great song.

Anyways, thank you for reading the List of female boxers I originated. I always feel honored when people read the articles I originate.

I saw you listed it on your User:Topbanana/Reports/This page contains a link that might be misspelled page. I think that is ok, but the problem is, the Bridget Riley written about here is, actually, a painter, not the Bridgett Riley who gained certain fame as a boxer in the middle 1990s (I think the boxer's nickname was The Pink Assasin, by the way, just a little extra info) :)

But thanks for your good willed effort to try to correct tat and I hope we can talk again some time soon. God bless you!

Sincerely yours, Antonio More Nicotine, please! Martin

Howdy, Antonio. The list your article appears on is automatically generated by a system that picks out articles with names very like those that are the targets of links to missing articles. Here, there's no article for Bridgett Riley so it's suggesting (wrongly as you point out) Bridget Riley. I've scored out the entry for this in my list for now, although the real way to fix this is to provide an article (even a stub will do) for Bridgett Riley. You do seem to be out resident expert on the subject - can you oblige ? - TB 10:02, Jun 11, 2004 (UTC)

User:Topbanana/Reports/This page contains a link that might be mis-punctuated

Would you have any objection to User:Topbanana/Reports/This page contains a link that might be mis-punctuated being sliced into several pages. I've had a couple of SQL timeouts waiting for it to save ... possibly connected to the 313k length. I'm thinking a-e, g-k, whatever. Happy to do the slicing &c if you wish. See also an alert on capitalisation on that page - not sure the convention gives good enough advice before we hare off & try to sort the errors. --Tagishsimon

Excellent job splitting that up - I was having problems editing it myself earlier but didn't get a chance to split it. As ever, these reports are meant to be kicked about a bit to get the bugs shaken out of them, you're very welcome indeed to edit/criticise/chortle as is appropriate ;) - TB 09:10, Jun 18, 2004 (UTC)

Hats off to you

Add me to the list of those singing the praises of your lists. The dead-end list has been an excellent help in pruning/improving wikipedia ... a great way to use a free half-hour when the brain cells aren't up to creating an original article! DavidWBrooks 15:04, 25 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Disambig pages

Please see User talk:Topbanana/Reports/Nothing links to this disambiguation page. Lupo (at a public terminal and thus not logged in), UTC 07:15, June 16, 2004

Probable punctuation problem

Hey there, TB. Just stumbled upon your user page and noticed a punctuation error in the word "area's" -- that apostrophe should be nixed since its possessive form makes no sense in the context of the sentence. (Alas, my inner stickler is shining through...) --Diberri | Talk 14:50, Jul 6, 2004 (UTC)

: Fixed ta.  My speeling never was up to much ;)  - TB 15:01, Jul 6, 2004 (UTC)

Puny little castles

I like the locator maps you drew for Scottish castles. Maps like that really help the reader! Thanks! --Menchi 23:17, 13 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Aozora Bunko - corrupted link

Howdy. I've been doing some automated checking of links and found what looks to be some corrupted text in a link on Aozora_Bunko:_S. I noticed that you're a regular editor of the page and wondered if you would be able to fix it? Search that page for the first instance of "Shimizurinzou" to see the problem. Any help you can offer will be much appreciated. - TB 13:54, Jun 22, 2004 (UTC)

Sorry for late reply. Those are corrupted because the page is automatically generated by the data I had. I will fix them. Actually I am rather regretful that I have created that page. I did because I could but those pages look quite out of place. Anyway, I appreciate you spoted broken text. -- Taku 09:12, Jul 27, 2004 (UTC)

Sysop

Congratulations! Consensus being reached on RfA, you are now an administrator. You should read the relevant policies and other pages linked to from the administrators' reading list before carrying out tasks like deletion, protection, banning users, and editing protected pages such as the Main Page. Most of what you do is easily reversible by other sysops, apart from page history merges and image deletion, so please be especially careful with those. You might find the new administrators' how-to guide helpful. Cheers! -- Cecropia | Talk 19:14, 11 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Congratulations, you've earned it!

Great that you're finally an admin! Your reports are an extremely useful resource. I forgot to vote on RFA, but naturally it wasn't needed. Have a nice day — David Remahl 19:25, 11 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Print head Thank you for the followup. I have to admit my mind was elsewhere -- phrasing a careful reply to a new user. I didn't even think of looking for a good redirect. Thanks. Oh, and thank you for making your reports available (they are a great help). And since I'm already typing... congratulations on becoming an admin. I honestly thought you were, already. :-) SWAdair | Talk 08:59, 13 Aug 2004 (UTC)

re: VfD

Good afternoon. I just put MOST Bridge back on the VfD discussion page. The consensus is clearly keep but the discussion should be allowed to run it's course so that it can be archived in accordance with the deletion process. I know it seems silly to do this when the 5 days will expire in just a few hours but a couple of us have been trying to improve the archiving process for these old discussions.

