User talk:Saltation

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Hello, Saltation, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful:

Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your name and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or place {{helpme}} on your talk page and ask your question there. Again, welcome! Xiner (talk, email) 16:04, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

Hello. Please don't forget to provide an edit summary. Thanks, and happy editing.

Xiner (talk, email) 16:04, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Your edit to Aptronym

Hi there, Saltation. I'm not sure what you're intention was, but I reverted your contribution to Aptronym because I just don't see how it fits. Am I missing something? Correct me if I'm wrong, or discuss my reverting on your talk page or mine (by clicking on the "76" in my signature.) Thanks and happy editing. Keeper | 76 01:07, 4 December 2007 (UTC)

HA! I had absolutely no idea what a "bap" was across the pond. It has no meaning at all over here, except to me now. That is quite hilarious and very ironic. I wonder if they did that on purpose? That all being said, I'm still not sure it belongs on the aptronym article, simply because the aptronyms are defined as names suitable to their owner, implying living persons (and not organizations). I'll look around though, there might still be a good place for the org somewhere, like "ironic acronyms of corporations". It could also list DAM (Mothers Against Dyslexia) and the like. Whatever/wherever it ends up, thanks for making a tired editor Laugh out Loud. Keeper | 76 22:49, 4 December 2007 (UTC)
My pleasure, sir! If you don't mind, i'll add it back, with the suggested addition/link as per your own talkpage. Organisations are people too (legally, anyway). If worse comes to worst, we could create a separate section for org.names, but given the way they're thought up, they tend not to be aptronyms since someone points out the problem in time, so it'd be a bit of a rump section. An example you might also like, which also illustrates why it'd be a too-short section: the original (jokingly) suggested name for the fast rail link b/w Melbourne and Sydney was the Fast Alternative Rail Transport. The board initially loved it, and had to be gently reminded what it spelled out... Saltation (talk) 23:02, 4 December 2007 (UTC)
I like your second example too, but I'm not convinced either belongs in the article. I'll link this chat to the discussion page on the article instead of getting in a revert problem with you. Your intentions are obviously good, but I think we disagree here. Let's see what other editors think. I'll do a quick check of the page's history to see if there are any other regular contributors...Keeper | 76 23:14, 4 December 2007 (UTC)
  • Hi Saltation.. company names are not suitable as aptronyms, what you have with BAAPS is a comical acronym. Thanks, Deiz talk 00:28, 5 December 2007 (UTC)
Hi Deiz
Intriguing attempt to narrow the definition, but unsupported by its historical usage.
I note your other edit on the same topic took the same over-restrictive approach, albeit rather amusingly. I note also that your reasoning in this instance varies between your post on the discussion page and your post here.
However, this addition/deletion is not important so I'll leave you to it.
Saltation (talk) 22:25, 5 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] French spacing

OK, I have a solution, but it's not perfect.

First realise that SB is almost exclusively run on WP:AWB, so excluding SB's "general fixes" will likely only buy you time (as another AWB bot will arrive).

There is however an option to ignore nowiki'd text, and a bunch of other stuff. SB is supposed to have this turned on, but sometimes I turn it off to get to picture captions - and forget to turn it back on.

So I've nowiki'd the unicode, which will probably keep most AWB bots away from them, including SB, provided I don't forget an leave the switch off.

Be aware, however that the next AWB gen fixes to hit that page will probably remove those <p>s you have put in the blockquotes.

