User:Teratornis/Notes

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This is a page of notes about various editing projects I do, a place to test wikitext markup, etc.

Contents

[edit] Adding shortcuts to the Manual of Style

Other editors implemented shortcuts for the Manual of Style (MoS), but the implementation seems incomplete:

  • Not all MoS pages have shortcuts (I think - check this).
  • Some MoS pages have sections with corresponding shortcuts, but not all of those sections have {{shortcut}} templates to display the shortcuts.
  • Some shortcuts may use prefixes other than MOS:.

The existing shortcuts with the MOS: prefix are here:

All the MoS pages should be here:

[edit] Adding shortcuts to the Editor's index to Wikipedia

John Broughton wrote the Editor's index to Wikipedia, and he incorporated a few of my suggestions. As of 04:37, 21 October 2007 (UTC), John is busy with other work, and (if possible) I would like to implement the idea for shortcuts we discussed:

However, before proceeding, I will outline exactly what I want to do and ask John to OK it first. Steps:

  1. Make an EIW: page. Copy the content from the WP:EIW shortcut.
  2. Add EIW: to the {{shortcut}} template at the top of the Editor's index.
  3. Add the EIW: prefix to the table of pseudo-namespaces here: WP:SHORT#List of prefixes. (Because I will have made the EIW: page, at least we will have one shortcut to link to from Special:Prefixindex/EIW:.)
  4. Determine how to use a bot to make a large number of shortcut pages.
  5. Construct the list of shortcut pages to make.
    • Presumably this involves specifying all the page titles, and the content of each page, in some format suitable for a bot to use as input.
    • I'll need to copy the wikitext from the Editor's index to a local file, and possibly write a Perl script to extract just the headings that have anchors and will need shortcuts.
  6. Submit the bot request.
  7. Edit the Editor's index to contain {{shortcut}} templates for every topic heading that has one or more corresponding shortcuts.

An alternative to running such a bot on Wikipedia would be to run it on a wiki I control, and try exporting all the pages back into Wikipedia. That way I could experiment with my own bot program, but that might be more hassle than it is worth.

Another option is to forget about bots and just edit everything manually. However, creating all the shortcut pages manually would be very tedious.

[edit] The smart way to add shortcuts to name anchors

17:29, 11 May 2008 (UTC): somewhat belatedly, I recognized a more efficient way of implementing shortcuts in the Editor's index, by following the style of name-anchor shortcuts in the WP:NOT page. See my comments in:

[edit] Request for Adminship

18:40, 11 May 2008 (UTC): User:Yellowdesk offered to nominate me for administratorship. See: User talk:Teratornis#Administratorship (permanent link). User:Yellowdesk has not gotten around to nominating me yet. But assuming this will eventually happen, I can start editing my answers to the standard questions:

[edit] Questions for the candidate

Dear candidate, thank you for offering to serve Wikipedia as an administrator. It is recommended that you answer these optional questions to provide guidance for participants:

