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.

7&6=thirteen ( ☎) has given you a Dobos torte to enjoy! Seven layers of fun because you deserve it. To give a Dobos torte and spread the WikiLove, just place {{ subst:Dobos Torte}} on someone else's talkpage, whether it be someone you have had disagreements with in the past or a good friend.

7&6=thirteen ( ☎) 12:18, 29 May 2021 (UTC)

Thank you for reverting the vandalism on Joseph Stowell. However, in this edit by you, you accidentally added a bad reference via reFill. I have reverted the edit and updated the reference so reFill won't do that again. Please check your reFill edits before saving them, as tools like that don't always provide accurate info. Thanks, and happy editing! GoingBatty ( talk) 15:10, 31 May 2021 (UTC)

thank you for letting me know —¿philoserf? ( talk) 02:14, 1 June 2021 (UTC)

Hi, once I finished, my next stop was this page. I hope you don't feel like I undid a lot of your work. If you want to revert, I won't contest. I have to say, using 'one click' for all those sections does seem like a lot of work, when they all could just moved in a single edit, like I did with the remainder of the page. But, to each their own, and whatever works for you, etc.

That list of links created a massive TOC and generally made the page unwieldy. I was surprised there were so many of those notices still there (77!). There was an RfC at the VP a while back where consensus was they could just be deleted as found. But, in case you or someone felt there may be a use for them, I added that note to the top of the page about them, indicating they can be found in the history. I was hoping this was an agreeable solution with you. Lemme know if there's any issue. Cheers - wolf 10:26, 5 June 2021 (UTC)

no problem. thanks for caring. the old bot comments add a lot of weight to a page. —¿philoserf? ( talk) 10:28, 5 June 2021 (UTC)

MOS:TALKORDER says GA nominations should go at the top of the talk page. Some Dude From North Carolina ( talk) 03:50, 13 June 2021 (UTC)

right 'o. i'll watch that —¿philoserf? ( talk) 03:53, 13 June 2021 (UTC)

Hello Philoserf. I'd like to note, that I've seen that you have been adding a lot of short descriptions lately, and for the most part, they've been accurate and helpful. I feel this is of great value to Wikipedia's user experience, and I thank you. However, I have noticed one instance in which one of your short descriptions was incorrect. It was on the page for the 1990 Michigan Secretary of State election, specifically, this version of the article: https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=1990_Michigan_Secretary_of_State_election&oldid=1027877754. The short description calls the article a "Michigan politician", when it is a clearly an event, not a person. I wanted to let you know of this, because at the speed which you are making these edits, I assume that they are automated. I wanted to let you know of this mistake, in the hope of preventing future errors. RoundSquare ( talk) 02:55, 15 June 2021 (UTC)

Thank you for the heads up. And for the fix.

No automation is involved. I have been clearing unassessed articles. I do move pretty fast some days. I am running a human algorithm. Assess, short description, some talk page cleanup, and when I am feeling it, citation fixes. Small technical items mostly. BTW. I have begun switching to American politician based on what I see others doing. I was uncertain what to do for events like elections, but I trust that once a short description is present, an editor will improve it if needed.

All that said, I will be a bit more careful as I go. —¿philoserf? ( talk) 11:55, 15 June 2021 (UTC)

Hi, just wanted to bring to your attention that SIA (set index article) is a valid class for WikiProject Lakes and is defined on the project page which on Crystal Lake (Michigan) was switched from SIA to List. I noticed that SIA is not listed in Rater which may be the reason for this. I'll look at getting SIA in Rater so this doesn't happen to the other pages. Wolfgang8741 says: If not you, then who? ( talk) 17:52, 21 June 2021 (UTC)

strange, i will look at that again. this might be the first time i have seen that with rater. i will check source on lists/sia articles. thanks for the heads up. —¿philoserf? ( talk) 17:54, 21 June 2021 (UTC)

