User:CmdrObot/archive4

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Archive This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.

Contents

Primitive Radio Gods

Hi - this bot auto-spellchecked the above site and corrected an intentional misspelling. Is there some sort of marker that should be placed in the text that will keep bots from making spelling edits there? Chubbles 21:06, 30 January 2007 (UTC)


Hi Chubbles, sorry about that. Putting a HTML comment beside the spellings in question, like you've done is a pretty good bet, given all spellchecking bots are supposed to be supervised. I'll make a note of the page so I don't try to edit it again. Thanks, CmdrObot 02:39, 31 January 2007 (UTC)

Éire

Hi...I know this might be a tricky one to write the right exceptions for, but could you note that if "Eire" is encountered in an article pertaining primarily to Canada (such as Endorsements for the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada leadership convention, 1993), then it's more likely to be a misspelling for Erie as in Lake Erie than for Éire as in Ireland? Thanks. Bearcat 09:29, 31 January 2007 (UTC)

Hey Bearcat. D'oh! that was rather stupid of me. I should have spotted straight away that it was Canada related. Your idea is a good one, but unfortunately as my bot stands it's not really possible right now. This might mean it's about time I took another look over the code and add a bit more functionality. I think I'd have to make it do two passes over the page: the first one, say, looking for "Canada" anywhere and if it finds it disabling certain substitution rules for that page, then it can go on and apply any remaining substitutions. Actually... hmm, now that I say it, it'd be quite easy to implement that. Thanks for prodding me to do this. Cheers, CmdrObot 02:42, 5 February 2007 (UTC)
Another Éire related issue. In this diff the bot corrected the spelling of a press release title. However that was how it is spelt in the press release, I think the citation should accurately reflect the spelling in the press release. DrFrench 12:35, 16 June 2007 (UTC)
Thanks. You're probably right, so I've made a note of it so my bot won't try to correct it again. Cheers, CmdrObot 14:04, 16 June 2007 (UTC)

Your edit to 2000 Pacific hurricane season

Many of the image names here and in other tropical cyclone articles contain the months which they are taken. Please don't let your bot change the capitalization of them because that turns them all into red links. Good kitty 05:55, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

Oh dear, sorry about that. I do keep an eye out for image etc filenames, but sometimes one slips through unnoticed. I've made an explicit note of this page though, so it won't happen again there. Again, my apologies. CmdrObot 21:28, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

aggression, agression

The French word "non-agression" that appears in Liaison (French) is spelled correctly, and should not be changed to (English) "non-aggression". If this is a problem, I can just replace it with another example or delete it (it's actually commented out at the moment, so it wouldn't make much difference). CapnPrep 21:08, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

Sorry for that. I didn't look closely enough at the context and assumed it was meant to be English. I've made a note of it so I won't miscorrect it again. Cheers, CmdrObot 22:07, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

Way of the Tiger

This edit [1] is an error. "Honoric" is a proper name of a character in these books and it should not be changed to "honorific". Edit reverted. exolon 01:22, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

Thanks. I've made note of it so it won't happen again. Cheers, CmdrObot 01:25, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

Oops!

The spelling correction from entends to intends is not always accurate. In this case, it should have been "extends". I don't know how often it occurs, but, it's something to watch out for. Neier 03:38, 10 February 2007 (UTC)

Oops indeed! Sorry about that, and thanks for letting me know. Cheers, CmdrObot 15:21, 10 February 2007 (UTC)

This is a automated to all bot operators

Please take a few moments and fill in the data for your bot on Wikipedia:Bots/Status Thank you Betacommand (talk • contribs • Bot) 18:59, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

Another mis-hit

On October 17, 2006, the bot corrected Song of the 144,000, "enflamed" --> "inflamed" - apparently the former is actually the right spelling, in that piece. I've put it back. Poets, makin' up words, go figure. :) — Wwagner 18:30, 16 February 2007 (UTC)

Tsk, bloody poets! :) Thanks for the heads up, I've made a note of it. Cheers, CmdrObot 19:41, 16 February 2007 (UTC)

Prepositioned

In Effect of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans, "prepositioned" was changed to "propositioned". I believe the former was meant, so I changed it back.-- Infrogmation 03:26, 17 February 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for that. I keep making mistakes with this word, for some reason, although usually I manage to catch most of them. I reckon it's time to remove it from my correction list! Cheers, CmdrObot 14:55, 17 February 2007 (UTC)

Latest edit to "Evil"

"Judgment" is not an incorrect spelling. "Judgement" is an alternative, but it is not more correct. AngryStan 06:43, 17 February 2007 (UTC)

Indeed, 'judgement' is always incorrect in a legal context. Bastin 13:47, 17 February 2007 (UTC)
Thanks for pointing that out guys. It's actually a word I added to my corrections list just yesterday without checking it properly, so hopefully no major harm done. I've removed it from the list and made sure it won't be added again. Cheers, CmdrObot 15:02, 17 February 2007 (UTC)

Stockton, New Jersey

You changed "...the town is presided over by an old inn. The Stockton Inn (formally known as Colligan's Stockton Inn)," to "formerly known". Actually, I meant formally. The correct name is/was the full name. People there actually call it just Colligan's. However since I am not in a position to verify if you may indeed be correct in that it has changed ownership in the last few years or not, I will not revert it. I just wanted to make you aware that not every oddity like that comes from ignorance of the English language, but may indeed be subtlety of usage. Formally is not a corruption of formerly. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Luxomni (talk • contribs) 02:54, 18 February 2007 (UTC).