1. What admin work do you intend to take part in?
A: My largest single area of activity is answering questions on the Help desk. Occasionally users ask questions that are difficult for a non-administrator to answer, especially questions about why an article was deleted. In some cases, a questioner merely alludes to something he or she did which is now deleted, and it can sometimes be difficult just to understand what a question means without the ability to view deleted articles. The Help desk does have some administrators answering questions, but there can be times when no administrator is available. It seems we could give faster responses to some questions with more administrators helping on the Help desk. Without the ability to actually see a deleted article, the best I can do for a user is cite general policies and guidelines, but such answers unavoidably contain many conditional branches which are almost sure to confuse a new user (e.g., "If your article has problem X, then you would do Y; and if it has problem Z, etc."). Being able to see such articles would allow for precise answers. Occasionally it might be helpful to userfy deleted content, but in most cases from what I have seen, I would tend to agree with the deletion decision, and in cases where an article was a good-faith attempt, I would instead encourage the user to transwiki to an appropriate wiki. Mostly I would like to be able to get the user close to some sort of definitive answer in one step, rather than just linking to further confusing procedures, which are likely to be difficult for new users especially.
I don't expect to do other types of administrative work right away, although I might in the future. I've been gradually learning more about template coding, and I might like the ability to edit protected templates, although I would proceed cautiously of course. I would also like to learn about bot programming at some point.
2. What are your best contributions to Wikipedia, and why?
A: My best work is on the Help desk, where I have my largest number of Wikipedia edits (2756 as of 18:40, 11 May 2008 (UTC), which incidentally puts me at second-most behind MacGyverMagic's 2963), and for which I have received most if not all of my barnstars. Answering questions on the Help desk has helped me get fairly good at looking up answers I didn't know when I first read some of the questions - I have developed a deep appreciation for the size, quality, and comprehensiveness of Wikipedia's instructions. I've also tried to help improve the tools for answering questions on the Help desk, such as:
  • The Editor's index - where I suggested some features to the primary author, John Broughton, namely: adding alphabetic TOC templates to each letter section heading; adding invisible name anchors with <span.../> tags, to allow "See also" links to go directly to the targets, rather than to the top of the section; and adding shortcuts throughout the index to simplify linking to entries when communicating with other users on talk pages or the Help desk.
  • Instructing User:Manors to add shortcuts to the FAQ, to provide similar rapid citation for the Help desk. (Manors had become discouraged with Wikipedia editing due to disputes with other editors, and he posted a question on the Help desk asking about how to leave the project. I suggested that he leave the often-contentious world of article editing, and focus on the Help desk and supporting tools for a while, which he did.)
  • Search templates: {{Google custom}}, {{Google help desk}}, {{Google wikipedia}}, and {{Help desk searches}}, which link to various Google custom search forms that are useful for searching various collections of documentation relevant to editing on Wikipedia. I've assisted other editors with using these templates to set up search links on various archive collections such as the Signpost and the Village pump. I also created {{Google scholar}} and {{Google scholar cite}}, the latter being useful as a template wrapper for the Universal Reference Formatter by User:Smith609, a tool for generating automatic citations with {{Cite journal}}.
I do have some article edits, but not a spectacular number. I have lots of interests, including renewable energy, peak oil, cycling, military history, too many to list really. I find that with my experience on the Help desk, I can advise other editors on how to fix various problems.
3. Have you been in any conflicts over editing in the past or have other users caused you stress? How have you dealt with it and how will you deal with it in the future?
A: I've been involved in online activity since the pre-Web days of Usenet. I find Wikipedia to be remarkably placid and congenial compared to many other online venues I have frequented (and continue to frequent). Over the years of watching people waste their lives flaming each other, I've concluded the only productive way to approach online disagreement is to cultivate sangfroid and critical thinking. It helps to have a solid grasp of all the facts relevant to a situation, and to honestly admit when I don't. Being familiar with fallacies and cognitive biases is vital for keeping disagreements reasonable rather than emotional. Probably the closest I ever came to getting sucked into a content dispute was on Talk:Nadine Gordimer. I didn't actually edit the Nadine Gordimer article, but I was merely commenting on an ongoing dispute. It soon became clear that the opponents were not interested in logical debate, so I left to work on other things.

[edit] Citation tools

21:56, 23 May 2008 (UTC): make some notes about citation tools. Copy some links from: WP:EIW#Citetools to subsections, and take notes about using them. Maybe someday I would write a page in the Wikipedia: (Project:) namespace that overviews these tools and documents them a little.

