User talk:RossA

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Dori 05:14, Nov 22, 2003 (UTC)


Hi, I saw your ideas on bots. I think the Copyright bot would be problematic (since there might be any number of perfectly legitimate derivatives of Wikipedia on the Net), but the Disambiguation bot sounds like a good idea. How would it work though? I haven't done any bot programming myself, but I think a bot like that one might work best by taking a list of similarly named articles from an SQL dump, i.e. "article", "article (some topic)", "article (another topic)", etc. I will be interested to hear if you start work on it! --Ejrh 09:01, 2003 Dec 24 (UTC)

You're right about the copyright bot, although it might be possible to have a whitelist of known wikipedia mirrors, and/or compare creation dates of pages.
What I was intending with the "disambig bot" idea has already been done - see User:Robbot.
I think (in theory) the best way to fix ambiguous linking is at the time an article is created. This could be done as part of the preview process. The wiki software could check each link in the edit and if it is ambiguous (ie if its target article links to Wikipedia:Disambiguation) then it could present a list of options with radiobuttons, and the user could select which one they meant. The options would be parsed from the list in the linked disambiguation page. For example, if I put the link [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury Mercury] in an edit, and then click "Show preview", I would see:
Your link to Mercury is ambiguous. Please select:
[*] keep ambiguous link to Mercury
[ ] change to Mercury (planet)
[ ] change to Mercury (element)
[ ] change to Mercury (god)
(etc)
There would be something in the options to enable this feature.
However, I don't know if something like this would ever be implemented. It would add significantly to the web server load and database load, and from a programming point of view it seems very dodgy because you have to parse lots of wikitext and make assumptions about what you find - bad assumptions which wouldn't apply to any other MediaWiki installations except en.wikipedia.org. RossA 11:14, 30 Dec 2003 (UTC)
Indeed, I was just thinking that a list of Wikipedia derivatives would be interesting... the Google API (such as it is) could facilitate searching for phrases, though you also need a mechanism to identify the right phrases to search for.
I also like the idea of checking links when editing articles. There are probably other helpful checks that could be done automatically (spelling?) but it's unlikely the Wikipedia code will be changed much soon. One thing I've always wanted was a list of similarly named articles for when you go to an article that doesn't exist. This could also appear when editing for links that go to non-existant articles. It depends on how much work the server needs to do.
I have a slightly old Wikipedia dump (not likely to be updated soon, it's a bit absurd to try to keep it up-to-date over 56.6 kbps!) and running Wikipedia code so I'll have a play around with some of these ideas. --Ejrh 04:28, 2003 Dec 31 (UTC)

Hello, Ross. Thanks for disambig Canterbury in Robert Stout. I hadn't read the whole article, just fixing "OU" wherever I found it. Robert needs more attention. I had a look at your user page and your stubs. DoC is almost not a stub any more, so I look forward to seeing someone progress with it. What a lovely image of Banks Peninsula! There must be several articles it can go with (even in the Maori Wikipedia, which has no pictures yet).

Must do some work for the real boss. Catch you later. Robin Patterson 20:22, 25 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Hello again. As I've said to some other Kiwis, the reason I've been doing less for the English WP in the last 6 weeks is here: the fledgling Maori Wikipedia, briefly mentioned above, which is mostly my articles at present. I would be pleased if you had a look at its current state; it may inspire something! Kind regards - Robin Patterson 03:26, 18 May 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Category:Wikipedians in New Zealand

Hi, You might want to consider adding {{User NZ res}} to the top of your user page, which will add you to this category automatically and also add a nice graphic. Onco_p53 07:43, 14 November 2005 (UTC)