You've been archiving talk pages, but from what I can see, you are only archiving threads started by bots. In some cases I went ahead and archived the rest of the old posts, but I'm not going to go through and do all of those talk pages. I'm curious, why this approach? BOZ ( talk) 11:47, 23 June 2021 (UTC)

indeed, I am archiving old bot comments. On some pages editors still wanna see old human conversation. I am happy when others come behind me and clean up further. I feel the old bot comments add too much weight and have blocked further human comment. time will tell. —¿philoserf? ( talk) 14:54, 23 June 2021 (UTC)

Also of note. I no longer add a talk header when there are no existing archives and I am only archiving bot comments. I stopped doing so in response to some editor opposition. It appears some editors really, really, do not like the talk header. Please do keep on adding it where you feel it is needed. I prefer it to the ugly archive boxes I see from time to time. —¿philoserf? ( talk) 17:12, 23 June 2021 (UTC)

Hello Philoserf, I like your page! I'd like to counter Larkin's poem with a quote from God, the Devil and Bob: "Ok, picture this long line of fathers and sons stretching from Adam all the way down to Andy. Now they're all passing down this punch. From one generation to the next, father to son, and the trick is to pass on a softer punch."

Anyway, I wanted to stop by because you have recently rated Monsters in Dungeons & Dragons as "low importance". I was wondering if this was just a standard setting, or if you have chosen that deliberately and for what reasons. While the article currently is not in good shape, I think the topic should be of High importance (or at the very least Mid importance) within D&D. For me it's hard to imagine D&D without monsters. Looking into the project, I'd say that topic is almost as central as Character class (Dungeons & Dragons), and more important than e.g. Alignment (Dungeons & Dragons) or List of Dungeons & Dragons deities, all of which are currently classified as High importance. What do you think? Thanks for letting me know! Daranios ( talk) 11:33, 2 July 2021 (UTC)

You are welcomed to change the rating. Mine was only one opinion as I am rating all unrated and adding priority for all unprioritized in the project.

Also thank you for your kind words and the quote. —¿philoserf? ( talk) 14:47, 2 July 2021 (UTC)

Maybe sometime next week or the week after that, I'm going to start going through the articles in those categories and do some general tweaks to try to increase the quality. Some of them undoubtedly have GA or even FA potential, so I want to try to see what I can do to work on them. There may be articles in those categories that would be better off downgraded to Start though. BOZ ( talk) 21:32, 4 July 2021 (UTC)

i am still working through the unrated/unprioritized. My next run through will be deeper evaluation and perhpaps some, improve as I go, or to do creation. —¿philoserf? ( talk) 01:52, 5 July 2021 (UTC)

I also plan the second run to be in priority order. My own and the project’s priorities. —¿philoserf? ( talk) 01:54, 5 July 2021 (UTC)

Sounds good - undoubtedly, there are also likewise starts and stubs that have improved enough to level up, as well. :) Keep doing what you're doing! BOZ ( talk) 04:16, 6 July 2021 (UTC)

That was awesome work on the assessment for the RPG project. There were over 1000 articles there when you started, and it looks like they are all assessed now. Awesome work! BOZ ( talk) 15:56, 6 July 2021 (UTC)

Thank you. I have practice. I did the same for a few other projects first. I wanted to gain experience across a range of article types before I began serious editorial improvements. —¿philoserf? ( talk) 16:25, 6 July 2021 (UTC)

I noticed you doing this on a page I watch, and found that you're doing it quite a bit. You should probably stop doing that, even though they are rarely replied to, messages from bots are intended to help editors understand changes to pages, and should be archived like any other older comment on a talk page, not simply removed. Beeblebrox ( talk) 18:36, 8 July 2021 (UTC)

I am doing what I have come to believe is the consensus. Other editors have lead my to this conclusion. That said. I have found no single way of dealing with these old bot comments satisfies. Any method, including leaving them there, annoys someone. —¿philoserf? ( talk) 19:23, 8 July 2021 (UTC)

I really, really don't think there is a broad consensus to just delete bot posts to talk pages. They are like any other good-faith post. Beeblebrox ( talk)

I trust you are correct now. I had been lead to conversations that seemed to agree that delete was better than archive. But. It ain't worth it. Enough else to cleanup that another editor hasn't come here to express an opinion about. I cannot find that conversation now. I will just remove that from my cleanup. —¿philoserf? ( talk) 20:06, 8 July 2021 (UTC)