Hi Lux, thanks for the note. I agree 'formally known' has quite legitimate uses, but it's also a not altogether uncommon Eggcorn. Don't worry, I don't blindly replace every occurrence I find, but it's entirely possible that I'll get it wrong on occasion. Thanks again, CmdrObot 15:31, 18 February 2007 (UTC)

thanx

Thnx for catchin my goof on the Mali Empire page. It took me two weeks to compile everything and I knew i'd miss something. Keep up the good work Scott Free 03:42, 20 February 2007 (UTC)

Ph.D.

See this edit. This robot said in its edit summary that it was correcting the spelling of "committe" to "committee", but it also (and quite incorrectly) inserted a space into almost every occurrence of "Ph.D.". --Trovatore 16:44, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

Fudge fudge fudge! You're completely right. The intent of this particular part of the script ws to fix the cases where users didn't put a space after the period at the end of a sentence. Clearly Ph.D. is an exceptional case I should make note of. I'll fix up my script to handle this. Thanks so much for pointing it out. Cheers, CmdrObot 21:47, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

Automated message to bot owners

As a result of discussion on the village pump and mailing list, bots are now allowed to edit up to 15 times per minute. The following is the new text regarding bot edit rates from Wikipedia:Bot Policy:

Until new bots are accepted they should wait 30-60 seconds between edits, so as to not clog the recent changes list and user watchlists. After being accepted and a bureaucrat has marked them as a bot, they can edit at a much faster pace. Bots doing non-urgent tasks should edit approximately once every ten seconds, while bots who would benefit from faster editing may edit approximately once every every four seconds.

Also, to eliminate the need to spam the bot talk pages, please add Wikipedia:Bot owners' noticeboard to your watchlist. Future messages which affect bot owners will be posted there. Thank you. --Mets501 00:46, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

Enumerated lists

CmdrObot's change to National Registry of Identification and Civil Status has replaced some hard-coded numbered lists with enumerated lists. Is it just me, or do all the numbers appear as '1' now? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Philip Trueman (talk • contribs) 12:51, 28 February 2007 (UTC).

Sorry, forgot to sign. Not having a good day. Philip Trueman 12:53, 28 February 2007 (UTC)
Phil, yes, you're completely right, and I should have noticed it when I made the edit in the first place. My apologies. I've fixed up the numbering by removing the empty lines between each item. Cheers, Cmdrjameson 13:33, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

Outmanoeuvred

The bot changed the spelling of outmanoeuvred to outmanoeuvered, whch is the US spelling. It's not a problem but I thought I'd let you know. Raymond Palmer 01:36, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

Hi Ray, thanks for that. There's no point in doing UK->US spelling changes without good reason, so I'll remove that one from the list. Cheers, CmdrObot 20:54, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

Brig o' Balgownie

Hi there. The bot is quite right in identifying the word "renouned" as a misspelling of "renowned" but this one was an intentional misspelling because it is quoted from a historical record. All the best. Belhelvie 11:49, 4 March 2007 (UTC)


Thanks for that. I've added it to my exception list. Cheers, CmdrObot 21:25, 4 March 2007 (UTC)

ALGAO

Hi, The link to the ALGAO website on the ALGAO page was corrected as being broken, but it appears that it still is after your correction - being new to this is there something in the way the link was originally written which made it appear broken that I can avoid in future? Thanks in advance.V-Bede 16:24, 5 March 2007 (UTC)

Hi there, yeah, the URL had 'http://http://' at the start, rather than the intended 'http://'.
I took a look at it just there and the reason that the corrected URL wasn't working is because there was an extra '/' at the end of the URL that shouldn't have been there. Web servers make a distinction between URLs ending with slashes and ones that don't. The ones with slashes represent directories, whereas the ones without represent files.
NB This can be further shortened to 'http://www.algao.org.uk/', which I've done. Cheers, CmdrObot 17:56, 5 March 2007 (UTC)
Oh dear, schoolboy error! Thanks for the explanation. V-Bede 09:06, 6 March 2007 (UTC)

Implented

In this edit "implented" was changed to "implanted" when it was supposed to be "implemented". Guettarda 21:46, 5 March 2007 (UTC)

Incorrect altering of Brand New

The bot altered the album name "Deja Entendu" to the incorrect Déjà Entendu. It should check for capitalisation/real names before doing such alterations. -Halo 20:12, 6 March 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for that, I've added it to my exception list. Cheers, CmdrObot 20:54, 6 March 2007 (UTC)

It also altered the name of guy named Deja here [2] Quadparty 01:46, 30 May 2007 (UTC)

Thanks Quadparty, I've made a note of it so it won't miscorrect it again. Cheers, CmdrObot 17:05, 30 May 2007 (UTC)

Ragnarok Online

Hi, I reverted your edit as while it was obviously made in good faith, the cited poll is actually titled that, regardless of whether or not it is grammatically correct. Just letting you know. Kari Hazzard (T | C) 01:12, 7 March 2007 (UTC)

Hi Kari, my apologies for that. I've added that miscorrection to my bot's exception list so it won't happen again. Cheers, CmdrObot 01:18, 7 March 2007 (UTC)

Loaction needs to be converted to Location

There seem to be many articles having spelling error of word location. Can this bot fix them?