I do notice that you said right on the page that you'd "unlink the page from VfD in 24 hours if nobody objects." My fault for not noticing that and commenting earlier. Thanks for your patience. Rossami 18:46, 13 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Battleships

Sorry for not getting back to you for a number of days. I've been in France and out of internet contact.

As for the articles, I created a number of sub-stubs around that time, and whilst I have fleshed some out, far from all of them have had that treatment. I am intending to eventually get round to it, but I wasn't sure when. Since you've highlighted the issue, I'll see what I can do about at least producing a filled in table and a little bit of history for the ships over the next few days. David Newton 20:55, 14 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Quotes in titles

Yes, I deliberately made redirects that included quotes. --Merovingian✍Talk 19:40, Aug 16, 2004 (UTC)

/Reports/Nothing links to this article

Up to a point, Lord Copper. UK railway stations - W, by way of example, is listed on the nothing links page, but many pages link to it by virtue of the {{UKrailwaystations}} doodab. Umm. For what it's worth. Excellent reports, btw. Much fun for times when brain is in idle. --Tagishsimon

Ta for the feedback. The report only takes links from the main en namespace into considers at the moment. I'll look at fixing this in the next generation (or perhaps the one after that). - TB 07:23, Jun 9, 2004 (UTC)

User:Topbanana/Reports/Suggestions for new interwiki links I was working through that list of missing en-de interwiki links, but now you replace that list with en-fr missing links instead. As I have already covered quite a bit of the A-C letters - will there be an update of the german-english list? I think it might make sense to keep separate lists for de and fr, as adding those links is best done by someone who speaks the two languages involved, there were some non-trivial cases. andy 12:04, 21 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Hi Andy, glad to see people making ue of these pages. As you might have noticed, the number of 'bad' entries on the list you were working from was significant - more than 20% - mostly due to poor handling of decorated letters. I'm currently re-vamping the method used to generate the list to improve this, as well as breaking the big down into a number of more specific sub-lists (See the bottom-most entries on User:Topbanana/Reports for some details). Hopefully this should only take a week or so, at which point some equivalent of the en->de list will exist again. IN the meantime if interwikification is your pleasure, why not fix the the 'BC' years? I've linked 100 BC and a few of the years surroung it to 8 new languages - the same needs done to most 'year' pages.

Nothing links to this disambiguation page

TB: Please see my note on User:Topbanana/Reports/Nothing links to this disambiguation page

Thanks!

Kevyn 04:52, 7 Aug 2004 (UTC)

I do apologise, I wasn't aware that anyone was still using this report. I'm without access to a text editor for a day or two, you're very welcome to revert my change, or I'll do it myself ASAP. - TB 20:47, Aug 7, 2004 (UTC)
OK! I've (FINALLY!) finished working with the page, and have blanked it. Kevyn 12:30, 23 Aug 2004 (UTC)
Cheers - if useful I can regenerate that report or similar in the future for you, just shout. For now though I'll discontinue it. - TB 08:02, Aug 25, 2004 (UTC)

Interwiki reports

They should be very useful - great work! Now, what I'd really like to go with it is a list of pages on non-English Wikipedias without interwiki links. :> Warofdreams 19:13, 1 Jun 2004 (UTC)

I'm only working from the en namespace for now, but should be able to convert my scripts to work on others quite easily. Give me another week or two to tidy up my scripts and move all the reports in my user pages to the wikipedia namespace and I'll see what can be done. I suspect at the very least it should be easy to pick out non-reciprocal interwiki links and quickly double out overall interwiki connectedness. - TB 21:33, 2004 Jun 1 (UTC)
Sorry if you didn't want that edited - I'll leave well alone if you want to revert it. It's a useful table, although some indication of what titles the articles in other languages which link to those in English (i.e. the yellow ones) have would be useful - I'm not sure how this could be implemented easily, though. The "interwiki is suggested" page looks good - how did you generate it? Warofdreams 18:45, 8 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Hi TB, these are really useful reports. Is there any chance of an extended version of User:Topbanana/Reports/This_is_one_of_the_most_linked_to_articles? It could be extremely useful (for instance) for checking whether smaller Wikipedias have the articles on the most popular topics. Thanks, Warofdreams 19:45, 25 May 2004 (UTC)

I've extended the list to include the top 300 items for now. I'll have a look at listing popular articles that do not contain interwiki links for you in he next week or two. Poke me if I forget please. - TB 20:30, 25 May 2004 (UTC)

New report request

Topbanana, I love the reports you've put together! I have a request. Could you list all articles that contain "ISBN:"? It's a common mistake when listing an ISBN to say "ISBN: 0-000000-0" instead of "ISBN 0-000000-0", and there's no way to search for this currently. Thanks, – Quadell (talk) (help)[[]] 19:32, Sep 23, 2004 (UTC)

University of Pune

I please you to revert your change on University of Pune page. 196.1.114.14 belong to the university of Pune (find the address of www.unipune.ernet.in). This website doesn't contain copiright data.

