Using your monobook tool has given me the desire to finally learn regular expressions. I had a class in college that covered them, but it didn't use a real syntax, it just sought to give an understanding of the concept. I used your code and a couple of internet tutorials as a basis and I'm reasonably comfortable with them now. I've started using AWB for my categorization project, and I've adapted some of your code as a basis for my AWB regular expressions. I wanted to say thanks; overall this has made me more productive and I've learned a lot.
I'm also starting to see what you're talking about with problems with the nbsp code. Something I've run into several times is a number followed by the word "in", which my regular expression interprets as a quantity of inches. I haven't quite decided how to deal with this yet, though I've considered limiting the number of inches to three digits. That way my expression will stop recognizing a year followed by the word "in." I'll still run into issues with task force numbers, though, which have been my biggest source of false positives so far. Very often a ship article will say something like "joined TF 92 in July." Maybe I'll ignore numbers preceded by "TF."
Anyway, again, thank you for your tool. It's very helpful on its own and it's encouraged me to do a lot of other stuff. TomTheHand 17:56, 26 June 2006 (UTC)
That sounds like a good idea. I'd like to refine my regexes for another couple of days, but I'd be happy to post mine. I'd like to post mine here first and get your input before posting them at the MoS. I'd feel more comfortable getting the opinion of someone more experienced before putting them up for general peer review. TomTheHand 18:28, 28 June 2006 (UTC)
Could you look here and tell me what you think? I decided to put together a page for my regexes so I can keep it updated as they evolve. TomTheHand 21:34, 28 June 2006 (UTC)
Have a quick look at this. It needs more work, esp on the whitelists. Rich Farmbrough 18:09 26 June 2006 (GMT).
Is there an easy way to convert your units and dates scripts to work in AWB? — Centrx→ talk • 22:26, 27 June 2006 (UTC)
Thanks for your comments. I don't quite understand what the policy on linking dates. If you get a chance, could you please respond to my question at Wikipedia:Peer review/Gregorian chant/archive1? Thanks! Peirigill 22:05, 28 June 2006 (UTC)
Hi, just a line to say thanks for the feedback about the improvement of the Oldham Riots article. I noted your suggestion to use the monobook installation you recommended; I've copied the script into my monobook, but have seen no changes to my browser (no date tab or such). Just to clarify, where should I see the date button? I'm using popups in my User:Jhamez84/monobook.js, could this be interfering, or have I not copied the script correctly. Hope you can help, I'd be very grateful! Jhamez 84 23:27, 28 June 2006 (UTC)
You may wish to be aware that your bot changed an hPa to hpa on Cyclone Steve. The other corrections were right though. regards Gazjo 04:04, 30 June 2006 (UTC)
30 June 2006 (UTC)
Someone told me that the "links to solitary dates" could prevent the University of Louisville page from being a G.A., so why did you relink them? 65.138.71.87 16:39, 30 June 2006 (UTC)
Please keep the University of Louisville page out your current date linking edit war with User:Rebecca. This page is up for Good Article consideration and your nonsense could effect this pages approval. 65.142.158.113 18:31, 1 July 2006 (UTC)
Why are you removing all date links? Bridesmill 22:50, 30 June 2006 (UTC)
You seem to take me for a fool, Bobblewik. Every time you stop making these edits, you only start again after a couple of months, as if the people who disagree with them will have forgotten about it. Do you want me to throw this one upstairs to the arbitration committee? I'm sick and tired of having to do this dance with you every couple of months to get you to make edits you shouldn't be making in the first place, when there's plenty of other helpful things you could be doing. I've rollbacked the lot this time, but please let it be the last of them. Rebecca 02:34, 1 July 2006 (UTC)
Furthermore, please cease trying to involve newbies in your crusade. After the long discussion that was had on this issue, you should know better. Rebecca 02:37, 1 July 2006 (UTC)
This also applies to telling newbies that they have to do something that policy very clearly does not state in order for their articles to become featured. Trying to force your opinion on people via the back door is not on, Bobblewik. Rebecca 04:43, 2 July 2006 (UTC)
I have responded at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (dates and numbers)#Proposal for section Percentages. — Centrx→ talk • 23:51, 3 July 2006 (UTC)
Yes, simply copy the code at the top of my page, making the necessary (and obvious) alterations. Sorry for the delay in replying. Incidentally your "E-mail this user" is not working at the moment. Regards, Rich Farmbrough 10:40 5 July 2006 (GMT).