Kedar 07:34, 8 March 2007 (UTC)

Hi there. As it turns out, my bot already checks for this particular misspelling. However as far as I can see, it isn't very common. In the last database dump (from February), I only found 7 articles with 'loaction' in them.
Cheers, CmdrObot 10:25, 8 March 2007 (UTC)

disproven→disproved

Why is the bot changing this? And why is it changing words within quotes? Guettarda 19:47, 8 March 2007 (UTC)

Because it didn't show up in my dictionary, and I must not have noticed the quotes in the article you've seen. I've checked the Oxford English Dictionary, and it appears disproven is in fact a valid variant of disproved, so I've removed it from my bot's list. My apologies, CmdrObot 19:56, 8 March 2007 (UTC)

Hudson Taylor

Hello,

An honest mistake, but this bot capitalized "catholic" in the Hudson Taylor article. The quote was referring to him being a universal Christian as opposed to a "Catholic" in the Roman Catholic sense. This could be a problem if the bot is always capitalizing this word that is not a proper noun in itself.Brian0324 14:59, 9 March 2007 (UTC)

Ah, thank you for that. I'm aware of the distinction between Catholic (the religion) and catholic (as in 'of the people'), but I guess I've misidentified its use once too many times. I think I'll take it off my bot's list of rules. Cheers, CmdrObot 20:02, 9 March 2007 (UTC)

spelling

Hello. I notice you're doing lots of spelling corrections. Are you following a policy of always preferring American spelling to British spelling (as when you changed rigourous to rigorous)? Michael Hardy 23:13, 9 March 2007 (UTC)

Hi Michael, no I'm definitely not (intentionally) changing British English to American English or vice versa. I did check this one when adding the rule to my bot, and my dictionary doesn't have an entry for 'rigourous'. Just there, I checked the OED to be sure, and it had rigourous as a variant spelling, but AFAIK it's not the standard in either the UK or US. Since there's this uncertainty, I'll remove the rule. Cheers, CmdrObot 23:19, 9 March 2007 (UTC)
You're right, rigourous is basically a misspelling in British English. There's a little-known rule of British spelling that -our words lose the u before the -ous suffix (another example is humorous, often misspelled humourous). —Angr 09:56, 10 March 2007 (UTC)

Oh. I hadn't realized that rule existed. (The American spelling results (I think?) from the early 19th-century American lexicogrpher Noah Webster's preference for spellings faithful to Latin and Greek etymologies.) Michael Hardy 03:03, 11 March 2007 (UTC)

invasibility→invisibility

No, invasibility is a valid term (related to likelihood of invasion of a habitat). Guettarda 02:50, 10 March 2007 (UTC)

Thanks. I've updated my bot with this. Cheers, CmdrObot 02:51, 10 March 2007 (UTC)

Berkely→Berkley

Regarding [3]: the city in California, at least, is actually spelled Berkeley. —Angr 09:54, 10 March 2007 (UTC)

Indeed it is! D'oh! I've fixed up the mistake in my bot. Thanks for that, CmdrObot 15:50, 10 March 2007 (UTC)

outmanoeuvring

Hello. Your bot reverted my spelling of outmanoeuvring again. Outmanoeuvring is the correct English spelling. Again, it's no real problem, but I think a few tweaks might be required. Raymond Palmer 19:20, 10 March 2007 (UTC)

Curses. The last time it was 'outmanoeuvred', which I removed, but I didn't realise there was also a 'outmanoeuvring' in there. I've got rid of that now, sorry for the inconvenience. Cheers, CmdrObot 19:23, 10 March 2007 (UTC)
Hey, no problem :) Raymond Palmer 19:26, 10 March 2007 (UTC)
Yeah my fault its was outmaneeuvred not outmanoevring. 19:29, 10 March 2007 (UTC)

Non-breaking spaces

Hey. I noticed that in this edit, you put a non-breaking space between "233" and "MHz". At first I was totally confused at what you had changed because Firefox was changing the non-breaking space back to a regular whitespace character EVERYWHERE (normal page display, view source, the form on the edit page). I've thought about this for a while, and I've come to the conclusion that you should probably be using   instead of using the unicode form of the non-breaking space. It seems that if anyone were to edit that page using Firefox, Firefox would automatically convert the non-breaking space to a normal space character (I assume this is a bug/feature in Firefox). --- RockMFR 22:04, 10 March 2007 (UTC)

Hi Rock, that's interesting, and yeah, I'd regard that as a bug in Firefox, damn them. I agree, the best workaround for this is probably to use the HTML entity instead, ugly as it is. I'll change I bot to do this. Thanks for the feedback. CmdrObot 22:09, 10 March 2007 (UTC)

re: Mayonaise -> Mayonnaise

The Smashing Pumpkins song is intentionally spelled as "Mayonaise" as opposed to Mayonnaise. I noticed this was changed on The Smashing Pumpkins discography. I'm not sure it it was changed on any other pages. Cjosefy 14:42, 11 March 2007 (UTC)

Hi, thanks for that. I've added that article to my exception list. Cheers, CmdrObot 15:36, 11 March 2007 (UTC)

French spelling in italics in Cults and governments

Hi:

Your bot appears to have changed constitue to constitute in the Cults and governments article. Good English but bad French: the quote appeared encased in two sets of two single quotes as a a sign of its Frenchness. Not enough to protect it? -- Pedant17 04:00, 12 March 2007 (UTC)

Hi there. Sorry about that, I'll add the article to my exception list so it doesn't happen again. I'm afraid that correctly recognising stuff that is and isn't in quotes is very tricky to get right given the freeform nature of wiki markup, and the fact that single quotes are actually used as wiki syntax. As the human supervisor, I should have recognised the French and left it alone, but I guess the occasional article slips through. Again, my apologies. Cheers, CmdrObot 02:00, 13 March 2007 (UTC)

Proposition about prepositioning

Yo! Thanks for the great work! However, on the Civil defense page, "prepositioning" was not a misspelling of proposition. It did in fact refer to the pre-positioning of materials in planning a civil defensive response. I corrected the page as "pre-positioning"... we'll see how long that lasts. --Parradoxx 14:57, 12 March 2007 (UTC)

