User talk:Geo Swan/archive/2019-11

This user is one of the 800 most active English Wikipedians of all time.

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Re: consistency

Hello Geo Swan, to be succinct - if you didn't understand my position when I elaborated my reasoning, I don't think you will now, and that's okay - everyone's different. I think if you re-read the last two comments on the entire thread, you will see that one of the (many) facets of my position against it was for "outing" other women who may not have wanted to be on the list, collected from minimal or dubious RS. I am surprised as to why this examination about my position on an old thread is being resurrected, as it would seem to be of no profit to do so, nor of any interest to me.

I'm not really sure how a single-word grammar tense adjustment I made on the other article, which I added for clarity because the man is deceased, exposes any personal feelings to you about whether or not I believe the article should be there. There is no extant debate for the existence of that article, and if I were to engage in an AFD for or against the article, I would give it considered thought before expressing a firm opinion either way - as I would for any other topic. I provide factual information for many articles, whether I agree with the topic or not, in order to improve Wikipedia.

The one conclusion that you can draw with certainty from my activity here is the belief that every edit I make is an attempt to improve Wikipedia. LovelyLillith (talk) 01:45, 1 November 2019 (UTC)

Disambiguation link notification for November 3

An automated process has detected that when you recently edited RFNS Kacau, you added a link pointing to the disambiguation page Pacific News (check to confirm | fix with Dab solver).

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New Page Review newsletter November 2019

Hello Geo Swan/archive,

This newsletter comes a little earlier than usual because the backlog is rising again and the holidays are coming very soon.

Getting the queue to 0

There are now 816 holders of the New Page Reviewer flag! Most of you requested the user right to be able to do something about the huge backlog but it's still roughly less than 10% doing 90% of the work. Now it's time for action.
Exactly one year ago there were 'only' 3,650 unreviewed articles, now we will soon be approaching 7,000 despite the growing number of requests for the NPR user right. If each reviewer soon does only 2 reviews a day over five days, the backlog will be down to zero and the daily input can then be processed by every reviewer doing only 1 review every 2 days - that's only a few minutes work on the bus on the way to the office or to class! Let's get this over and done with in time to relax for the holidays.
Want to join? Consider adding the NPP Pledge userbox.
Our next newsletter will announce the winners of some really cool awards.

Coordinator

Admin Barkeep49 has been officially invested as NPP/NPR coordinator by a unanimous consensus of the community. This is a complex role and he will need all the help he can get from other experienced reviewers.

This month's refresher course

Paid editing is still causing headaches for even our most experienced reviewers: This official Wikipedia article will be an eye-opener to anyone who joined Wikipedia or obtained the NPR right since 2015. See The Hallmarks to know exactly what to look for and take time to examine all the sources.

Tools

• It is now possible to select new pages by date range. This was requested by reviewers who want to patrol from the middle of the list.
• It is now also possible for accredited reviewers to put any article back into the New Pages Feed for re-review. The link is under 'Tools' in the side bar.

Reviewer Feedback

Would you like feedback on your reviews? Are you an experienced reviewer who can give feedback to other reviewers? If so there are two new feedback pilot programs. New Reviewer mentorship will match newer reviewers with an experienced reviewer with a new reviewer. The other program will be an occasional peer review cohort for moderate or experienced reviewers to give feedback to each other. The first cohort will launch November 13.

Second set of eyes

• Not only are New Page Reviewers the guardians of quality of new articles, they are also in a position to ensure that pages are being correctly tagged for deletion and maintenance and that new authors are not being bitten. This is an important feature of your work, especially while some routine tagging for deletion can still be carried out by non NPR holders and inexperienced users. Read about it at the Monitoring the system section in the tutorial. If you come across such editors doing good work, don't hesitate to encourage them to apply for NPR.
• Do be sure to have our talk page on your watchlist. There are often items that require reviewers' special attention, such as to watch out for pages by known socks or disruptive editors, technical issues and new developments, and of course to provide advice for other reviewers.

Arbitration Committee

The annual ArbCom election will be coming up soon. All eligible users will be invited to vote. While not directly concerned with NPR, Arbcom cases often lead back to notability and deletion issues and/or actions by holders of advanced user rights.

Community Wish list

There is to be no wish list for WMF encyclopedias this year. We thank Community Tech for their hard work addressing our long list of requirements which somewhat overwhelmed them last year, and we look forward to a successful completion.

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To opt-out of future mailings, you can remove yourself here

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 08:33, 3 November 2019 (UTC)

Disambiguation link notification for November 10

An automated process has detected that when you recently edited Ferry Street Bridge (Buffalo), you added a link pointing to the disambiguation page WKBW (check to confirm | fix with Dab solver).

(Opt-out instructions.) --DPL bot (talk) 07:47, 10 November 2019 (UTC)

Ref question

Hi, I noticed your edits to To Kill a Mockingbird on my watchlist and then saw that you'd made a similar edit to other articles, I hope you don't mind me asking you about them. I was wondering why you added the full citation to the {{reflist}} and called the named ref in the body, rather than defining the citation in the body? I've never seen it done that way, and I figured with your vast WP experience, you probably know something I don't and I'd like to learn what it is. Schazjmd (talk) 17:15, 11 November 2019 (UTC)

• I used to use inline citations, until I saw someone use what is called a "list-defined" reference. It puzzled me, at first, but after looking in to it I decided it was the superior way to define the reference.

1. It is what the article says that is important. But, with inline references, much of the paragraph is metadata, making it much harder to update the article's actual content. I have been told there are optional extensions, that use colour to show what is content and what is metadata. But, since I also work on non-WMF wikis, I don't use extensions like that. I am cautious about using some of the newer, cool templates people like inventing, as well, because I don't want to get used to anything nonstandard, I won't find on other wikis.