I'm a little confused as I took your last comemnt to mean you were going to stop doing that, yet you showed up on my watchlist doing it again today. Beeblebrox ( talk) 04:48, 11 July 2021 (UTC)

So I did have a look at Ex Illis. However I got stuck. The details are on its talk page. Slimy asparagus ( talk) 12:22, 8 August 2021 (UTC)

thanks for the heads up @ Slimy asparagus:. I'll go back and take a look. —¿philoserf? ( talk) 12:24, 8 August 2021 (UTC)

Hi! I rarely pay attention to the talk pages and the wikiproject important ratings, and don't really understand them, thanks for working on them! But I noticed that Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education was given an importance rating of low. To me, that is surprising as that case is the one that caused School integration in the United States to happen. Of course, everyone has heard of Brown v. Board of Education, but while it made integration the law, nothing really happened until Holmes...it happened in the fall of 69 and caused (almost) everyone to integrate in the spring of 1970. Again, I don't really know how the ratings work, but this case had momentous effects. Happy editing! Jacona ( talk) 20:13, 17 August 2021 (UTC)

Hi @ Jacona: I have been plowing through the backlog of articles that are missing quality or importance ratings. I default to low on the logic the "if another editor hasn't already rated it, it must be low" and "if an editor sees the new rating and disagrees they will increase the priority". I will do that now for this article based on your judgement. Thanks for caring. —¿philoserf? ( talk) 20:45, 17 August 2021 (UTC)

Thanks. That stuff is really not my thing, but I’m glad you are doing it. Thanks! Jacona ( talk) 22:23, 17 August 2021 (UTC)

Hi! Regarding your rating of Ameristar Charters Flight 9363, remember that Template:WikiProject Aviation uses a custom class mask which requires that all five of the criteria on the B-class checklist be checked off in order for the template to display the article as B-class (if three or four of the criteria are checked off, the template displays a C-class rating; if fewer than three, the template defaults to a Start-class rating). I'd do it myself, except that, being as I'm the one who wrote the article, I'm not exactly an unbiased assessor.  ;-P Just a heads-up - kudos! Whoop whoop pull up ^{Bitching Betty ⚧ Averted crashes} 22:56, 17 August 2021 (UTC)

Hi @ Whoop whoop pull up: I'll keep an eye out for that. —¿philoserf? ( talk) 23:48, 17 August 2021 (UTC)

Have you seen the size of the article now with the recent edit, its so big it puts me off from reading it! lol. Govvy ( talk) 20:19, 27 June 2021 (UTC)

INRE: archive and exposing the archive. As you may have seen from User talk:Philoserf/Archive 2#Archiving talk pages there are reasons I leave Talk headers and Archive boxes to other editors. There are too many opinions. When I only archive bot comments I leave it alone. If I archive editor comments I use a talk header.

INRE: length. I am a good scanner. Digging in only where the detail I am seeking may reside. This ain't a compelling biography, just an encyclopedia. :evil grin: —¿philoserf? ( talk) 20:24, 27 June 2021 (UTC)

I noticed you archived content at Talk:Basic Role-Playing using one click archiving. However, you failed to make the archive appear on the page (perhaps by adding an {{ Archives}} box). Perhaps I can suggest setting up automatic archiving on the page instead. Thank you, CapnZapp ( talk) 18:39, 1 July 2021 (UTC)

See the conversation at User talk:Philoserf/Archive 2#Archiving talk pages and User talk:Philoserf/Archive 2#Archiving —¿philoserf? ( talk) 19:00, 1 July 2021 (UTC)

Perhaps I should just be deleting these old BOT comments —¿philoserf? ( talk) 19:03, 1 July 2021 (UTC)

I don't think there's anything wrong in keeping them, possibly someone may get something useful out of it. I used to look at those once upon a time, but that bot stopped running after a while. BOZ ( talk) 10:53, 2 July 2021 (UTC)

As long as you don't create archives that aren't advertised on the page, I'm good. Cheers CapnZapp ( talk) 15:22, 5 July 2021 (UTC)