Argh! Thanks for catching that. I've seen quite a few prepositionings (usually of ships) in the past, and have prevented my bot from making a rather silly correction of it. I guess it was just a matter of time before one slipped through the net. I'll make a note of it anyway. Cheers, CmdrObot 02:03, 13 March 2007 (UTC)

Ancient (Stargate)

Hi, you found 3 spelling mistakes in this article. Two of them were real mistakes (thanks for fixing), but the other one (ahve->have) was supposed to say "ahve" (i.e. misspelled) and has been changed back to the wrong spelling. I'm just letting you know in case you want to fix this word again. :-) – sgeureka t•c 09:01, 15 March 2007 (UTC)

Thanks, sgeureka. I've made a note of it. Cheers, CmdrObot 20:58, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

Thank You

Dear CmdrObot, Thanks for the edit and spelling correction in William of Baskerville page. Much appreciated. --Cyril Thomas 01:13, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

Dear Boss letter

Last year you copied edited the writing in the quotation listing what the writer of the Dear Boss letter said. This was a direct quote. The spelling errors have to stay that way, because that's how the letter was written. You can;t change the text of historical documents. 216.165.158.7 05:44, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

Phycology

Re your edit [4], phycology, phycological etc... the study of algae, you must be learning a lot with this bot project of yours, good luck :) sbandrews (t) 11:08, 18 March 2007 (UTC)

Indeed! Although I suppose that's no bad thing :) By the way, I like the interactive map of Mars you have on your user page. Nice job. Cheers, CmdrObot 00:50, 23 March 2007 (UTC)

Imposter

Rastafari movement is a UK spelling article so you shouldnt have changed the correct imposter to the incorrect impostor. Thanks, SqueakBox 22:52, 22 March 2007 (UTC)

Ah, my apologies. I didn't realise this was one of those cases where British and American English differ. I've removed that rule from my bot, thanks for pointing it out. Cheers, CmdrObot 22:58, 22 March 2007 (UTC)
No problem I thought that might be the case. I didnt know it was spelled like that in American myself, SqueakBox 23:01, 22 March 2007 (UTC)

Conversion of units

Hi - on this page the bot 'corrected' cental to central. Ordinarily no problem, but in this case the unit of measure really is a cental. -- BPMullins | Talk 01:18, 28 March 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for that. Another user, Rhialto already pointed it out to me, and I've made a note of it so it won't happen again. Cheers, CmdrObot 17:53, 28 March 2007 (UTC)

Baton Rouge, LA

How's it going. The bot changed 'Comite' Drive to 'Committee' Drive, which is incorrect. Just letting you know. --Boznia 01:44, 28 March 2007 (UTC)

Oops. Sorry about that. I've made a note of that exception so my bot won't make the same mistake again. Cheers, CmdrObot 17:55, 28 March 2007 (UTC)

Litteral Township

Hi, in List of Arkansas townships, the bot changed "Litteral" (which is the name of the township, see http://www.city-data.com/township/Litteral-Washington-AR.html ), to "Literal". I guess it's, ahem, a literal-minded bot :-) --Bonadea 14:18, 28 March 2007 (UTC)

Ba-dum, tish! :) Thanks for the note (and the terrible pun), and sorry for making the mistake. I've updated my bot's exception list so it won't happen again. Cheers, CmdrObot 17:57, 28 March 2007 (UTC)

Skolt Sami articles

Hello! You're bot has been changing the proper Skolt symbol (´) to ', so we end up with changes like Puõ´ttem→Puõ'ttem. The correct char is, however, ´, so if you could have the bot change them back and then start ignoring them, it would be nice and something that I'd appreciate greatly. Pjacklam has a subpage in the Norwegian wiki that has all of the special symbols needed for the different Sámi languages. Thanks :) -Yupik 21:50, 6 April 2007 (UTC)

Thank you for explaining this to me, and sorry for messing up your articles. Luckily, back in February, I changed the way my bot treats ´s: it now only converts them to apostrophes when they're found in common English contractions. Unfortunately, I won't be able to get my bot to revert the changes, but I will go back and fix them up manually myself. Cheers, CmdrObot 22:01, 10 April 2007 (UTC)

Please take care in technical articles

Dear Commander: The "history" page of the article "History of evolutionary thought" records that on 25 February 2007 you edited the sentence "The preformed parts expanded and rearranged themselves to grow into an adult, and so Bonnet was called a 'preformationist'" to read "The performed parts expanded and rearranged themselves to grow into an adult, and so Bonnet was called a 'preformationist'".

This "improvement" in spelling had to be reversed by GRBerry on 28 February 2007. You seem to be very good at taking criticism (which is refreshing!), so I gently offer this: when "fixing" technical articles, take great care: there are many terms used which are quite unknown to even fairly well-educated language users. "Preformed" is one such term. Thank you for your good attitude. Writtenright 00:45, 10 April 2007 (UTC)Writtenright

Hi Writtenright, thanks for the tip. As it turns out, I've run across the (correct) use of 'preformed' a number of times on Wikipedia. Usually it's used when discussing moulds used in metallurgy, glasswork, plastics and so on. I guess in this particular case I must not have been paying as much attention as I should have been, and inadvertently approved the change. I've made a note of it so it won't recur.
Thanks for the compliment; the way I look at it is that in the interests of speed, I don't worry about being 100% perfect with either the rules I add to my bot, or how thoroughly I check the edits they make. I try to be fairly careful, but I do make the occasional mistake that probably wouldn't happen with a slower, more measured approach. In order to make this an acceptable compromise, I think the very least I can do is to encourage criticism/feedback from other Wikipedians and respond to it as best I can. Cheers, CmdrObot 22:23, 10 April 2007 (UTC)

S.p.A.