Mail to me works now, I think. I don't check it often, perhaps once per day if that. If you don't get a reply within 48 hours, let me know here. bobblewik 20:36, 11 July 2006 (UTC)
I disagree with your decapitalization of all cases of "Plan" in A Mind Forever Voyaging. I think it should be capitalized most of the time because it's an abbreviation of the name, and if I recall correctly, it was consistently called "the Plan" in the game. On the other hand, "the plan" could refer to just any plan, making it slightly more difficult to skim the text (since context needs to establish we're still talking about the Plan and not some other plan). - furrykef ( Talk at me) 22:02, 11 July 2006 (UTC)
I've partially reverted your changes to this article. The two dates you delinked were the only two linked in the whole article--hardly overlinking--and each was linked for a good reason; 411 BC and 404 BC are probably the two most eventful years of the late 5th century, and a great number of the events relate to Thrasybulus's career. If you hadn't noticed, Quadell went through this article and delinked all the extraneous dates a while ago; I specifically relinked these two. If you still think they should be delinked, let me know and we can discuss it, but I think these fall squarely in the category of "useful links". -- Robth Talk 13:41, 12 July 2006 (UTC)
Your bot is indescriminately delinking dates at random. Some of which seem potentially useful in context. I don't think you've got it set up very well. Kevin_b_er 11:21, 15 July 2006 (UTC)
You've been blocked for editing with what appears to be an unapproved bot. Seeing as you have been blocked for indiscriminately delinking articles before (the last block being a week long), I've blocked you for 1 month.
I would suggest that if you consider this an important issue, to do the edits by hand and provide an explanation on why a particular year should not be linked. If your removal of links is contested, don't just change them again, but engage in conversation with people to come to an agreement. - Mgm| (talk) 14:04, 15 July 2006 (UTC)
I got a message from User:Rich Farmbrough asking me to reconsider your block. If you are willing to leave more descriptive edit summaries or talk page messages on your delinkings (with reasonings on why you removed a particular link) and throttle the number of such edits down to something below 6 in a minute, I'd be happy to unblock you immediately. Otherwise, I'll have to wait until Rich provides me with some info I asked him for. - Mgm| (talk) 23:17, 16 July 2006 (UTC)
Sorry, afaik at WP:BOTS "bot speed" is defined as not waiting 30-60 seconds between consecutive edits: for "6 per minute" you need bot approval;
Bobblewik has been denied approval of a date delinking bot twice (that is at any speed), I would advise against superseding that community decision by the decision of a single admin;
What is perceived by many Wikipedians as Bobblewik's insensitivity to "context" of date links is the real issue I suppose.
Anyway, here I quote myself [1]:
Rich, please let everybody speak for him/herself. Your interpretation of what the "majority of complainants say" is not near to what I learnt from months of discussion at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (dates and numbers). Several archives were filled with talks on which I was active too for a considerable amount of time. But all of that does not summarize to what you say. Similarly on the WP:BOTS-related talk pages.
And I resent your "400,000 dubious date links" while you write it down as if it were a statement of fact. It isn't. It's an opinion of some people. Nothing more, nothing less. There is no policy or guideline giving the tools with which you would be allowed to unlink 400,000 dates, no matter how "dubious" you appreciate them being linked. And if something is contentious, you don't make a (semi-)automatic process to proceed indiscriminately with an action that is perceived as contentious by many, and not covered by guidelines or policies (while the guideline *deliberately* expresses that Wikipedians have different views on this). The speed at which this is done is not the issue. The fact that the (semi-)automatic process, and in particular Bobblewik who operates it, don't capture differences in significance of date links according to context, is what this is about.
There is no commitment by Bobblewik to refrain from such contentious edits in the future, that settles it for the present block, as far as I'm concerned. -- Francis Schonken 23:42, 17 July 2006 (UTC)
From my experience, the vast majority, over 90 % of year links, are superfluous. Shall we say 360 000 +? I support unblocking Bobblewik, but I also think we need to properly revisit policy on this. -- Guinnog 23:55, 17 July 2006 (UTC)
Hi Bobblewik,
In Mark McNee, your created an image redlink.
With regards to your block for date delinking, I think it'd be better if you just give up on date delinking, even if you think it's legitimate to delink dates. There's more to wikipedia than delinking dates.