Hello, and welcome to Wikipedia. I marked your article as a copyright violation as the web site it is copied from (http://www.unipune.ernet.in/indexout.php) states "Copyright © 2000-2004, University of Pune, all rights reserved". All text included in wikipedia must be released under the GDFL license. If you are the copyright holder and want to release the text, please state this on Talk:University of Pune. Many thanks. - TB 09:49, Aug 5, 2004 (UTC)

ICA Maxi

Howdy. I've been going through the 'redirects to nowhere' list. You changed ICA Maxi into a redirect to the non-existant ICA (supermarket)) on the 17th July. I wanted to check if you have plans to create the target article, please. - TB 20:01, Aug 16, 2004 (UTC)

Thanks for pointing that out! I totally forgot about it. The page has now been created. David Remahl 21:56, 16 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Edit attribution Hi Topbanana. Your edits as 139.133.7.38 have now been reattributed to you. Regards — Kate Turner | Talk 01:27, 2004 Sep 5 (UTC)

Chuvashs

Hi Topbanana!

A Chuvash is a Turkic nation, not person who live in Chuvashia.

--Untifler 14:49, 12 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Thanks for the clarification, Untifler. I've modified your correction to the page a little bit to make it a bit easier to read. I'd appreciate your checking that what's there now is accurate. - TB 08:27, Aug 13, 2004 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject Geography of Poland

I started Wikipedia:WikiProject Geography of Poland some time ago to settle the naming conventions for Polish Voivodships, powiats/counties and gmina/communes, as well as to create a set of infoboxes for use on these pages. I thought you might be interested. [[User:Halibutt|Halibutt]] 12:51, Oct 5, 2004 (UTC)
Howdy. My only edit on the listed article was a minor edit fixing a malformed link. Kindly update your algorithm for selecting possible interested parties from edit history. Ta kindly. - TB 13:01, Oct 5, 2004 (UTC)

Separate out the scripts

If it isn't a hassle, could you create page with the scripts separated out? Then I could snag your scripts and run on my local Wikipedia. EmRick 16:08, 13 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Many of the reports (those not dealing with guessing the targets for red links or interwikidness) now have details on how to generate them yourself. For the main script, see User:Topbanana/Reports/Scripts/Create Link Analysis Database. - TB 14:47, Jun 18, 2004 (UTC)

External links

Hi! I'm actually working off a report I generated myself from a cur dump (select cur_title from cur where cur_namespace=0 and binary cur_text regexp '===? ?External Links? ?===?';)—I haven't uploaded that one yet (it's 1.6MB) but I also generated User:Lady_Lysine_Ikinsile/This page contains an External links section with the wrong indent level. I hope I'm not duplicating any of your lists with these; dysprosia requested them on IRC and I thought I may as well fix some while I had up-to-date lists :-) —Lady Lysiŋe Ikiŋsile | Talk 16:28, 2004 Jul 6 (UTC)

Double database entries

Hello, I have recently created my own list of double entries, and started discussions about them at wikitech-l and wikipedia-l, see my list and the mail at wikipedia-l. You wrote "This isn't a report as such as there's nothing a regular Wikipedian can do to fix the problem." on your list. It is right, that normal wikipedians can do nothing about that. But sysops can, and I'd like to see some sysop work on the list. --SirJective 17:02, 18 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Hello again! The german databas got a scheme change that now prevents duplication (a new unique index). Do you know if that happened with the english DB as well? If this index was added here too, this report will return no more duplicates. --SirJective 15:27, 13 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Comments on existing reports

Your page listing possible comma faults has several HTML coding problems that are causing most of the page to diplay improperly; most of the links directly to the editing pages aren't working. (The error messages mostly indicate bad HTML syntax.)