Hi CmdrObot. In a recent edit to Alfa Romeo, you incorrectly changed several instances of “S.p.A.” (the abbreviation for “Società per Azioni”, the Italian version of joint stock company) to “S.p. A.” (i.e. inserted a space before the ‘A’). Might be one to watch out for in the future. Regards. DH85868993 03:07, 12 April 2007 (UTC)

Ah. Thanks for that. I'll add a special case to my bot to handle it. Cheers, CmdrObot 20:25, 20 April 2007 (UTC)

A->an

While it's usually true that the indefinite article should be "an" if the word following begins with a vowel letter, there are times where this is not the case as with this edit: [5]. "Euchological" as normally pronounced in English begins with the same consonant sound as "you" and "yes", like "eureka" and "euphony", and so the preceding article should be "a", not "an". See the usage note here [6]. I wonder if this is a uniform enough rule for words beginning in "eu" that it should be made a general exception? TCC (talk) (contribs) 03:02, 25 April 2007 (UTC)

Hi TCC, thanks for noticing that. You are, of course, quite right. I've run across many 'eu' words before, and I haven't seen a single case where it should be preceeded by 'an' rather than 'a'. Before now, I just created specific exceptions for the individual words ('euro', 'eurocard', 'eurofighter', 'europop', and so on, ad nauseam), but I think it's about time I made a specific rule in my bot to handle it. Cheers, CmdrObot 18:08, 25 April 2007 (UTC)

HNoMS Olav Tryggvason

Dear commander, this source: * Berg, Ole F.: I skjærgården og på havet - Marinens krig 8. april 1940 - 8. mai 1945, Marinens Krigsveteranforening, Oslo 1997 ISBN 82-993545-2-8 is a Norwegian source, as signified by the lang|no tag, hence the first letters of months is not supposed to be capital. I thought that tagging sources with lang|no would prevent this problem, isn't that correct? Manxruler 14:12, 26 April 2007 (UTC)

Hi Manxruler. Thanks for pointing out the bug in my bot. I've made it ignore any text inside a lang template. Cheers, CmdrObot 21:29, 26 April 2007 (UTC)
Glad to be of assistance. Its a fine bot you have made, good to hear its getting even better. Manxruler 23:21, 26 April 2007 (UTC)

This is an awesome bot!

I love you cmdrobot. Let's elope to the hills and have perfectly spelled children. No, but seriously, great job :D Keep upholding the iron fist of English! - Fluck 15:02, 4 May 2007 (UTC)

LOL. Thank you! Having just read your user page, I'm glad I'm on your good side; it sounds like your enemies have a difficult time of it. I'm happy to hear you believe in the iron fist of prescriptivism too. None of this namby pamby descriptive linguistics for us! CmdrObot 00:38, 5 May 2007 (UTC)

Singular value decomposition

I've no idea how this could have happened, but your edit at Singular value decomposition added a plus/minus symbol at the start of the article. No big deal, and I corrected it, but I'm letting you know in case it's a bug. Cheers, Jitse Niesen (talk) 00:24, 5 May 2007 (UTC)

Hi Jitse. I think the problem was probably me accidentally clicking on the ± button in the 'insert symbol' widget while verifying the bot's edit. Thanks for letting me know though. Cheers, CmdrObot 00:43, 5 May 2007 (UTC)

Merchant Taylors' School, Northwood

Your bot has made a number of spelling and punctuation changes to this page, but -

  • Most of the spelling changes are in old quotations. I haven't checked the originals, but I have no doubt at least some of them were correctly transcribed.
  • Furthermore, it seems to replace '...' with '. ..', which is plain wrong.

Yours, --ColinFine 16:17, 5 May 2007 (UTC)

Thanks Colin. I've made note of the spellings in the quotes on that page. Also, you're quite right about the bot introducing spurious spaces into ellipses; this happened as an inadvertent side effect to a change I made to the bot recently. I've fixed it now. Thanks again. CmdrObot 20:33, 6 May 2007 (UTC)

Additional function suggestion: decapitalisation of headings

According to Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style_(headings), only the first word and proper nouns should begin with a capital letter. Would it be possible to differentiate between names and other proper nouns and non-proper nouns? Perhaps it could check a dictionary and if it's listed as a regular noun, it gets marked for decapitalisation. If a word were entirely capitals, then it would be left as an acronym. --Seans Potato Business 20:28, 5 May 2007 (UTC)

Hi Sean, thanks for the suggestion. It's a good idea, but I suspect not quite so easy to determinte what's a proper noun as it might first appear (eg Potter, Cooper, Smith, Archer). Also, what if you had something like an embedded movie name, like "The public debate on 'Mortal Combat'", or an official title, such as "Reaction to the Director General's report"
For what it's worth, my bot already does 'case normalisation' for some common headers, such as 'External links', 'See also', 'Plot summary', 'Track listing' and so on. Hopefully this is enough for the moment. Thanks again, CmdrObot 20:43, 6 May 2007 (UTC)
Yeah, I think you're right. :( Thanks for the attention! --Seans Potato Business 10:37, 7 May 2007 (UTC)

Origin of Western Ganga Dynasty

Hi. Can you please run spellcheck on this article if and when you have time?