	The Tireless Contributor Barnstar
	For your recent mass assessments as well as occasional article cleanups, which are not only of marvellous quantity but also outstanding quality! Keep up the great work Philoserf, you are an amazing editor! LunaEatsTuna ( talk) 23:38, 12 September 2021 (UTC)

Thank you for noticing the work. I keep learning. —¿philoserf? ( talk) 00:51, 13 September 2021 (UTC)

Sorting bullet lists is counter-productive. Just because they aren't ordered lists doesn't mean they aren't presented in a progressive order. A term may be used in one bullet point which is assumed in a subsequent bullet point. Sometimes they are ordered lists that the writer chose not to number. In Deity yoga, you reordered a list of progressive stages. Anyway, it's a bad idea and wrecks articles. Skyerise ( talk) 15:16, 21 September 2021 (UTC)

there are reasons html calls them ordered lists and unordered lists. that said, i do review the results. i am also happy to have a more closely involved editor overrule me. —¿philoserf? ( talk) 18:10, 21 September 2021 (UTC)

Hello! Regarding this revert: I don't mind, but the section was archived, not deleted. Feel free to fix and sorry for any convenience! --- Another Believer _{( Talk)} 15:32, 6 October 2021 (UTC)

hmm? i missed that. i usually see so in the comment. —¿philoserf? ( talk) 15:33, 6 October 2021 (UTC)

Hi Philoserf! You recently switched the date format of a few articles ( Critical Role (campaign three) & Eberron). Filling in missing dates is great but you shouldn't switch the date format unless you have a compelling reason ( MOS:DATERET) especially if the date format is due to MOS:TIES. Both of those articles are about American products (one a web series and one an American publication) so they should follow Template:Use mdy dates instead of dmy. Thanks! Sariel Xilo ( talk) 16:50, 6 October 2021 (UTC)

Did that article indicate a date format? I do not remember that it did. Most articles I encounter have many different date formats involved. When I encounter on of these I select between mdy and dmy based on content. Anyway, I will watch for such. I do not ever recall changing an article that had a mdy or dmy indicator. —¿philoserf? ( talk) 17:28, 6 October 2021 (UTC)

Unfortunately, I could not remove the sock's promotional edits without also removing yours because they were entangled. If you wish to change some material in the article that does not also reinstate the sock's edits, that's fine. I am going to undo your edit again. Please do not revert me as you just did.-- Bbb23 ( talk) 00:06, 21 October 2021 (UTC)

Thank you for the explanation. —¿philoserf? ( talk) 18:17, 10 November 2021 (UTC)

Hi there Philoserf,

WikiProject Writing participant's have noticed you've been assessing quite a few articles under our scope; thank you for your contributions!

I am writing to direct you to WikiProject Writing's quality and importance assessment criteria. Please take care to look at this before adding the WikiProject Writing banner to pages, or changing a previous assessment.

Thank you for your continued contributions to articles within writing studies! Breadyornot ( talk) 17:06, 10 November 2021 (UTC)

I will review these again. I have been doing this for many projects and review project specific criteria. WP:WikiProject Writing is caught up at the moment. I do check from time to time to see if new articles appear w/o quality or importance assessments. See you between our edits Breadyornot. —¿philoserf? ( talk) 18:14, 10 November 2021 (UTC)

Hello. I just stumbled across the Talk Pages of a couple of WikiProjects flagged as inactive, yet which you appear to have been supportive of, and even somewhat active in (like Cullen328 might have been). I also noticed that you had set up archiving of those projects' talk pages. I wanted to flag up that you've done it in such as way that its almost inevitable any such project will stay inactive, and put off any new user who might visit them. I'm referring specifically to [WP:WikiProject Backpacking]] and WP:WikiProject Hiking trails.