Andjam
09:56, 20 July 2006 (UTC)
Like [2] break images in articles for no good reason. Blindly using some tool or other to do such things without proper human oversigt (or lack of human oversigt if not using a tool) is careless. - Splash - tk 13:14, 21 July 2006 (UTC)
Using your monobook tool has given me the desire to finally learn regular expressions. I had a class in college that covered them, but it didn't use a real syntax, it just sought to give an understanding of the concept. I used your code and a couple of internet tutorials as a basis and I'm reasonably comfortable with them now. I've started using AWB for my categorization project, and I've adapted some of your code as a basis for my AWB regular expressions. I wanted to say thanks; overall this has made me more productive and I've learned a lot.
I'm also starting to see what you're talking about with problems with the nbsp code. Something I've run into several times is a number followed by the word "in", which my regular expression interprets as a quantity of inches. I haven't quite decided how to deal with this yet, though I've considered limiting the number of inches to three digits. That way my expression will stop recognizing a year followed by the word "in." I'll still run into issues with task force numbers, though, which have been my biggest source of false positives so far. Very often a ship article will say something like "joined TF 92 in July." Maybe I'll ignore numbers preceded by "TF."
Anyway, again, thank you for your tool. It's very helpful on its own and it's encouraged me to do a lot of other stuff. TomTheHand 17:56, 26 June 2006 (UTC)
That sounds like a good idea. I'd like to refine my regexes for another couple of days, but I'd be happy to post mine. I'd like to post mine here first and get your input before posting them at the MoS. I'd feel more comfortable getting the opinion of someone more experienced before putting them up for general peer review. TomTheHand 18:28, 28 June 2006 (UTC)
Could you look here and tell me what you think? I decided to put together a page for my regexes so I can keep it updated as they evolve. TomTheHand 21:34, 28 June 2006 (UTC)
Have a quick look at this. It needs more work, esp on the whitelists. Rich Farmbrough 18:09 26 June 2006 (GMT).
Is there an easy way to convert your units and dates scripts to work in AWB? — Centrx→ talk • 22:26, 27 June 2006 (UTC)
Thanks for your comments. I don't quite understand what the policy on linking dates. If you get a chance, could you please respond to my question at Wikipedia:Peer review/Gregorian chant/archive1? Thanks! Peirigill 22:05, 28 June 2006 (UTC)
Hi, just a line to say thanks for the feedback about the improvement of the Oldham Riots article. I noted your suggestion to use the monobook installation you recommended; I've copied the script into my monobook, but have seen no changes to my browser (no date tab or such). Just to clarify, where should I see the date button? I'm using popups in my User:Jhamez84/monobook.js, could this be interfering, or have I not copied the script correctly. Hope you can help, I'd be very grateful! Jhamez 84 23:27, 28 June 2006 (UTC)
You may wish to be aware that your bot changed an hPa to hpa on Cyclone Steve. The other corrections were right though. regards Gazjo 04:04, 30 June 2006 (UTC)
30 June 2006 (UTC)
Someone told me that the "links to solitary dates" could prevent the University of Louisville page from being a G.A., so why did you relink them? 65.138.71.87 16:39, 30 June 2006 (UTC)
Please keep the University of Louisville page out your current date linking edit war with User:Rebecca. This page is up for Good Article consideration and your nonsense could effect this pages approval. 65.142.158.113 18:31, 1 July 2006 (UTC)
Why are you removing all date links? Bridesmill 22:50, 30 June 2006 (UTC)
You seem to take me for a fool, Bobblewik. Every time you stop making these edits, you only start again after a couple of months, as if the people who disagree with them will have forgotten about it. Do you want me to throw this one upstairs to the arbitration committee? I'm sick and tired of having to do this dance with you every couple of months to get you to make edits you shouldn't be making in the first place, when there's plenty of other helpful things you could be doing. I've rollbacked the lot this time, but please let it be the last of them. Rebecca 02:34, 1 July 2006 (UTC)
Furthermore, please cease trying to involve newbies in your crusade. After the long discussion that was had on this issue, you should know better. Rebecca 02:37, 1 July 2006 (UTC)
This also applies to telling newbies that they have to do something that policy very clearly does not state in order for their articles to become featured. Trying to force your opinion on people via the back door is not on, Bobblewik. Rebecca 04:43, 2 July 2006 (UTC)
I have responded at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (dates and numbers)#Proposal for section Percentages. — Centrx→ talk • 23:51, 3 July 2006 (UTC)
Yes, simply copy the code at the top of my page, making the necessary (and obvious) alterations. Sorry for the delay in replying. Incidentally your "E-mail this user" is not working at the moment. Regards, Rich Farmbrough 10:40 5 July 2006 (GMT).