ThanksDineshkannambadi 22:49, 6 May 2007 (UTC)

Sure thing. I've spellchecked it now. Cheers, CmdrObot 00:54, 7 May 2007 (UTC)

Thanks.Dineshkannambadi 01:20, 7 May 2007 (UTC)

Cumberland, Maryland Radio Chart

You made some changes to the radio chart on the Cumberland, Maryland page. This messed things up BIG time. I figured you didn't mean to do this, so no worries. But, there are sometimes, especially with charts, that blank areas are a good thing and should be left alone. If you have questions with charts and whatnot, please let me know and I will be glad to help. - SVRTVDude (VT) 03:21, 7 May 2007 (UTC)

Hi SVRTVDude, I'm very sorry about that. I'll have look at getting my bot to leave that sort of thing alone in future. Cheers, CmdrObot 19:55, 7 May 2007 (UTC)
Hey, not a problem:) All was corrected quite quickly, so not many people probably noticed. Take Care....SVRTVDude (VT) 23:54, 7 May 2007 (UTC)

Direct Instuction

Thanks for helping to clean up the Direct Instruction article. I contributed to it, but it's still kind of muddy, poorly written, awkward, and confusion. It needs MORE work, but every little bit helps.Richard Dates 19:56, 15 May 2007 (UTC)

Canadian residential school system‎

Please check your bot programming; it changed practising, the Commonwealth spelling, to practicing, the American spelling, on a page about a Canadian subject. Canadian spellings are used throughout it, so 'correcting' to a non-Canadian spelling is an issue with WP:ENGVAR and WP:SPELLING. Any words that are in the 'English spelling comparison chart' should be removed from any automated system, to avoid this sort of thing. I'll leave it for you to correct, since it's not a huge issue, but I felt it should be brought to your attention (I'm a Canadian living in Massachusetts, and writing for both US and Canadian clients, so I wind up having to watch this a lot! :-) ) --Thespian 02:22, 16 May 2007 (UTC)

Argh. Thanks for that. I go through two phases with my bot usage: the first is manually spellchecking a bunch of articles to find interesting new typos to add to my dictionary, and the second is spellchecking more articles using the bot itself. Occasionally I screw up the first phase :( Thanks for pointing me at the spelling chart, I didn't knw about it before. Cheers, CmdrObot 18:10, 16 May 2007 (UTC)

fulfilment or fulfillment‎

I was editing the Rape article after noticing several grammar and spelling mistakes. One of the words I edited is "fulfilment." Only after the editing, I checked the history and noticed that you recently edited the same word. Isn't fulfillment, with a double L, the correct way to spell it? I checked dictionary.com and noticed they also spell it with a double L. If I made a mistake, I sincerely apologize. Searching for Orion 15:43, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

Hi there. There are two spellings of the word: the British English one is 'fulfilment' and the American English one is 'fulfillment'. I'm the one at fault, I shouldn't have been 'correcting' it in the first place :) Cheers! CmdrObot 20:29, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

Spacing

The bot recently went through Rockall and changed kilometrage from "900 km" to "900 km" [7]. While this doesn't affect the appearance of the article, by just adding a non-breaking space, is this standard procedure for displaying distances, or a malfunction, as I've never seen it before? Cheers. M0RHI | Talk to me 11:55, 20 May 2007 (UTC)

Hi there. Yeah, it's part of the SI recommendations and it's mentioned here in the Manual of Style. It's not a strict requirement on Wikipedia or anything, but it's nice if you can remember to do it. Cheers, CmdrObot 14:30, 20 May 2007 (UTC)
I have to object against the large scale automated introduction of nbsp into articles, even though it is part of the Manual indeed. The spacing in SI is fine, but the HTML entity is not. I perfectly understand the technical reasons, however it moves Wikipedia further away from having both easily portable and editable text. It further raises the barrier for people who have no understanding of HTML and makes units in text very hard to read. As such, I see the disadvantages outweighing the advantages. In fact, I would rather suggest petitioning the right people to add this particularly function to the software, as it should be: same as we don't enclose every paragraph with the p tag and lists with dl and li, but rather the parser recognizes this based upon the normal text flow or easy to understand conventions, the same should be done with the SI units. However, until then, I strongly suggest only adding human readable spaces to units, as the HTML masking will not be needed anymore after adding the software function anyway. Bluebird47 22:42, 26 May 2007 (UTC)
Hi Bluebird. I don't entirely agree with some of your comments; in particular I'm not sure that it'd be easy to unambiguously detect all the SI units and insert non-breaking spaces automatically in a way that wouldn't cause errors elsewhere. I'll hold off from making any more nbsp edits for the moment though, until I've had a chance to think about it some more. Cheers, CmdrObot 15:12, 27 May 2007 (UTC)

kbps vs Kbps vs kBps vs KBps

Hi. I see that you've programmed your bot to correct things like Mhz and stuff, so I was wondering if you could add the confusion between how to signify the units of bit rate. The usual mistake is to use 'Kbps' when they should have put 'kbps', because the 'k' stands for 1,000, not 1,024. The other one is the 'b' which means 'bit' whereas 'B' stands for 'byte'. I don't think I've ever seen 'KBps' used, and if it were used it'd very likely be incorrect. 'kBps' looks so out of place that it might be correctly used, but will probably be a typo. Then again, some would say that the correct SI units are 'kbit/s' anyway, although 'kbps' is so widely used, including in the literature, I personally don't think it would be right to change all the 'kbps' to 'kbit/s' - mainly because I use 'kbps'! ;-) Digitalradiotech 18:22, 20 May 2007 (UTC)

Hmm. This is a tricky one. Given the lack of consensus, and the frequent misuse of 'b' where people mean 'B', I think the only changes I could safely do are 'Kb/s'->'kb/s' and 'mb/s'->'Mb/s'. Thoughts? CmdrObot 21:06, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