You're right. As the report was faiurly out of date I've regenerated it form a more recent database dump, hopefully without the problems this time. - TB 12:10, 2004 Dec 13 (UTC)

/Reports/This article contains a repeated word

I just quickly went through the remaining 'a a' articles (and removed the list) - out of what was there, I only needed to make two changes, both of them changing an 'a' to an 'an'. Most of the hits were two words, one ending in an 'a' and the next one starting with an 'a', or things like mathematical formulae. Prehaps any future check should be for ' a a ' (with the spaces)? T.P.K. 09:25, 24 Oct 2004 (UTC)

  • Thanks for looking at that list - the "a a" section was (IMHO) always going to be a bit suspect; I included it there to see if it would be worth keeping in a regularly generated copy of that report. The next version should autamtically exclude instances of "a a" that are obviously not in a textual section of an article and might prove a bit better. - TB 21:58, 2004 Oct 24 (UTC)

/Reports/This is a broken redirect page

This lookup doesn't handle the non-broken redirects that try to link to sections, e.g. Euro1080. They may be broken semantically, but syntactically they work and should be either excluded or subcategorized in the list. --Joy [shallot] 22:01, 16 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Wikiquote suggestions

Well, I've finished up User:Topbanana/Reports/A wikiquote article exists on this topic. Could you regenerate the list with updated data? – Quadell (talk) (sleuth) 19:43, Jan 27, 2005 (UTC)

  • Great news and excellent work. If I didn't already know you to be a top janitor I'd award you a medal. The currently available database download is over 24 days old; as soon as a newer version becomes available I'll start generating an updated copy of the report. If time permits, can you update the suggested improvements section of the report with a better definition of what 'proper' wikiquote links might look like? Ta muchly. - TB 09:44, 2005 Jan 31 (UTC)


Bad HTML entity finding report

Would you mind writing a report that picks up &[A-Za-z][^;]*$ or similar? I'll have a look at [1] for the precise definition if you like. Mr. Jones 16:44, 25 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Howdy. I've rediscovered your request while tidying up my user talk page. Am I right in thinking you're interested in a list of articles containing HTML references that are not all numeric and not on the list of 252 HTML4 entities listed on http://www.w3.org/TR/html40/sgml/entities.html ? - TB 11:40, Sep 24, 2004 (UTC)

A suggestion for a report

Hi - I don't know if you're thinking of creating any more reports, but if you are, one for disambiguations could prove very useful. A report which showed pages X (Y) or X, Y which are not linked to from X nor from X (disambiguation). For instance, many places in the US have articles on (for example) XTown, Alaska which are not linked to from XTown - exactly where many users will look for them. Warofdreams 13:50, 3 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Interesting idea - I'll look into this in the next few days and let you know what I come up with. - TB 16:05, Aug 3, 2004 (UTC)
Okay, the second idea above has been implemented as User:Topbanana/Reports/A disambiguation link is suggested. All feedback welcome.

Empty Categories

A report winkling out such abominations as Category:1908 Summer Olympics? --Tagishsimon

I've not examined the database behind categories yet, but really will have to sooner or later. Am I right in thinking you're interested in a report showing categories with few or no members ? - TB 10:48, Aug 30, 2004 (UTC)

Duplicate interlang links

Some articles may contain a duplicate interlang link, potentially making it appear twice in the "other languages" box. Could you create a report that finds pages with more than one interlang link to the same language? — David Remahl 16:47, 21 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Sure thing - I'll put it on my todo list. - TB 08:00, Aug 23, 2004 (UTC)
Wow, that one proved to be a bit of a challenge. Results at User:Topbanana/Reports/This article links more than once to another wikipedia. - TB 11:25, Sep 24, 2004 (UTC)

Untagged GFDL images

Hi! Thanks for setting up the multiple interlang links report, very helpful! I'm going to use it as a basis for discussion on meta: too.

Now I've got a new idea. What about a report that finds Image: pages that do not have the {{GFDL}} template (or are otherwise members of Category:GFDL images), but either link to GNU Free Documentation License (or something that redirects there) and/or contain the phrase "GFDL", "GNU FDL" or something to that effect? It would be tremendously useful to hunt down and tag images uploaded before the tagging system was put to use. — David Remahl 00:33, 25 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Sure thing. Have a look at User:Topbanana/Reports/This image may be GFDL but not properly marked as such and let me know if it meets your needs. I can list the 14472 images in category 5 (see the report for details) but would need to spread them over several pages to avouid breaking Wikimedia. - TB 10:26, Sep 30, 2004 (UTC)

Broken links - plurals

Great work on these reports! How about a report finding red links ending in "s", where an article or redirect exists for the singular? User:Daniel_Quinlan/redirects does this, but it is woefully out-of-date and doesn't appear to have the code he used. Warofdreams 10:23, 20 Oct 2004 (UTC)

  • Sure thing - I've placed a first stab at such a report in User:Topbanana/Reports/This page contains a red link that may be due to a plural discrepancy. A check for simple plurals only (the addition or removal of a single 's' at the end of an article title or link) yielded almost 7000 suggested corrections so I didn't attempt anything fancier. Kindly annotate it with suggested improvements and/or split it up into more workable sections as you see fit. - TB 11:06, 2004 Oct 20 (UTC)
    • Fantastic speed! Warofdreams 18:01, 20 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Wikiquote box