By completely stripping out every single thread after a predetermined date, you simply create a bare empty talk page, and undoubtedly puts off anyone leaving that rare, new thread, and shoves everything into the emptiest of empty archives. I find such approached to talk page archiving (=clearance) quite depressing, and certainly unlikely to encourage anyone to post there again. Simply by including a |minkeepthreads=3 parameter, you could have retained the latest three discussion threads, no matter how old they were. Then, at a glance a visitor can see whether the last discussion was a decade ago (and thus genuinely inactive), or simply has low level traffic, perhaps receiving one thread a year or two. As new users probably won't know to look in the archive box off to the right of the page - especially when the most recent one or two archives will have just one thread in them - I fear they'll simply leave and never feel able to ask that potentially important question. Please don't take this as a criticism, as I'm sure doing it that minimalist way wasn't intentional, and I hope that projects like have a future, even if merged together, as you appear to have proposed. But I fear the way archiving of these WikiProjects has been done seems to make permanent inactivity almost a self-fulling prophesy. Regards, Nick Moyes ( talk) 17:27, 21 November 2021 (UTC)

Feel free to change what I setup. WP:WikiProject Backpacking was inactive when I got there. I did a flurry of work there. I still visit from time to time too. But I do not own any if it. Change away. An editor will let you know if they object. —¿philoserf? ( talk) 20:07, 21 November 2021 (UTC)

your close here is not grammatical ("Failed to generally weak support ...") maybe there are missing words or something? (I'm actually not entirely sure what you mean.) Also (sorry, a pet peeve) "rational" is an adjective and "rationale" is the associated noun. -- JBL ( talk) 12:43, 3 December 2021 (UTC)

Thank you. My second close and my first time using the closer script. It was messy. I will get better at it, including spelling, grammar, etc. —¿philoserf? ( talk) 16:32, 3 December 2021 (UTC)

BOZ ( talk) is wishing you a Merry Christmas! This greeting (and season) promotes WikiLove and hopefully this note has made your day a little better. Spread the WikiLove by wishing another user a Merry Christmas, whether it be someone you have had disagreements with in the past, a good friend, or just some random person. Don't eat yellow snow!

Spread the holiday cheer by adding {{ subst: User:Flaming/MC2008}} to their talk page with a friendly message.

I'm wishing you a Merry Christmas, because that is what I celebrate. Feel free to take a "Happy Holidays" or "Season's Greetings" if you prefer.  :) BOZ ( talk) 20:23, 22 December 2021 (UTC)

Hi, the reason I changed the spelling was because the description of the photo says moulted, not because of the variation of English. Regards Denisarona ( talk) 08:38, 28 December 2021 (UTC)

Okey dokey. I’ll go over it again and look for consistency/inconsistency. Thanks for letting me know. —¿philoserf? ( talk) 15:21, 28 December 2021 (UTC)

As seen on Western (genre) and space Western, Western is capitalized as the genre is derived from a proper noun Old West, making it an exception to MOS:GENRECAPS, which explicitly makes an exception for such cases. GENRECAPS doesn't apply across the board unilaterally, and Western in genre scholarship is always capitalized. ~Cheers, Ten Ton Parasol 02:53, 31 December 2021 (UTC)

Thanks —¿philoserf? ( talk) 02:57, 31 December 2021 (UTC)

Just wanted to thank you for your valuable inputs and contribution to the new article. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Oria 6 ( talk • contribs) 09:38, 9 January 2022 (UTC)

Glad to help. —¿philoserf? ( talk) 14:38, 9 January 2022 (UTC)

The problem is, as my edit summary noted, Motor Boat is a magazine / trade journal viewed through Google Books, not an actual book. This means it needs more of a date than the year to identify the source; and that trimming the URL misdirects to another page of the same number. I was deferring to the article's use of sfn references and minimizing changes to the citation templates, but after seeing your changes I've just gone ahead and checked all I could and used "cite magazine" where appropriate, and also taken it back to detailed URLs. That led me to discover we are citing at least 2 ads, and some of the trade press coverage may be churnalism; GA or not, this article could do with some better references to avoid those. I also saw there was potentially useful information at Haskelite Manufacturing Corporation; I looked at Haskelite because Haskell canoe was redirected there, and I have no idea whether we really need so many articles on Haskell, his companies, and his products, especially since the manufacturing corp. article is also a GA, but the manufacturing article also seems at a glance to have a lot of refs on the forms of Haskelite, so it may be possible to greatly improve the Haskelite article using info and refs from there, and I've mentioned that in my latest edit summary. Anyway, I wanted to drop you a note on why I've undone both your edit and the one you had the bot make. Yngvadottir ( talk) 03:48, 25 September 2022 (UTC)