Unexpected "voice" change in Mistakes on the User:CmdrObot page

Tiny niggle: Paragraph text begins, 1st sentence, with (presumably) bot voice: "If my owner does screw up and miscorrect something, please let him know ..." but then 2nd sentence is owner Cmdrjameson voice: "Alternatively, my bot is exclusion compliant, so you can get my bot to ignore your page if you like. I'd prefer that you let me know if my bot causes any problems though, as I'm keen to fix any bugs it may have."! Iph 18:32, 22 May 2007 (UTC)iph

Ah, excellent point! I guess you can tell that I added the second sentence relatively recently and didn't take enough care to fit it in to the surrounding context. Cheers, CmdrObot 20:59, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

jewellery→jewelry

Thank you (CmdrObot) for introducing spelling mistakes into British-English articles, as you did to Chelsea, London. I would hope this could be stopped before it goes to far. The Irish spelling is the same, CmdrO'bot. Thanks Kbthompson 20:44, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

My apologies for that. I've (a) updated my bot so that it doesn't make that miscorrection any more, and (b) added it to my list of national spelling variants so my bot will warn me if I accidentally try to add it to its corrections rules again and (c) am going to have a look over the last few days of edits to see if I made any other miscorrections like that.
However, I feel a comment is in order here: you might like to consider being less sarcastic in matters like this in future. I don't see how it can achieve anything other than to get people's backs up, and make them less inclined to listen to your (entirely legitimate in this case) criticism.
Cheers, CmdrObot 20:58, 22 May 2007 (UTC)
Thank you and apologies if I caused offence, none was intended. Sometimes I have a misplaced sense of humour. Apparently, it can be misinterpreted. Cheers Kbthompson 23:22, 22 May 2007 (UTC)
It just did it (or very similar) again on Bonar Bridge, changing jewelery -> jewelry. I've fixed the page (-> jewellery), but it would be good if you make sure this one is also removed - something best not done by bots, where there's no easy way for it to tell if the page is US or UK. Thanks in advance. -- Kvetner 22:24, 3 June 2007 (UTC)
Thanks. I've removed it. CmdrObot

Ya missed one!

The user at 64.141.104.2 edited Scoreless in the first with some apparently unhelpful edits (marking one of the members as "Sexy Boy," and saying that Popular acts were "not performed once ever" or some such. I think I've managed to fix the page without damaging your edits. I'm keeping my eye on those History pages! --Edwin Herdman 21:11, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

Edit summaries

Hi. No big deal, but do you think that you might want to simplify your edit summaries? Many of the articles that you are touching have multiple replacements and something more general may be more appropriate. --After Midnight 0001 20:41, 26 May 2007 (UTC)

Good point. It generally works well for ordinary spelling substitutions, but I'm doing a bunch of SI unit fixups at the moment where the summary isn't terribly meaningful. I've changed it so that it's a bit more useful. Cheers, CmdrObot 21:01, 26 May 2007 (UTC)

Gothenburg tram

Why has CmdrObot been adding   everywhere in front of "km" in the Gothenburg tram article? What function does this have? Tamino 10:07, 27 May 2007 (UTC)

Hi Tamino, nonbreaking spaces are used to make sure that the number and the unit stay together on the same line regardless of the width of the web page. It's part of the SI typesetting recommendations and is also here in the Manual of Style. Cheers, CmdrObot 14:03, 27 May 2007 (UTC)

Thanks, now I know. A good idea actually. Tamino 16:57, 27 May 2007 (UTC)

RE: Edits to Maritime Prepositioning ship

Your edits [8] as shown in this diff appear to be in error. "Prepositioning" is the correct term, "propositioning" has a completely different meaning. :) z4ns4tsu\talk 14:42, 31 May 2007 (UTC)

My apologies. I'd run across this before, and I thought I'd disabled that substitution in my bot, but it turns out I got 'preposition' and 'prepositioned', but forgotten about 'prepositioning'. Cheers, CmdrObot 18:12, 31 May 2007 (UTC)
Ah, the humor that comes from a script/program doing exactly what you told it to. Thanks. z4ns4tsu\talk 21:13, 31 May 2007 (UTC)

Western Ganga Dynasty

Hi. Could you run spell check on this article when you have time. It is almost ready for peer review.thank a lotDineshkannambadi 21:39, 7 June 2007 (UTC)

OK, I just finished spellchecking. I hope the peer review goes well. Cheers, CmdrObot 22:12, 7 June 2007 (UTC)

Thanks a lot.Dineshkannambadi 22:22, 7 June 2007 (UTC)

Italian Renaissance painting

Thank you! --Amandajm 06:58, 12 June 2007 (UTC)

Bland Bot Error

I wish I were here to tell you about another interesting error your bot is making, but alas, mine is completely mundane: FYI, your bot may occasionally change legitimate uses of the words "an other" into "another." [9]. If it's picking up on the unusual phrase in this quote, you might also be on the watch for miscorrections in articles that describe a person as "an other", in the classical sense or as a pop-culture reference. ~CS 06:33, 14 June 2007 (UTC)

Hi CS42. Believe me, at the moment I'm more than happy to have bland bugs. I actually remember looking at this particular bot correction and saying to myself "yeah, OK, typo." Damn these postmodernists and their wordplay! I've added this 'an other's to the 7 other in my exception list, and I'll try to watch out for this kind of thing in future, but I'll have to say, even if I spent a while reading that article, I'm not sure I'd have caught the wordplay. Thanks for the note, CmdrObot 19:01, 14 June 2007 (UTC)

Bot madness

I know you bots are, y'know, bots, but could your programmers somehow fix you so that you please stop editing odd spellings that are in quotations. I'm getting tired of reverting them ... Jasper33 21:09, 24 June 2007 (UTC)

