User talk:Mr.Z-man

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[edit] Opera popular pages

Hi, thanks for the list. If you get the chance, could you comment on this [1]? Basically, the list may not be picking up on pages which have foreign accents in the titles, which is a drawback where opera is concerned. Cheers. --Folantin (talk) 11:18, 10 June 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Some shameless thankspam!

I'd like to thank everyone who took part in my RfA, which closed 79/3/6, so I'm now another proud bearer of the mop-and-bucket - hopefully I'll wield them with success! I'd also like to say that I found the process to be welcoming, friendly and supportive, with the support comments encouraging and the oppose and neutral comments offering good feedback, so I had a very positive experience, despite the fact that, from all the comments and discussions, I was expecting something much more negative - thanks for helping to make it a worthwile experience! Many thanks once again, Colds7ream (talk) 13:01, 10 June 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Abuse filter bot coming back?

Is the abuse filter bot coming back? Wknight94 ^talk 14:30, 13 June 2009 (UTC)

Still waiting for final approval. Mr.Z-man 15:05, 13 June 2009 (UTC)

[edit] time stamp

every single time i sign my name with it it doesnt seem to have a link to my page it did but not anymore --The Movie Master 1 02:38, 19 June 2009 (UTC) 02:36, 19 June 2009 (UTC)

see above i have to highlight and link it my self User:The Movie Master 1

Make sure the "Raw signature" box in your preferences is not checked. Mr.Z-man 02:40, 19 June 2009 (UTC)

oh thanks a lot The Movie Master 1 (talk) 02:41, 19 June 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Request for three more popular pages

Hi Mr. Z-man,

It'd be very helpful for some upcoming Wikipedia workshops for scientists if there were "Popular pages" for three more WikiProjects:

• Wikipedia:WikiProject Microbiology
• Wikipedia:WikiProject Pharmacology
• Wikipedia:WikiProject Neuroscience

Could you ask Mr. Z-bot if he'd be willing to do those as well? It'd be a big help. Thanks! Proteins (talk) 18:58, 19 June 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Possible AIV false pos?

Since I cannnot view the details of the filter I am not sure what the problem was behind this. I am delisting from AIV until this is explained. Daniel Case (talk) 14:57, 21 June 2009 (UTC)

Yes, it looks like a false positive (for that filter, the user's contribs still seem a little suspicious) but I didn't write the filter. I would suggest bringing it up on Wikipedia talk:Abuse filter. Mr.Z-man 15:10, 21 June 2009 (UTC)

[edit] harmonising date formats

I agree largely with your arguments about harmonising date formats. OTOH, I believe that is desirable to keep the datebot proposal's scope narrow because a) it is judgemental matter and thus not suited to bots, and b)the precise scope will allow the proposal speedier passage at RfC. You might like to know that a script by Lightmouse can effectively do much of the harmonising task with respect to dmy and mdy dates (although date ranges remain problematic).

I see from your monobook page that you are fairly adept with scripts. Perhaps you might be interested in modifying the script by Lightmouse so that it treats yyyy--mm-dd dates too? Used in conjunction with dmy or mdy tagging, maybe a bot can be sent around at a later date to align date formats throughout? There has also been some limited discussion at Template_talk:Dmy. Ohconfucius (talk) 02:27, 25 June 2009 (UTC)

I haven't done much JavaScript work lately, and I'm fairly busy with other things to start a new task. I would suggest asking Animum or AzaToth. Mr.Z-man 16:55, 25 June 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for your suggestion. I only asked you this because you seemed to be extremely interested in this task and are spending quite a lot of time forcefully pushing the idea that the delinking bot should also align dates. It seemed like a task which would allow you to put your money where your mouth is. With your skills, you probably could have written all the code in the time you have taken to argue your case on WP:DATEBOT.