Barnstar

For the work you did on implementing the Wikiquote box, I'd like you and User:Eloquence to share this barnstar. Filiocht 10:57, 10 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Why thank you. I'll have it Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, and User:Eloquence can have it Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. We'll take alternate Sundays and sort out special arrangements for holidays and such ourselves. - TB 11:42, Sep 24, 2004 (UTC)

Question Hi, I've noticed your lists have made a good impact in improving common problems in Wikipedia. I wondered if you would mind if I added my list of featured articles with references problems as a see also to User:Topbanana/Reports. The more notice we get for that, the quicker we can fix the problem. Keep up the good work and let me know. Thanks - Taxman 20:29, Dec 8, 2004 (UTC)

You're very welcome to add your report. Several others have already added thier reports to User:Topbanana/Reports, it has the makings of at least the start of a central list of autmatically-generated-lists-of-problems-or-easy-improvements-sort-of-thing. - TB 12:23, 2004 Dec 9 (UTC)

Thanks for reverting my user page

Thanks!

Hey TB, I just wanted to thank you for reverting some vandalism on my user page. I haven't been on WP for a while on account of I'm busy and WP has been ultraslow. So that vandalism could have been there for quite a while. Thanks! --Deathphoenix 23:00, 22 Jan 2005 (UTC)

This page contains a link that might be mis-punctuated It would be great if you could regenerate the list, as that would increase the proportion of items listed which are genuine problems. Quite a high number of items not crossed off the present list have already been fixed or the problem otherwise resolved just in the normal course of article improvements of Wikipedia.

A couple of minor problems with the list at present:

  • There are a few links listed where the link starts with a lower case letter, but is otherwise identical to the article title linked to. This is not a problem, as the first letter is case insensitive. I'm not sure why your list has these, as I don't think it has them consistently.
  • If there are two or more articles which a link might resolve to, the list at present shows them as [[first,second]], but it would be more useful to show them as [[first]], [[second]].

I understand that this is generated by an SQL query, and it may not be possible to resolve these problems.

I get a broadband connection (and wireless network) installed at home tomorrow, so my time on Wikipedia might increase. The dial-up connection does get a little frustrating at times. You may have noticed a slow-down in my processing of list items over the last couple of months; this is not because I'm no longer keen, but because I try to categorise and occasionally otherwise improve articles as I work on them, and often I get sidetracked into populating a new category or other janitorial work.

Anyway, thanks for the reports, they've given me a "home project" on Wikipedia.-gadfium 21:03, 5 Oct 2004 (UTC)


  • The page of "L"s, the one where all the LISTS raise their ugly heads, is really long. Is it possible to split the lists of lists into smaller sections to make them more manageable? This is probably some trivial something that I just don't know how to do yet. Joyous 02:13, Oct 20, 2004 (UTC)
    • Yes, I tackled many of the "L"s a few months ago, in the previous version of this report, and I can sympathise with you. Ever since then, I've been breaking up each letter I tackle into subsections (bite sized chunks). This also reduces the problem of edit conflicts. For the Lists, just insert "=List of A=", "=List of B=" etc into the list, and save it. I doubt that anyone would object if you just break it into lots of 25 lines (or whatever you find convenient) with sections of "=Part 1=", "=Part 2=" etc. Don't include the quote marks. -gadfium 05:48, 20 Oct 2004 (UTC)
    • Goodness yes, it's possible - be bold, alter this and any other reports you find to suit your needs. The worst I'm likely to do is merge them back into one big list the next time I generate the report, and that's onyl because I haven't worked out a nice way of automatically chopping reports into sections of 10-30 entries each. - TB 09:08, 2004 Oct 20 (UTC)

Top Banana

Is your name a refernce to the fantastic game Top Banana? Mark Richards 17:56, 12 Oct 2004 (UTC)

  • Hi Mark. Sadly I never experienced the wonders of the game you mention (I was an - gasp! - Atari ST user). I started using the name on a TiVo discussion forum, that being the phrase that came to mind when I finally grokked what they do. - TB 07:46, 2004 Oct 13 (UTC)
Shame. The game was amazing in its bizarity. I am somewhat shy of admitting that I run an Acorn emulator on my x86 mainly for the purpose of playing this! Ah the golden age of gaming! Mark Richards 15:56, 13 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Wow!