   On of the gods of the UNIX World was a guy named Bill Joy. He is probably the most famous developer of BSD Unix, developed at Berkeley. When he was a senior systems developer there, he authored several of the core BSD untilities, including an editor called vi, that replaced the original primitive non-visual editor, ed. Then, when smarty-pants started forming Silicon Valley spinoffs, he became Vice President for technical development at Sun Microsystems, a leading Silicon Valley company that built UNIX workstations.

   Well, there was a religious war among UNIX geeks as to whether vi was superior to emacs. After Bill Joy had moved to Sun, emacs fans started saying "Here is proof that emacs is superior to vi. Why even Bill Joy (the vi developer) doesn't use vi anymore. I heard that, over and over, for years. Until I read an interview with Joy, around 1985, where he was asked about this. While, it was true, he didn't use vi, anymore, there was a completely different explanation for that. He wrote that, internally, he used something called Interleaf, a very expensive desktop publishing program for all his editing, just like everyone else at Sun Microsystems. They were partners with Sun. In return for supplying everyone at Interleaf with free workstations, everyone at Sun got to use their beautiful $10,000 program. And, this is the kicker, as for not using vi when he was giving a technical presentation, he didn't use vi because he had made it so customizable, and the source was in the public domain, so every lab he visited would have a version of vi slightly different than what he was used to. He described how it was extremely embarrassing to be giving a technical presentation to other smarty-pants, using a program you were famous for developing, and then not having it work for you, as if you had forgotten how it worked. You'd know it was because you had encountered a local modification, but they wouldn't, and they would all think they were smarter than you.

   So, when he gave presentations outside his own lab he always stepped down an used the primitive ed, which he knew would work the same way, everywhere.

   I too use the subsection of WMF features I think will work the same way, everywhere.

2. When a reference is used multiple times, a contributor can never count on it being defined, inline, in the subsection of an article they were currently working on. So, there is no disadvantage to defining all references within the {{reflist}}.

• When I fix a reference, I always leave as much of it intact as possible. I prefer references to have every field on a separate line, but if I fix a reference with all fields on a single line, I leave it like that, merely adding new fields, or fixing broken ones... Following the principle of "if it ain't broke don't fix it..."
• I sometimes get pushback, where people move the list-defined references into the body of the article, or take a reference I defined with every field on its own line, and transforming it to one where all the fields are on a single line. It's disruptive, because diffs rely heavily on newlines. I've started over 3000 articles. I sometimes return to articles I worked on months or years ago, when a google alert tells me that topic may need updating. What I routinely find is that a diff from my last edit to the current day show massive changes. But, that diff won't be of much help determining whether the content of the article has been updated. What I often find, if I spend the time to page through every version, one diff at a time, is that all those other edits were to the articles metadatat, its references, its templates, or were relatively trivial corrections to spelling, punctuation, or minor word order corrections. What I often find is that no one else has done any work on updating the article's content - what it actually says.
• Some of the people who give me pushback, will point to some of our wikidocuments, which warn against modifying the style of references an article uses, and those aggressive pushers-back, or push-backers, won't listen when I try to point out how they are misinterpreting those wikidocuments.

  Those wikidocument's warnings all date back to 2006. When I first started contributing here, in 2004, no articles used references, at all. All articles used a combination of bare-urls and an external links section, as support for references hadn't been added to the WMF software suite. Around 2006 multipe incompatible methods of adding references to articles became available.

  When I encountered an article that used one, I puzzled out how to use it, and used it, exclusively, for what seemed like a long time, but might have been less than a year. I used it as it was superior to bare-urls, but it was definitely inferior to the {{cite}} system when combined with <ref></ref> pairs.

  The system I had originally used was completely incompatible with <ref></ref> pairs. An article that used them would have two different sets of footnotes. Chaos.

  So, the wikidocuments had good reason to warn against mixing styles.

  The combo of <ref></ref> pairs mixed with {{cite}} templates has proven so overwhelmingly popular even very experienced contributors don't realize that there are about 10,000 older articles that still use one of the other older incompatible citation styles. Wikidocuments warn against trying to convert those article.

  Both inline and list-defined references are instances of a single citation style. If you decide to use list-defined references, and you get push-back, ping me, and I will come and help you explain this.

Cheers! Geo Swan (talk) 21:02, 11 November 2019 (UTC)

Thank you! I appreciate the time you took to educate me. Now that you've explained it, I can see how defining the cite in reflist rather than body could be a real advantage in editing. I'm reminded of the many times I've Ctrl+F'd to track down where a ref is defined so I could fix something. I think I'm going to use your approach in my future articles. Thanks again. Schazjmd (talk) 22:17, 11 November 2019 (UTC)

You’ve left out the BBC reference a few times in your recent edits

You left out the BBC reference in a few book articles. Also it’s not ‘the’ BBC News, it’s just BBC News, or the BBC. That needs addressed. AR Gleeson (talk) 20:01, 11 November 2019 (UTC)

• AR Gleeson, I see you added a missing reference to Harry_Potter. Thanks.
• You warned me I left out that reference in "a few" unnamed articles. The BBC list contained 100 entries. I tried to add to the articles on those 100 titles that the BBC listed them. If you came across a single instance of a missing reference, then, may I suggest it was hardly useful to state you found "a few" instances. Alternately, if you found more than one instance, may I suggest that, if you weren't going to add the reference to those articles, you could have listed them here, rather than imply I should go back and check the other 99 articles. Geo Swan (talk) 21:33, 11 November 2019 (UTC)

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