  • Reference generator - enter info into appropriate boxes, will generate standard text for citation that can be pasted into an article
    • I don't see how this tool saves any work over just editing a template by hand. If anything, having to cut and paste into all the individual boxes is harder than hand-editing a template in a text editor, since with a text editor one can paste in a large amount of multi-line data and edit it into the template in one place, without the need to keep switching between windows.
  • Web page that generates citation from an ISBN or PubMed article (and another, less recommended)
  • Wikipedia:PMID - automatic link to PubMed
  • User:Smith609/Cite - {{Cite}}-o-matic - generates Wiki-friendly citation templates from a Google Scholar search or BibTeX entry
  • Google Scholar enhanced with the Wikipedia citation assistant
    • See below for more notes about this promising tool.
  • Wikipedia:Wikicite - Windows program for entering citation info; outputs to the clipboard a Wikipedia-formated cite
  • Wikipedia:Citing sources#Tools
  • Zotero, an on-line research tool, can export citations in Wikipedia format
    • 06:24, 24 May 2008 (UTC): this sounds like a very capable tool. I will have to try it for use with my book project. See below for additional notes about Zotero.
  • WPCITE - Firefox add-on that grabs some information from web page, formatted as a {{Cite web}} template
    • I installed this on May 8, 2008. It works pretty well, but only generates the {{Cite web}} template, so it's best for news articles, but not as good for books, scientific journals, and other complicated stuff. It doesn't work at all on PDF files. Zotero looks far more capable.
  • User:Mr.Z-man/refToolbar - user script that adds a button to the edit toolbar; clicking that offers a choice of four citation templates. (Also available via the Gadgets tab of "my preferences".)
  • Other:

[edit] Citation tool documents

06:09, 24 May 2008 (UTC): try to find whatever documents Wikipedia has about using citation tools. There doesn't seem to be a centralized document that I could call a comprehensive user manual for, say, beginners. Here's a {{Google custom}} search:

That finds some pages:

[edit] Zotero

06:59, 24 May 2008 (UTC): I installed Zotero in Firefox on one of my computers. It looks impressive. Here is the Zotero quick start guide:

and instructions on using Zotero to generate Wikipedia citations:

See what other Wikipedians have written about it:

17:04, 31 May 2008 (UTC): shortly after I installed Zotero on two of my computers, I began noticing problems on each of them. The problems did not begin instantly, but after a few days, so I don't know whether Zotero is responsible. But the timing seems suspicious, as neither computer had been having problems recently.

  • On my computer that runs Ubuntu Linux, YouTube videos stopped playing under Gnash in Mozilla Firefox. I cannot recall exactly how soon after I installed Zotero that this problem began. That is, I cannot remember whether I was able to play any YouTube video after I installed Zotero. I might have. Gnash may have stopped playing YouTube videos because of some other problem, such as an automatic update to some other software I have installed.
  • On my laptop computer that runs Windows XP, I installed Zotero and noticed no problems for a few days. Then my laptop displayed a blue screen of death and after that the computer does not reboot, displaying an "operating system not found" error. I had a similar problem about 18 months earlier and I had to reinstall Windows and restore my applications from backups. Obviously Zotero was not responsible for wiping out my hard drive 18 months ago, but who knows about this time.

It might be worthwhile to look for reports of buggy interactions between Zotero and other components on the computers where people install it.

[edit] Google Scholar enhanced with the Wikipedia citation assistant

  • Google Scholar enhanced with the Wikipedia citation assistant
    • This worked pretty well for me, as soon as I noticed how to use it (there was no obvious documentation). In the Google Scholar search results, one of the links below each result entry is {{Wikify}}. Clicking that link generates a {{Cite journal}} template, with fields automatically containing title, author, date, and so on.

17:04, 31 May 2008 (UTC): It would be nice to create a Google template (see: {{Google templates}} for a formatted list) that would generate links to this tool, so I could pass search parameters to it from wikitext. The first step would be to create a new template that would send a search string to the unenhanced Google Scholar (I could call it: {{Google scholar}}). Once I have that working, I could figure out how to send field values to Google Scholar enhanced with the Wikipedia citation assistant.

05:17, 1 June 2008 (UTC): I created the simplest possible {{Google templates}} and it works. It just passes the search string to the basic Google Scholar search form.