I love browsing through your reports. Thanks for generating them, even though working on them causes me to spend even more time here when I should be grading papers or cooking dinner or cleaning house. Joyous 01:32, Oct 13, 2004 (UTC)

  • You're very welcome - I'm just glad to be contributing in some small way to improving the overall quality of the wikipedia, evne if it is at second-hand. Please do let me know if there are any specific grammar mistakes that really annoy you and I'll produce a report listing the articles containing them for you. - TB 07:48, 2004 Oct 13 (UTC)
Howdy. Having spent almost a year working out tools to generate lists of "things needing fixed", I've come to the conclusion that simply detectable problems (spelling errors, grammatical errors, unnecessarily red links, broken redirects) are being generated more quickly than thay can be fixed. Fun though it would be to start looking for more subtle problems such as described above, I'll have to decline for now, sorry. - TB 09:52, 2004 Nov 17 (UTC)

Plural discrepancy N-R

RE: User:Topbanana/Reports/This page contains a red link that may be due to a plural discrepancy/N-R -- I found this page while doing a search for items I needed to change from "RL Burnside" to "R. L. Burnside." In the report, you mention a concern that the red link for "Deep Blues" should be changed to "Deep Blue." Not correct. Deep Blues is the name of a famous blues history book by Robert Palmer (author/producer); that is the work referred to there. There was also a documentary film based on the book. Burnside was discussed in the book. Hope this helps. Bebop 17:26, 29 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Howdy Bebop, and thanks for following up on 'what links here' so diligently. The report you refer to contains a list of automatically generated suggestions for fixing red links. Like any automated system it's only so clever - the list contains a fair number of incorrent entries. A number of wikipedians are working through it by hand to pick out the useful corrections and implement them. Even where the suggestions aren't right - as in the case you mention - it may be appropriate to add disambiguation links to the articles in question (ie "This article is about the book Deep Blues by Robert Palmer. For the film see Deep Blues (film). For the similarly named chess-playing computer, see Deep Blue"). Or of course you could always edit the report to ad a comment about the suggestion and why it's not right. Again, thanks for following up. - TB 14:58, 2004 Nov 30 (UTC)

I fixed something that I learned later was in one of your reports

User:Topbanana/Reports/This page contains a red link that may be due to a plural discrepancy/I-M (excluding list ofs) -- I found this listed in the What Links Here page when I did a disambiguation of Grifters and The Grifters. I believe I had just moved The Grifters to Grifters for the new disambiguation page (after first creating band page and moving a film page). I have not adjusted the "Grifters" entry like I did the others because yours is a report and not an accidental reference to the band. Hope this helps since you sometimes cross out items that have been corrected. There is no band called Grifter though. It's plural. Bebop 20:07, 10 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Reports - may I?

I would like to regenerate some of these old reports from the latest dump (2005-02-09); is it fine with you if I replace reports on your pages with new ones? r3m0t 16:25, Feb 19, 2005 (UTC)

  • Goodness yes - you're very welcome indeed to do so. Any problems, please let me know. - TB 22:17, 2005 Feb 19 (UTC)

Corrupt page

In User:Topbanana/Reports/A disambiguation link is suggested Sections S through Y have become duplicated. -- RHaworth 10:30, 2005 Feb 20 (UTC)

  • Why so it has. I've fixed the page now. As always, you are encouraged to be bold and go right ahead and edit/fix things yourself. Ta for pointing the problem out. - TB 11:06, 2005 Feb 20 (UTC)
    • I would have done but:
      • being a pedant I would have had to check for differences between the two ocurrences
      • the page is enormous (can you split it?) and with Wiki or my machine (or both) being rather slow at the time
I just did not want to take the time. -- RHaworth 13:33, 2005 Feb 20 (UTC)

issues about school articles

In November 2003, there was a VfD debate over Sunset High School (Portland). The debate was archived under Talk:Sunset High School (Portland). What to do with the article is still being contested and has been recently re-nominated for VfD at Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/Sunset High School (Portland).

I am writing to you because you have participated in such debates before. There still does not exist a wikipedia policy (as far as i can tell) over what to do in regards to articles about specific U.S. public school. My hope is that a real consensus can come out of the debate, and a real policy can take shape. Take part if you are so willing. Kingturtle 02:35, 12 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Redshirt

Just a note, one of your user subpages contains a link to Redshirt which has been changed to a disambig page. The information you probably were intending to link to is now at Redshirt (science fiction). --Dante Alighieri | Talk 11:07, Apr 24, 2005 (UTC)

Comments on existing reports

I saw you were requesting a wikipedia server / SQL access to the pedia. I can provide a machine with good connectivity and a local install of the current revisions for you to run your scripts on if this would be helpful. I could provide you with SQL access remotely, but it would probably be easier for you to just run them on my machine. If this is interesting to you please reply on my talk page. Thanks for your reports, I think they're doing a great service for the project. --Milyle 10:26, 4 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Just for fun

  • What are the 'most watched' pages?
  • What are the 'most edited' (controversial?) pages?