Why do you so vehemently oppose the date-linking bot? We are not in a commercial situation, and we are not in a hurry. Real-life time and cost considerations do not apply. There seems to be no reason why the two bots (a second bot to align dates) shouldn't exist independently. I have already started tagging articles {{dmy}} and {{mdy}}, so perhaps with your help, these formats may be maintained by such a bot in future. Ohconfucius (talk) 01:31, 26 June 2009 (UTC)

There's no reason why the 2 should be done separately. Both of those tasks would likely require hundreds of thousands of edits. Doing them separately would be a huge waste of resources. There's no hurry, therefore we take the time to make a more complete proposal. When working with bots that make large numbers of edits, the goal should be to be as efficient as possible. I don't disagree with the idea of a bot to delink dates, I just think that if we're going to do this, we should try to get it right the first time. Incremental updates, where each increment requires half a million edits, is a pretty terrible plan IMO. Mr.Z-man 02:24, 26 June 2009 (UTC)

I would agree wholeheartedly with your suggested approach if the community had adopted a unified date format across WP as I would have preferred, but it has not. I estimate the number of articles with predominantly dmy, mdy, or an ambiguous mix of date formats are fairly evenly split (in addition to a very large number of ISO dates in lists/tables and reference sections), and this is big enough to be problematic. Efficiency is good, but not our foremost concern. Most often, solving complex issues involves cutting down the problem into manageable chunks, and I think the narrow scope of the Datebot proposal does that quite well. Heterogeneous date formats, except for ambiguous date formats (eg 07/08/09), do not cause one's brain to stall while reading. Non-relevant links, however, are a detriment to the reading experience. That is why I feel they should be removed as a first priority.

I have analysed the edit patterns in a few articles, and believe that a very large number of edits - the vast majority - are trivial in nature ( I suggest you look at the articles of any of the more prominent athletes or musicians). By extension of your 'efficiency' logic, many small manual modifications should only occur with a more substantial contribution. That is how I like to work, but I don't always achieve it for a number of reasons; most WP editors don't work that way at all. Bots can only work that way if the rules are clear and unambiguous, but this problem is laced with too much subjectivity. Ohconfucius (talk) 04:27, 26 June 2009 (UTC)

Efficiency is not a goal with manual editing though. Of course logic that applies to a computer program won't necessarily extend well to humans. People generally don't know what they're going to do very far in advance of when they do it. The same is not true of a bot. A bot operator knows what the bot is going to (or should) do well in advance. Its also a matter of scale. It takes human users, and even most bots, years to make more than a hundred thousand edits, a bot to do date unlinking or date standardization would do it in a few weeks. As for "many small manual modifications should only occur with a more substantial contribution" - that is how bots are supposed to work. Bots that only make minor changes are usually denied. And to be clear, I'm not proposing that all dates be made the same format project-wide, just that each article is standardized to use whatever the dominant format in that article is. Mr.Z-man 06:15, 26 June 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Popular pages for WP:Croatia

Could you please add Wikipedia:WikiProject Croatia to projects for which this list is created?

BTW: since the list displays the quality assessment, it would be handy to see the importance assessment too. (Strictly speaking, hit count and quality are not related, while hit count and importance are.) GregorB (talk) 20:53, 25 June 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Request for mediation not accepted

A Request for Mediation to which you were are a party was not accepted and has been delisted. You can find more information on the case subpage, Wikipedia:Requests for mediation/Use of Sports Logos. For the Mediation Committee, Ryan Postlethwaite 02:26, 26 June 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Metrication in the United States

A digusting comment has been placed on the Metrication in the United States talk page. Can you remove it?

There are two principal reasons why the United States of North America has been unable to change to a sensible measurement system that 200 / 203 countries use.

1. The financial cost of such a change would probably cripple a weakening economy.
2. The average American lacks the intellect necessary to be able to handle such a change.

ILuvAmerica (talk) 11:06, 27 June 2009 (UTC)

Looks like its already been removed. Mr.Z-man 15:05, 27 June 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Popular pages for WikiProject Indian music

Hi Mr.Z-man! I'm a fan of your article hits pages. If it's not a bother, would you consider creating an article hits page for Wikipedia:WikiProject Indian music? Thank you. Hekerui (talk) 23:25, 27 June 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Thanks!