I must say, I do not favor Google Books links. I can however defer to anyone whit a reasoned position. —¿philoserf? ( talk) 19:03, 25 September 2022 (UTC)

I understand some editors object to them both on security grounds—I've seen Iridescent say we shouldn't be putting readers into the Google ecosystem without warning—and because it's a crapshoot whether the reader will see anything close to what the editor saw. But under real world circumstances, where Google is pretty near inescapable and where a reader is highly unlikely to have dead-tree or micro-format access to any relevant book, let alone back issues of every single relevant periodical, I believe we need to do more for the reader to satisfy WP:V than just handwave at sources that they have no way of consulting (or even making sure we haven't made a mistake or just made up something). That's illustrated by the sourcing for this article, that turns out to rely heavily on boosterism in trade journals and to include ads, and where we didn't have article titles in many cases, and still don't where I wasn't able to find them via Google. What this article does do well is provide free-access clippings from Newspapers.com—usually when an editor cites Newspapers.com there is absolutely no way to see that source without registering for that service, especially when there's a typo in the headline, as there was in at least one instance here. And one of the news sources here has a Google News Archive source instead; that's an invaluable service that Google took over from its original provider, invaluable by both its coverage and by being completely open access.

However, I don't think you're really suggesting stripping out all the sources that have google prefixes in the URL. The issue I wanted to raise is with the bot-assisted URL truncation. As I understand it, this is primarily for my own anonymity? The problem is, it severely complicates verification in many cases, especially for these bound volumes of journals/magazines that Google places in "Books", because they will have multiple pages with the same page number, and also in any case where the reader gets snippet view, because the search term is stripped out and the reader needs the search term to search again and find the referenced passage; and it isn't always obvious what search term to use. (One of the magazine issues cited includes both an article on applications of Haskelite and ad pages in which the company crows about the industry using Haskelite. One can't search for page numbers in snippet view, so I want to be able to assist the reader to redo the search and find the passage we are using as a ref.) Of course, in more recent sources we also have the problem that e-books don't use page numbers, so if the version of the book available for preview in Google Books is the e-book, as is increasingly often the case, the URL has to be lengthy to zero in on the relevant passage. I know I am technically incompetent—I usually avoid editing articles that use the sfn referencing format because it's so complicated to work with—but in many cases, as particularly with the Motor Boat reference in this article, truncation of URLs throws out the entire baby with the bathwater, leaving the reader essentially with "Wikipedia is pushing Google Books for some reason, goodness knows what that link was supposed to show me". If we're going to link to Google-mediated sources, I think we should actually link to the source where possible. Yngvadottir ( talk) 02:55, 26 September 2022 (UTC)

I have rolled back all your changes to this article because you did not respect the existing British English and violated MOS:ENGVAR. Sturmvogel 66 ( talk) 00:41, 26 December 2022 (UTC)

@ Sturmvogel 66: The page had an existing American english. I just re-established it.. which you reverted. Read the page source. —¿philoserf? ( talk) 01:51, 26 December 2022 (UTC)

I'm really not trying to give you a hard time. But people were asking you repeatedly to take care not to leave messes, and now someone is going to have to go clean up. Anyway, all the best. – jacobolus  (t) 20:18, 30 March 2023 (UTC)

Wow. You are free to do any amount of editing you want, including none, but you've clearly created all manner of work for others and your response is to wave it away as "nits" and retire? Are you sure that this is how you want to treat others who are trying to work with you to make the encyclopedia better? ― Justin (koavf)❤ T☮ C☺ M☯ 21:52, 30 March 2023 (UTC)

There is currently a discussion at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard regarding an issue with which you may have been involved. Thank you.

A quick head’s up: I made a post at the Administrator’s Noticeboard asking for more eyes on this. Not trying to put you on the spot; I just don’t think I can check through all of these edits by myself. – jacobolus  (t) 03:04, 31 March 2023 (UTC)