Sridev 00:44, 18 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Hi there Sridev. Thanks for the suggestions; peoples watchlists are somewhat personal and therefore not available in the database downloads I work from. As for the most edited articles I'd love to produce such a report but have a problem - I do not have enough disk-space to load a copy of the 'hist' table needed to produce this. If anyone has mysql and ~120GB of free space, the SQL query required would be:
select old_title, count(*)
from old
where old_namespace = 0
group by old_title
order by 2 desc
limit 100;
-TB 11:18, 2004 Nov 18 (UTC)

Redlink Marketing & Publicity You might want to take a leaf out of the Please help out by clicking here to fix someone else's Wiki syntax project, which encourages its users to post that link in the comments field, thus exciting the interest of Recent Changes squatters - see their How does this work? point 4. --Tagishsimon (talk)

Unification of the different Wiki fixup projects?

Greetings TB, Neilc, Sietse Snel, and Erik Zachte! I'm posing this message on each of your four talk pages, asking you if you're interested in unifying the different Wiki fixup projects (User:Topbanana/Reports + User:Neilc/External links + User:Sietse_Snel/Fix_common_mistakes + Wiki Syntax Project + Erik's list of HTML problems that he emailed me a subset of).

Currently, we all have different pages at different locations listing different types of problems. What I'm wondering is whether we and the Wikipedia would all be slightly better off if we had one location that contained all of the outstanding problems from all of these different projects. It would be the ultimate clearing-house for problem-finders like us to list problems, and for contributors to go find list of things that need fixing, and fix those problems.

Consider the benefits:

  • One page address for all problems is easier to remember, and we'd set up a super-short shortcut (e.g. "WP:WF") that was very easy to remember.
  • It's easier to avoid duplication by seeing what other people are already doing - for example, I've started searching for redirect problems, only to find the Topbanana was already doing something similar. I didn't mean to do this, but I simply didn't know it had already been done.
  • It evens out the workload - currently one person's problems all get finished, and another person somewhere else has a new batch that's suddenly done and ready for fixing - and it's hard for the contributors to know where to go to find outstanding problems.
  • If we have one page with everything on it, we could list it as a place for newbies to start out doing productive stuff when they're new to the Wikipedia - and by seeing and fixing the types of problems that came up, they'd be that much less likely to make those mistakes themselves.
  • There's a momentum that builds up from having a continuous supply of problems, rather than having a stop-start supply. If problems stop coming, contributors stop checking - they like to see new problems, and feel a part of community project that's getting somewhere and doing something useful.
  • With one central repository, if you go on holidays or disappear for a few weeks or contribute new problems very infrequently, it doesn't matter - someone else will still be doing something useful while you're off doing other stuff.
  • New developers could easily add problems they found to the page, and indeed would be actively encouraged to do so. Rather than a series of independent and competing efforts, it would be one combined effort, with people actively encouraged to expand the scope with new systematic searches for problems (such as Erik, who out-of-blue sent me a list of HTML problems a conversion script of his had found - this is the exactly the type of thing we need to actively encourage, because the whole Wikipedia is that much better off for it).
  • It would make it easy for the contributors to know what's out there - There may be other fixup projects already running that I don't know about, and it would be really good to include them - I haven't omitted anybody deliberately, so if there are omissions, it just proves my point that currently it's hard to know what's out there.
  • As the number of articles in the Wikipedia grows, the need for some systematic central repository of problems grows - and the pace of growth shows no signs at all of slowing.

What do you think? Are you interested? I'm completely open to your suggestions - and to get us started, can I just throw some ideas out there:

  • It would be good to have a WikiProject location (and it does NOT have to be "Wiki Syntax" - it could be "The SuperList of things that need fixing", or "Wiki Fixup", or any other name you like).
  • All problem-finders would be listed in a special credits section (and for the record I'm more happy to be the last name on the list :-) ) - so that everyone still gets recognition and credit.
  • It would be good to have the current list of locations redirect to the new central location, wherever it is, so that any pre-existing links still work.
  • Some basic criteria for the scope of the new project would be good (something like: Covers the whole English Wikipedia; Has lists of problems; The list of problems should be generated by some type of automated process - e.g. software or database query - which ensures that it's systematic and repeatable; The problems listed should be simple to fix, so that the barrier to entry for contributors is low; And it would be good if when contributors fixed problems if we could ask them to put a link in their edit description that pointed back to the central location).

Maybe I'm crazy. Maybe it's a bad idea. I'd really like to think it could work. Maybe it's a good idea. You tell me.

P.s. To save lots of different messages on different pages, can we please have one location where everybody can speak their mind? How about Topbanana's talk page ?