		The Admin's Barnstar
		Thanks for your help in deleting the articles at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Anybot's algae articles! Much appreciated. –Juliancolton | Talk 01:34, 29 June 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Bot acting in a way that confuses me

Mr.Z-bot just reported Rex Dominator at AIV because he "Tripped filter 139 (details)." Not sure how this is a problem, since the user wasn't able to do anything of vandalism or otherwise problematic, because he was prevented from so doing by the filter. Is there a good reason why this would be reported? Not challenging you: I just don't know what this is, so I'd like to understand. Nyttend (talk) 04:07, 30 June 2009 (UTC)

The point is that he intended to vandalize. The fact that the edit wasn't actually successful shouldn't matter. If we have to wait for users to manage to bypass the filter before we blocked them, there wouldn't be much point to having it in the first place. Mr.Z-man 04:45, 30 June 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Popular pages for Wikipedia:WikiProject Zoroastrianism

A member of the above project has requested it have a popular pages page as well. Thank you again for a really wonderful innovation here. John Carter (talk) 00:52, 2 July 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Getting revision lists with wikitools

Hi Z-Man, you pointed me to frameworks for doing WP API calls a little while back at the village pump. I noticed that you maintain a python framework, wikitools, and I'd like to try it out. Unfortunately I am having a very difficult time navigating the source code to find the things that I am looking for. Specifically, is it possible to use your framework to get a list of revisions of a page? and if so how? Thank you, Sligocki (talk) 01:37, 3 July 2009 (UTC)

There's no function specifically for getting the page history. The framework is primarily an abstraction layer around the MediaWiki API with some objects for convenience. The README file explains how to do a simple query, this can be adapted for pretty much anything. To get the revision history for a page:

from wikitools import wiki
from wikitools import api
# create a Wiki object, by default it uses the English Wikipedia
project = wiki.Wiki() 
# define the params for the query, see the MediaWiki API docs for more details
params = {'action':'query', 'titles':'Main Page', 'prop':'revisions', 'rvlimit':'max'}
# create the request object
request = api.APIRequest(project, params)
# query the API
result = request.query()

and the result will look something like:

{u'query': 
    {u'pages': 
        {u'15580374': 
            {u'ns': 0,
             u'pageid': 15580374,
             u'revisions': [{u'comment': u'null edit to force purge',
                             u'parentid': 289122198,
                             u'revid': 298682365,
                             u'timestamp': u'2009-06-26T03:36:51Z',
                             u'user': u'Hersfold'},
 
                            {u'comment': u'transition complete',
                             u'parentid': 289122024,
                             u'revid': 289122198,
                             u'timestamp': u'2009-05-10T20:14:33Z',
                             u'user': u'Happy-melon'}],
             u'title': u'Main Page'}
        }
    },
 u'query-continue': {u'revisions': {u'rvstartid': 289122024}}}

but with a few thousand more revisions. So to get the most recent revision, result['query']['pages']['15580374']['revisions'][0]. The API is documented on mediawiki.org and at http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php. You may need to set "rvprop" depending on what information you need. Mr.Z-man 02:20, 3 July 2009 (UTC)

I see, there's no convenience class to help out. Well maybe I'll try to write one in the style of your framework. Thank you, Sligocki (talk) 18:38, 3 July 2009 (UTC)

I've been considering a Revision class to represent individual revisions, but haven't done it yet due to lack of time and no real use for it myself. Mr.Z-man 19:12, 3 July 2009 (UTC)

[edit] closeAFD.js

Hi Mr.Z-man. Firstly, can I say User:Mr.Z-man/closeAFD.js is proving to be a very useful script, but I just notified of an error caused by the script when I tried relisting an AfD. The edit is here, and I am using Google Chrome. Is this a known bug or error? Or did I just press the wrong button? \ Backslash Forwardslash / {talk} 07:26, 3 July 2009 (UTC)

I don't know what would cause that. Is that the only time you've tried to do a relist on Chrome, or have other worked properly? Mr.Z-man 19:12, 3 July 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Mr. Z-bot's schedule?

Hey, quick question: when does Mr. Z-bot update the Popular pages? Judging from his work for the past two months, I'm guessing that it's on the first Tuesday of each month, is that right? Sorry to bother you and thanks again, Proteins (talk) 19:02, 3 July 2009 (UTC)

Right now its approximately "whenever I get around to it" though that should change next month as I'm switching to a new script with better automation. I was going to do it last night (this morning UTC), but the Toolserver went down and it took a few hours for everything to come back up. Mr.Z-man 19:18, 3 July 2009 (UTC)

OK, thanks! I'm putting them to good use in our workshops, Proteins (talk) 19:41, 3 July 2009 (UTC)