Rich Farmbrough, 13:49 31 March 2008 (GMT). (tweaked 14:54)

Rich, you're a legend. Thanks.
Since I think this is a nontrivial issue for this and other articles, I've posted the problem (and the workaround's problem implied by your last line) to the Bug page on AWP. Please don't hesitate to update or delete it if you feel it is not appropriate. Saltation (talk) 16:26, 31 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] (1) unicode substitutions mangle Typographic articles
(2) workaround will mangle multi-paragraph Blockquotes in future

Status New
Description
  1. !NoWiki'd text– can mangle Typographic articles: inappropriate Unicode substitutions
  2. Temporary fix may prevent wiki-standard Blockquotes from displaying multi-paragraph quotes

Saltation (talk) 15:57, 31 March 2008 (UTC)
To duplicate: see below -- alternate-spacing unicode characters can be inappropriately replaced, and the workaround could cause future AWB edits to destroy the paragraph-separations in multiparagraph blockquotes
Operating system N/A (all)
AWB version (all)
Workaround workaround creates a further issue: removing paragraph markup in Blockquotes. See below.


i've just been informed that a key problem a bot (User:SmackBot) has with typographically-significant unicode-representing html codes (specifically: replacing them with raw unicode chars and thereby, in some small but important areas of wikipedia, seriously and significantly reducing the ability of editors to use wikipedia usefully) is likely to recur due to AWB.

i hadn't heard of AWB before and frankly i'm not clear on its relationship with this bot (or vice versa) but the assertion by the bot's writer that "Be aware, however that the next AWB gen fixes to hit that page will probably remove those &lt:p>s you have put in the blockquotes" suggests that this devel community should be aware of the problem sooner rather than later.

rather than risk clouding the issue by trying to paraphrase the problem, i will simply re-post below my initial flagging of the problem to the bot's writer and his response: (emphasis added)

[edit] SmackBot: conversion of HTML char-codes to raw Unicode: issue & consequent suggestion

greetings rich. first off, although you've probably heard it many times before, congrats and thanks for smackbot. it does good work, with few errors.

but (you knew there was going to be a but, didn't you), there's an exception:

it passed through French spacing and mungled the examples of different-width spacing in the unicode section. see the 2nd mod block HERE -- note the html charcodes &#8201; and &#8239; have been converted to their raw unicode equivalents, and in the latter example user-content becomes effectively invisible. even given my own knowledge of what should have been there (i created this section (by the miracle of copy-paste)), i thought the code had been completely deleted until i went to replace it and discovered by accident that there was an invisible essentially-zero-width character still between the last word and the exclamation mark.

now i'm in 2 minds as to doing this sort of thing anyway.

PRO: it's technically slightly purer for those on perfectly updated systems using standards-aware (typically paid-for) tools.
CON: it makes the article uneditable offline for anyone without access to unicode-compliant tools, which are much less common than most people think.
CON: some of the unicode codes' characters are not directly creatable on our current keyboards/OSs —that is, they CAN NOT be manually entered, and in some cases can not even be clearly or even visibly observed–can YOU determine at a glance in an edit-window that a gap in the text is not a normal space but actually a non-breaking space?— and in some key cases are not even visible: once they've been forced from being display-time characters to also being edit-time characters, most people lose the ability to directly enter them, and in some cases (eg varying-width spaces) may lose the ability to even see they are there.

but clearly i need to keep SmackBot away from the typographic examples.

i looked at {nobots}, and was about to exclude poor ole smackbot despite his sterling service and well-meaning edits. then i stopped and thought.

i do NOT want to forever exclude smackbot from hoving to with dustpan and brush, monkeywrench and oilcan, tidying up and improving common errors that may be inserted in future by later editors (none of us will be here forever {existential angst} )

but i DO need him not to munge my spacing examples.


then a penny dropped.

SUGGESTION:
modify SmackBot to have a context-sensitive ruleset.
CASE: where an article is tagged Category:Typography, he does NOT execute the html-code-->unicode-char conversion rules.

"simple as that", he says, secure in the knowledge that it's not him that would have to be making them changes...