All the best, -- Nickj 07:09, 1 Dec 2004 (UTC)

  • Might I suggest, being the nosey sod that I am, the project talk page for maximal coverage? --Phil | Talk 09:31, Dec 1, 2004 (UTC)
I would be careful of citing 'eliminating duplication' as a good reason to centralise ad-hoc reporting; a number of reports I've produced deliberately attempt to get the same results as a existing one to highlight deficiencies in the operation of both.
Perhaps the best approach would be to create a WikiProject (read WikiProject best practices carefully!) with the initial goal of:
    • Creating an index of attempts to automatically highlight simply fixable problems in the en wikipedia.
    • Advising the producers of such reports on how best to standardise, present and advertise such reports.
    • Coordinating the discussion and development of new ideas for such reports
In the longer term this might develop into a 'home' for reports of sufficient maturity and usefulness.
-TB 10:11, 2004 Dec 1 (UTC)
Good idea! I'm very interested in working together with fixing these errors. Nickj has already listed a few advantages of such a cooperation. I also think that it would be nice if we, possible error finders, could find some way to coordinate our efforts and cooperate in updating lists, if the people who started those lists think that is OK. We could also try to find solutions for common problems, like the false alarms that Erik Zachte mentioned on the WikiSyntax talkpage.
I like Topbanana's idea of putting this in a WikiProject. I also think it would be a good idea to have some shortcut to that project, like Nickj suggested: "WP:WF" or "Wikipedia:Fixup" or something.
Having some basic criteria sounds good to me, with some reservations. I hope that it will remain possible to work towards the same goal in slightly different ways. For example, Nick proposed that searches should be repeatable. That will not be completely true in practice if we use different tools for generating the same problem lists (e.g. I use grep, most others probably use MySQL; my reports only concern the article namespace, where other may check the wikipedia and template namespace too). I think there should be room for such differences between contributors. Sietse 14:02, 1 Dec 2004 (UTC)
It would also be handy to have standard protocols for listing the false positives associated with certain reports, so the fixers do not repeatedly have to rediscover that they are FPs, and/or to avoid people fixing things that should not be fixed. Such protocols might include any or all of a) some sort of marker in the article page to state that this is an FP for certain reports b) exception lists of known FPs and c) SQL routines to make use of exception lists and/or markers. My half penn'th. --Tagishsimon (talk)

Well, I think there's two things that we still need to decide on, if we want to totally unify everything, but I suspect they're not going to be easy :-(

  • Re: "I would be careful of citing 'eliminating duplication' as a good reason to centralise ad-hoc reporting; a number of reports I've produced deliberately attempt to get the same results as a existing one to highlight deficiencies in the operation of both." Understood. But the problem is that if we have lists, and want people to go through those lists and mark what's done, and there are two such overlapping lists, then that's going to frustrate people (because they'll be going to the same page, and finding that the listed problem has already been fixed). If these are two separate projects then there's what politicians would call plausible deniability ("How could I have know that X was also going to produce a report on Y?"). If it's all listed on one page though, then that's not going to be a good enough answer...
  • Re: "In the longer term this might develop into a 'home' for reports of sufficient maturity and usefulness." In my personal opinion, it would be good if this could become a home for all types of reports, even the new ones. Sure, new reports will be less mature and possibly less useful, but over time they will mature and (hopefully) evolve into being more useful. What's important is that contributors can distinguish the less useful and polished reports from the more polished and useful ones, whilst being inclusive enough that new problem finders will be able to join. Maybe each report could have stars next to it or something (few stars = very young, unproven, more stars = older, safer). Of course the question then becomes "who gives the stars?". Maybe the authors themselves? And if people think they've got it wrong? Well, that's when it gets tricky...

Even if we can't resolve these above things, it should possible to do the things listed by TB (co-operation but not unification) with only a few minor changes to how we currently do things. Re: "Creating an index of attempts to automatically highlight simply fixable problems in the en Wikipedia." I've created a simple template that lists these types of attempts, that are currently active (I think it's important to only list currently active things to get some of the benefits outlined previously), and I've added this to each of the pages that I'm aware of that fall into this category. This should save everyone needing "see also" sections, and instead we can have one template, where problem finders can add their projects (when they have new data), or remove/comment them out (when they're out of data). Does anyone want to kick off a WikiProject for the next item, "Advising the producers of such reports on how best to standardise, present and advertise such reports" ? (The talk page of such a project would probably just automatically become the next item, i.e. a focal point for "coordinating the discussion and development of new ideas for such reports".)

Re: "Nick proposed that searches should be repeatable. That will not be completely true in practice if we use different tools for generating the same problem lists." I've got no problem at all with that - what I meant more was that the lists should be generated in an automated manner (grep, or query, or script, are all great). I'm certainly not trying to impose any particular technology or programming language - that's for each problem finder to decide on for themselves. My concern is that there should be a systematic/automated way of generating these lists, and in particular that the lists should not be totally manually hand-generated by people. This act of generating the lists systematically allows the author to repeat and refine the search. Basically all the projects already fall into this category anyway, so it was more just me trying to describe the common defining criteria of these projects.

All the best, -- Nickj 04:50, 10 Dec 2004 (UTC)

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