Make another template to act as a front-end wrapper for the citation assistant input form. Here is the HTML code from that page, so I can get the field names:

<form action="Scholar" name="f" method='POST'>
<span id="hf"></span>
<table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0">
<tr valign="top">
<td width=150> </td>

<td align="center">
<input class='flatbox' maxlength="256" size="40" name="q" value="">
<input class='flatbox' type="submit" value="Search" name="btnG">
<p style='font-size:smaller; text-align:left;'>
Title:     <input class='flatbox' size="20" name='intitle' value=''>
</p><p style='font-size:smaller; text-align:left;'>
Author:  <input class='flatbox' size="20" name='as_auth' value=''>

</p><p style='font-size:smaller; text-align:left;'>
Journal: <input class='flatbox' size="20" name='as_publication' value=''>
</p><p style='font-size:smaller; text-align:left;'>
Years:   <input class='flatbox' size="4" name='as_ylo' value=''> - <input class='flatbox' size="4" name='as_yhi' value=''>
<input type=hidden name=hl value="en">
<input type=hidden name=lr value="">
</td>
<td> </td>
<td valign="top" nowrap>

</td>
</tr>
</table>

</form>

00:18, 4 June 2008 (UTC): from the above code we can see these field names:

  • q: the general input field on the simple Google Scholar search form
  • intitle: Title
  • as_auth: Author
  • as_publication: Journal
  • as_ylo: Years (from)
  • as_yhi: Years (to)

Try to manually construct some search URLs for the Google Scholar enhanced with the Wikipedia citation assistant:

So far, the pattern seems to be that any search with a blank q field does not work. This is strange, because I am able to run searches from the site itself without entering anything in the q field. It's somewhat hard to tell what the resulting URL would be, since the site uses method='POST' rather than method='GET'. Try making a local HTML file and with a copy of the above <form ...> tag, and open it in a Web browser to see what the resulting URL looks like with method='GET'. I.e., browse to the search form, click File | Save page as... in Firefox, save it to a local file, edit that file to make the form use GET, then reopen the page in Firefox and see what URL it generates.

And here is the resulting URL when I search with just the value: 2005 in the as_ylo field:

Evidently I see that I overlooked the &btnG=Search value in the tests I constructed by hand above. Now it seems that I have enough information to construct a template which will run this search and allow all fields.

[edit] Template:Google scholar cite

07:06, 6 June 2008 (UTC): make a template to wrap the Google Scholar enhanced with the Wikipedia citation assistant: {{Google scholar cite}}. I will start by editing in my sandbox page: User:Teratornis/Sandbox4.

21:32, 6 June 2008 (UTC): I edited a first draft. The standard template call could look like this:

{{User:Teratornis/Sandbox4
  |keywords=
  |title=
  |author=
  |publication=
  |yearlow=
  |yearhigh=
  |linktext=
}}

Make a scratch copy of the core part of the template text, with extra line breaks so I can read it:

[http://www.srcf.ucam.org/~ms609/Wiki/Scholar?q={{{1|{{{keywords|}}}}}}
&btnG=Search
&intitle={{{title|}}}
&as_auth={{{author|}}}
&as_publication={{{publication|}}}
&as_ylo={{{yearlow|}}}
&as_yhi={{{yearhigh|}}}
&hl=en
&lr= {{{linktext|{{{1|{{{keywords}}}}}}}}}]

See: WM:TEMP#Mix of named and unnamed parameters. I would like the keywords parameter to optionally be the first unnamed parameter, and the linktext parameter to be optionally the second unnamed parameter. That way the user has the option to use a very short version of the template, or a longer version with named parameters.

21:32, 6 June 2008 (UTC): test my first draft:

Type this To get this What it produces, or searches for
{{User:Teratornis/Sandbox4|keywords=miscanthus}} miscanthus Search the Google Scholar Wikipedia citation assistant for: miscanthus, using a named parameter
{{User:Teratornis/Sandbox4|miscanthus|Search the Google Scholar Wikipedia citation assistant for: miscanthus}} Search the Google Scholar Wikipedia citation assistant for: miscanthus The above search using two unnamed parameters, to specify a search keyword, and some link text

[edit] Updating to account for the new name: Universal Reference Formatter

21:57, 7 June 2008 (UTC): see my comments in User talk:Smith609#Template:Google scholar cite. I need to edit some things to account for changes by Smith609 (the user formerly known as Verisimilus):