LESS ARCHITECTURALLY-ARDUOUS SUGGESTION (which in many ways is superior to the above) :
you the developer do one single personal manual pass through the code's config data for the unicode chars smackbot will seek to convert, and remove at devel-time any character with typographic significance (perhaps best defined as: invisible behaviour different from a typewriter font; in particular: spaces).

for now, i'm going to {nobotno,badbot,down!} the article. but it'd be nice not to have to.

i remain,
yours in mutual futile pursuit of perfection,
Sal
Saltation (talk) 11:46, 31 March 2008 (UTC)
OK, I have a solution, but it's not perfect.
First realise that SB is almost exclusively run on WP:AWB, so excluding SB's "general fixes" will likely only buy you time (as another AWB bot will arrive).
There is however an option to ignore nowiki'd text, and a bunch of other stuff. SB is supposed to have this turned on, but sometimes I turn it off to get to picture captions - and forget to turn it back on.
So I've nowiki'd the unicode, which will probably keep most AWB bots away from them, including SB, provided I don't forget an leave the switch off.
Be aware, however that the next AWB gen fixes to hit that page will probably remove those <p>s you have put in the blockquotes.
Rich Farmbrough, 13:49 31 March 2008 (GMT). (tweaked 14:54)

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[edit] Woody Brown (disambiguation)

This is an automated message from CorenSearchBot. I have performed a web search with the contents of Woody Brown (disambiguation), and it appears to be very similar to another wikipedia page: Woody Brown. It is possible that you have accidentally duplicated contents, or made an error while creating the page— you might want to look at the pages and see if that is the case.

This message was placed automatically, and it is possible that the bot is confused and found similarity where none actually exists. If that is the case, you can remove the tag from the article and it would be appreciated if you could drop a note on the maintainer's talk page. CorenSearchBot (talk) 00:27, 8 May 2008 (UTC)

as posted on said article's discussion page: Calm down! Calm down!
over-twitchy Bot jumping in mid-synch on a 4 article update: woody brown, woody brown (actor), woody brown (surfer and catamaran inventor), woody brown (disambiguation). Saltation (talk) 01:00, 8 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Wigalliousness

Sorry if I CSD'ed your article accidentally. It just smelled funny, and I move fast... Ziggy Sawdust 00:47, 8 May 2008 (UTC)

Heh. No worries. There's a strong tendency on wikipedia nowadays to do the same, an unfortunate focussing on meta-information rather than actual content. I've just recently had an editor waving The Rules at me on another article because he'd only read the discussion not the article (and had mis-read even the discussion), and even when I'd reminded him of THE Rules he went off on another non-article-related tangent. You're doing blddoy well if you've realised a hair-trigger mistake with the same hair-trigger speed. I'm pretty close to giving up on wikipedia due to the rise of the self-appointed yet dissociated Gatekeeper Class and the tremendous damage they're doing to wikipedia, but it's the showing-through of people like yourself that restore the spirit. Thank you. Saltation (talk) 00:58, 8 May 2008 (UTC)
oh by the bye: i accidentally overwrote your DIEDIEDIE tag and i gave up on the myriad changing flavours of wikipedia Bureaucracy Du Jour quite a while back -- do i need to add anything to the article for the SpeedyDelete boys now homing in on it or not? Saltation (talk) 01:03, 8 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Typographic examples mangled -- incorrectly modifies Spacing/Punctuation

Plenken and Klempen had their examples re-formatted into Wikipedia's preferred format, thereby rendering them useless (now fixed). SmackBot had the same problem with French spacing's Unicode example, which Rich Farmbrough put a temporary fix in for (~2008.03.31).

I'd rather not exclude CmdrObot from these articles.

Is it possible, perhaps, for CmdrObot to NOT make stylistic tweaks to articles in the Typography category? Also, perhaps Punctuation and Spacing. Which, I just noticed, Plenken and Klempen should also be tagged as...

cheers, Saltation (talk) 17:21, 31 May 2008 (UTC)