Mail to me works now, I think. I don't check it often, perhaps once per day if that. If you don't get a reply within 48 hours, let me know here. bobblewik 20:36, 11 July 2006 (UTC)
I disagree with your decapitalization of all cases of "Plan" in A Mind Forever Voyaging. I think it should be capitalized most of the time because it's an abbreviation of the name, and if I recall correctly, it was consistently called "the Plan" in the game. On the other hand, "the plan" could refer to just any plan, making it slightly more difficult to skim the text (since context needs to establish we're still talking about the Plan and not some other plan). - furrykef ( Talk at me) 22:02, 11 July 2006 (UTC)
I've partially reverted your changes to this article. The two dates you delinked were the only two linked in the whole article--hardly overlinking--and each was linked for a good reason; 411 BC and 404 BC are probably the two most eventful years of the late 5th century, and a great number of the events relate to Thrasybulus's career. If you hadn't noticed, Quadell went through this article and delinked all the extraneous dates a while ago; I specifically relinked these two. If you still think they should be delinked, let me know and we can discuss it, but I think these fall squarely in the category of "useful links". -- Robth Talk 13:41, 12 July 2006 (UTC)
Your bot is indescriminately delinking dates at random. Some of which seem potentially useful in context. I don't think you've got it set up very well. Kevin_b_er 11:21, 15 July 2006 (UTC)
You've been blocked for editing with what appears to be an unapproved bot. Seeing as you have been blocked for indiscriminately delinking articles before (the last block being a week long), I've blocked you for 1 month.
I would suggest that if you consider this an important issue, to do the edits by hand and provide an explanation on why a particular year should not be linked. If your removal of links is contested, don't just change them again, but engage in conversation with people to come to an agreement. - Mgm| (talk) 14:04, 15 July 2006 (UTC)
I got a message from User:Rich Farmbrough asking me to reconsider your block. If you are willing to leave more descriptive edit summaries or talk page messages on your delinkings (with reasonings on why you removed a particular link) and throttle the number of such edits down to something below 6 in a minute, I'd be happy to unblock you immediately. Otherwise, I'll have to wait until Rich provides me with some info I asked him for. - Mgm| (talk) 23:17, 16 July 2006 (UTC)
Sorry, afaik at WP:BOTS "bot speed" is defined as not waiting 30-60 seconds between consecutive edits: for "6 per minute" you need bot approval;
Bobblewik has been denied approval of a date delinking bot twice (that is at any speed), I would advise against superseding that community decision by the decision of a single admin;
What is perceived by many Wikipedians as Bobblewik's insensitivity to "context" of date links is the real issue I suppose.
Anyway, here I quote myself [1]:
Rich, please let everybody speak for him/herself. Your interpretation of what the "majority of complainants say" is not near to what I learnt from months of discussion at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (dates and numbers). Several archives were filled with talks on which I was active too for a considerable amount of time. But all of that does not summarize to what you say. Similarly on the WP:BOTS-related talk pages.
And I resent your "400,000 dubious date links" while you write it down as if it were a statement of fact. It isn't. It's an opinion of some people. Nothing more, nothing less. There is no policy or guideline giving the tools with which you would be allowed to unlink 400,000 dates, no matter how "dubious" you appreciate them being linked. And if something is contentious, you don't make a (semi-)automatic process to proceed indiscriminately with an action that is perceived as contentious by many, and not covered by guidelines or policies (while the guideline *deliberately* expresses that Wikipedians have different views on this). The speed at which this is done is not the issue. The fact that the (semi-)automatic process, and in particular Bobblewik who operates it, don't capture differences in significance of date links according to context, is what this is about.
There is no commitment by Bobblewik to refrain from such contentious edits in the future, that settles it for the present block, as far as I'm concerned. -- Francis Schonken 23:42, 17 July 2006 (UTC)
From my experience, the vast majority, over 90 % of year links, are superfluous. Shall we say 360 000 +? I support unblocking Bobblewik, but I also think we need to properly revisit policy on this. -- Guinnog 23:55, 17 July 2006 (UTC)
Hi Bobblewik,
In Mark McNee, your created an image redlink.
With regards to your block for date delinking, I think it'd be better if you just give up on date delinking, even if you think it's legitimate to delink dates. There's more to wikipedia than delinking dates.
Andjam
09:56, 20 July 2006 (UTC)
Like [2] break images in articles for no good reason. Blindly using some tool or other to do such things without proper human oversigt (or lack of human oversigt if not using a tool) is careless. - Splash - tk 13:14, 21 July 2006 (UTC)