Japser33, my apologies for the inconvenience. I've tried to do it before, and it's not easy to get a bot to recognise what is directly quoted text and what isn't. As a human supervisor I try to watch out for things that are evidently direct quotes from other sources, but I'm not always successful. There are two things you can do to help:
1. When there's a problem, tell me about it! Suffer in silence, and my bot's likely to make the same miscorrection again some day. If you let me know what I miscorrected and in what article, I can add it to my bot's exception list.
2. If you find the same miscorrection occurring repeatedly with different bots/editors, you might want to put a {{sic}} in the quote (if you want ordinary readers to see it), or a HTML comment <--Like this--> somewhere near the word to advise editors that it's a deliberate misspelling.
I can only find one edit of CmdrObot's that you've reverted, and that's for replacing 'till' with 'until' in some quoted text in Brook Watson. Are there any others I should add to my list? Cheers, CmdrObot 19:58, 25 June 2007 (UTC)

Oh, apologies, I had my grumpy hat on yesterday; besides, when I finally looked up what AWB was I found it specifically says it's not a bot - two of the other recent quotation-(non)-correction-edits on Brook Watson were done that way. Doh! No, you're quite right, your bot has only done it the once. Mea culpa! I'll take your advice on the code thingy - cheers for that. Jasper33 20:20, 25 June 2007 (UTC)

Additional Function Suggestion: Move Fullstops Before Footnote References

Would it be feasible to add the function of moving full-stops from before a <ref> tag to after the following </ref> tag? One place to practise this would be the Notch signaling article. --Seans Potato Business 12:46, 25 June 2007 (UTC)

Blocked

I have blocked the bot. It is editing hundreds of articles for the sole purpose of changing "till" to "until". While "until" may be preferable style in some cases, "till" is a valid English word which does not need indiscriminate replacement. While in most cases this will be a relatively harmless waste of resources, in some cases it introduces errors in direct quotes. See here for example: [10] Haukur 23:33, 25 June 2007 (UTC)

Hi Haukur, I wish you'd left me a message before blocking my bot. I know the bot was replacing instances of till with until, it was entirely deliberate. My bot is completely supervised, so I was watching out for 'till' being used in direct quotes, and had added about 180 usages of "till" (out of 800) to my bot's exception list. I'm sorry I made a mistake with Sweyn I of Denmark, but it you'd left me a message, I'd have added it to my exception list immediately.
Also if you look at the recent edits in my contributions, you'd have seen that I stopped editing 15 minutes before you blocked me, and 'till->until' wasn't the only change I was making, it's just I happened to be focussing on articles with that word in it today, just like yesterday I was focussing on "aircrafts". Could you unblock me please? Cmdrjameson 00:10, 26 June 2007 (UTC)

I've now found three more examples of changes to direct quotes, just by checking a sample of the bot's actions for the last two days.[11][12][13] This is in addition to the error brought to your attention by Jasper33 above. This is not good and makes me wonder if the rest of the bot's till-to-until edits should be reverted indiscriminately since checking every case is time consuming. I appreciate that you've done some good work with the bot and that an error now and then is acceptable but your current error rate is unacceptable. You are only authorized to run a spellbot if you carefully check each proposed edit. Haukur 00:04, 26 June 2007 (UTC)

OK. Since it's so error prone, I've removed till->until from my bot's rules. Cmdrjameson 00:24, 26 June 2007 (UTC)
I've unblocked the bot now but you still haven't addressed the point that there is no reason to replace 'till' everywhere in the first place. Haukur 00:29, 26 June 2007 (UTC)
Right. I'll go back and review all the till edits tomorrow, and revert any inappropriate ones. Thanks. Cmdrjameson 00:29, 26 June 2007 (UTC)
Wow, you really did too! Great job :D Haukur 22:09, 26 June 2007 (UTC)
The reason I was changing 'till' to 'until' is because 'till' isn't very formal. For similar reasons I added a rule for changing 'often times' to 'often' when it was suggested to me. The former is technically correct, but it isn't really the right tone for an encyclopedia. In hindsight, the difference is probably small enough not to be worth the bother. I'll stick to less controversial edits for now! CmdrObot 00:35, 26 June 2007 (UTC)
The best of luck to you. Haukur 00:35, 26 June 2007 (UTC)
My Webster's says: "TILL and UNTIL are both old in the language and are interchangeable as both prepositions and conjunctions ... TILL is not a shortened form of UNTIL..." But, anyway, sticking to uncontroversial errors is probably the best thing to do and I see you've done a lot of good work with those. Happy editing. Haukur 00:54, 26 June 2007 (UTC)

Request

  • Hi, I am not familiar with the Bot process and what or who I have to ask, so please forgive me if I am asking something not possible. What I wanted to do was use the Bot to go through the Category:UFOs and clean up all the articles there and all the articles in its subcategories automatically ... we have already discussed this option in the wikiproject paranormal talk page ( here ) and I was directed to go to an actual Bot discussion page(s) and request clean up here (which is why I am here) -Nima Baghaei talk · cont · email 21:39, 26 June 2007 (UTC)

Storeys

Hi CmdrObot, please can you stop automatically changing storeys to stories. Storey, and its plural storeys, are standard British English spellings for the floors of a building, and so according to WP:ENGVAR there is no need to change to US English story and stories on UK topics. Thanks, Edward Waverley 12:57, 3 July 2007 (UTC)

Hi Edward. I've checked it in the dictionary, and you're quite correct, it's a perfectly acceptable spelling. I've removed that rule from my bot (and added a test so I won't forget and add the rule again at some future date). Cheers, CmdrObot 17:55, 8 July 2007 (UTC)