Hi Saltation. Firstly, my apologies for messing up those articles on you. It must be annoying to repeatedly have to fix up this kind of edit. I like your idea of turning off unicode conversion and mucking about with spaces before/after punctuation for articles in specific categories, and I'll have a go at adding this to my bot shortly. In the meantime, I've updated my list of 'entities that are dangerous to automatically convert to UTF-8' to include everything from &#8192;-&#8201; and &#8239;. Do you think this will help? Cheers, CmdrObot (talk) 15:32, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
Hi CmdrObot. Firstly: pish. "Truth emerges more readily from error than from confusion." (Sir Francis Bacon) A minor oversight, easily corrected, made by someone genuinely striving to improve a much much larger result, is a price I'd pay a hundred times over without complaint. This is one very peculiar very specific subset of normal usage, and there's no way any normal person could be expected to know of it. With an active community and effortless regression, we are all your million eyes finding specific/exception(al) instances where your bot's general case can be improved by not being applied.
Secondly, bugfix-wise: interim workaround-wise: I'd suggest #8192-#8205, #8232-#8233, #8239, #8287-#8288, and #8291. Possibly also #8289-#8290? (#8287-#8291 couldn't hurt, in any case)
cheers and thanks. Saltation (talk) 23:10, 5 June 2008 (UTC)
Speaking of obscure character-encoding oversights, use Flock to go to [1], scroll down to 8238, and feel a disbelieving hilarity spread a smile across your face.
And on the topic of Typography and Spaces, have a read of that French spacing article, and after a period of "how geeky is this?" gradually realise that a lot of what you now regard as normal is merely the result of early-days quick-hack computer design and a particular subgroup's fashion sense.
In particular, look at the example of traditional spacing, and consider that, using this format, the standard newspaper font was 6-point, yet fully readable...
Saltation (talk) 23:10, 5 June 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Renaming pages

Thank you for your contributions to Wikipedia. It appears that you recently copied the contents of a page and pasted it into another with a different name. Specifically, you copied the contents of Woody Brown and pasted it into Woody Brown (disambiguation). This is what we call a "cut and paste move", and it is very undesirable because it splits the article's history, which is needed for attribution and is helpful in many other ways. The mechanism we use for renaming an article is to move it to a new name which both preserves the page's history and automatically creates a redirect from the old title to the new. In most cases, you should be able to move an article yourself using the "Move" tab at the top of the page. If there is an article that you cannot move yourself by this process, follow the instructions at Wikipedia:Requested moves to request the move by another. Also, if there are any other articles that you copied and pasted, even if it was a long time ago, please list them at Wikipedia:Cut and paste move repair holding pen. This would also explain why you received the message from CorenSearchBot earlier, which you seemed to misconstrue. Just to be clear, this message is about how you moved the page content, not about the appropriateness of that content. Thank you. Russ (talk) 10:27, 6 June 2008 (UTC)

Substantial errors here. e.g.: I did not copy an article's content into a disambiguation page; you are merely parrotting a bot's False Positive's auto-text without bothering to examine the articles' histories.
I did in fact look at the Move option. I was not satisfied it was safe (at its gentlest: "Note that ... history merge is almost impossible to undo.") nor that it would have a sensible consequence. This may have changed since then. At the time, that was the case.
Regardless, if you wish to try to "correct" people, you need to be a great deal more accurate or at least careful than your comment here implies. Claiming that a bot's false positive to a completely different "threat" can be "misconstrued" because you now wish its automessage to be read as referring to something utterly different merely demonstrates that you have not read its text properly nor understood its purpose.
"On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." (Charles Babbage)
It gets worse. A glance at the related changes made to the objected-to articles (other instances similar), underlined by the speed of changes in the editor's Contribution history at the time, strongly suggests that the editor has not paid any attention to the meaning of the words in the articles s/he is editing. The implication is that the editor is paying attention to the wikipedia structural code rather than to the content of wikipedia.
The purpose of wikipedia is its content. Not its administrators. Not its style.
By the bye: the above comment requesting that an acknowledgedly-risky technique be used in line with one proposed wikipedia-microetiquette, itself stamps on a fundamental global etiquette: signing your Comments.
Thank you. Saltation (talk) 23:20, 5 June 2008 (UTC)
You are right about one thing. I forgot to sign my message, which was definitely a mistake. --Russ (talk) 10:27, 6 June 2008 (UTC)