User talk:Quiddity

I usually watchlist talkpage threads for a few days, so please reply in original threads.

If you leave a new message here, I will probably reply here, unless requested otherwise.

"I didn't do it, nobody saw me do it, you can't prove anything!" -- Bart Simpson^[3]

"Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up
and hurry off as if nothing ever happened." - Winston Churchill^{[citation requested]}

a small bag of holding

This yellowing sack, woven of bananafibre and buckypaper, currently contains: one copy of this week's newspaper, two photographs of cat noses, and the susurrus of neglected conversations ...

"Attention and activity lead to mistakes as well as to successes; but a life spent making mistakes
is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing." – George Bernard Shaw^[2]

Wikibreak (2011 + a bit more)

I (Quiddity) took a wikibreak in December 2010 to concentrate on other IRL projects, that continued for far longer than I had hoped. It wasn't until July 2012 that time made itself available. I've got a lot to catch-up on! -- Quiddity (talk) 04:07, 6 August 2012 (UTC)

Thank you!

Thanks so much for that table of Community portals on other Wikipedias – it's actually really useful to see the different design structures that have been chosen by different projects. And if we find something that works particularly well on EN, it would be good to share findings with the other communities who have a CP, in case any of them have run into the same problems and want a better page. Maryana (WMF) (talk) 00:39, 3 August 2012 (UTC)

Thanks :)

Note to self: meta:Research talk:Community portal redesign#Comparison with other Wikimedia CPs.

Thanks for fixing up Glossary of chess

I wasn't aware of the nice templates available to aid in marking up glossaries. Your pointer to MOS:GLOSS was very informative. Quale (talk) 03:56, 6 August 2012 (UTC)

Glad it's appreciated. It took quite a while, and is a long diff to look through. I feared a BRD cycle ;)

I didn't add the {{defn}} templates in yet, as they make the raw-text very hard to navigate, but I might do so later. Will ping on the article's talkpage before I do. -- Quiddity (talk) 04:09, 6 August 2012 (UTC)

I was gonna ask if you did it w/ an automated tool. (And if so, could you please also do for Glossary of chess problems.) But "it took quite a while" makes me fear ... manually, letter by letter? (If so, I won't ask you to do for the other glossary. Please advise, thx.) Ihardlythinkso (talk) 07:51, 6 August 2012 (UTC)

Halfway between.

• Copy to textpad
• search&replace a number of things (multiline search&replace required)
• copy the "x" from "|content= x" into "term= x"
• check every single entry manually
• paste back into editwindow
• preview and check things dozens of times
• hit save.

All while listening to podcasts (TTBOOK and Radiolab). (So I'm not plain crazy ;)

(It would cut the time in half, if I'd just get around to learning regex properly... >.> )

I'm almost done Glossary of botanical terms, and it's taken about 2hrs. I'll do the chess problems next, now that I've gotten 2 (!) pieces of positive feedback. Thankee! -- Quiddity (talk) 08:26, 6 August 2012 (UTC)

Thx for the explain. Better if you do (for consistency). Thx for your efforts. Ihardlythinkso (talk) 08:48, 6 August 2012 (UTC)

I stopped by to say thank you too, for the changes to the two chess glossaries. The reason that we had a subsection for each term was so that other articles could link to that term (and that still works). None of us knew about the changes you made. You really cleaned it up; and I think it loads faster too. Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 22:53, 6 August 2012 (UTC)

Just FYI, MOS:GLOSS's template-structured glossaries are all-or-nothing. The <dt>...</dt> markup embedded in the {{defn}} template is required or the markup is invalid. If you're finding that it creates reading problems, do it like this:

{{defn|1=


Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.


}} instead of:

{{defn|1=

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

}}

Hope that helps. — SMcCandlish   Talk⇒ ɖ∘¿¤þ   Contrib. 06:13, 7 August 2012 (UTC)

Glossary of ancient Roman religion

I may have questions as I work with the new format, so I'm hoping you'll watch the talk page for a while. Thanks! Cynwolfe (talk) 22:09, 6 August 2012 (UTC)

Definitely, and for years to come. -- Quiddity (talk) 22:15, 6 August 2012 (UTC)

Re: Thanks for everything

(begins with my msg, copied from talk:The Transhumanist)

A belated thanks (I have time! Finally!) for the notes on my talkpage wishing me well, during my wikibreak. They were much appreciated when I finally had time to login again. In general, I'm glad to see that nothing horrendous has occurred, though the indexes appear to be sliding into projectspace (which seems reasonable). I'll be working on glossaries for a little while, but hope to get caught up on outlines and start assisting with them again, soon. Best wishes, -- Quiddity (talk) 04:15, 6 August 2012 (UTC)

Wow. I was worried that you weren't coming back, and you were very sorely missed. It is a great relief to see you back again!

What on Earth have you been up to?

My outline development participation has shifted to perl programming and may include C++ programming soon. The prototypes are being developed offline for the most part. The two main avenues of development so far are one that involves using the external program calling feature of AWB, and the other is the use of standalone scripts on Wikipedia data dumps.

This endeavor has turned out to be even more technical than I thought it would, with a rather long learning curve. There are two of us working on this, and I'll pick up more programmers as I can find them.

We decided to avoid accessing MediaWiki's API directly from scripts due to bot policy and approval bureaucracy, and to avoid burdening the WP servers.

Perl was a natural progression from using regex, and wasn't as painful as I thought it would be, though it has turned out to be very time consuming.

Unfortunately, I haven't had as much time as I would like to devote to this, but when the programming projects are completed, we should get a solid productivity increase of at least a factor of five, but I'm hoping for a magnitude. In time, I see no reason why we can't get two magnitudes.

The goal is to be able to build outlines similar to Outline of cell biology, Outline of forestry, and Outline of chess, (or even better), using program support to speed up the process. While keeping a human editor in the loop before posting to WP, of course. Not likely this year, but very likely if I can manage to put a whole year of uninterrupted development time into this.

Regex only goes so far, but with Perl, we are currently at an automation ratio of about 80% of content, when the right conditions apply (when adequate prerequisite materials are available). The last 20% is a killer, and has really bogged us down. The magnitude mark would be 90%, while the 2 magnitude mark is 99% automation.

Unfortunately, the current "80% automation" achievement picks off only the low hanging fruit. The items it misses are those that already took the human editor the longest time to process. So it's not the 5x productivity increase I was hoping for. Eighty-percent of content does not equate to 80% of the labor. We've got a lot of tweaking and conceptual blockbusting to do before we will get there, but I'm highly optimitistic.

I'm 100% certain we can achieve 5 x productivity, i.e., a human editor being able to build a finished quality outline in 1/5th the time, using program support. I would love to achieve 100% automation, but that will require heuristic training architecture, or beyond, and we're a few years out from diving into that ocean.

We're currently on a break, but we will be back up and running within the next 3 or 4 weeks.

In the meantime, I'll be dropping in from time to time to keep an eye on the outline watchlist, etc.

Cheers, The Transhumanist 22:55, 9 August 2012 (UTC)

Keep Wikidata strongly in mind; it should become amazingly important over the next few years.

(As a scratching-the-surface-example, it should eventually contain all objective relational-data ("x = born on date = y", "country x's population = y in year z", etc) therefore: instead of updating all 150+ articles (de: fr: es: ja: en: etc) every time the official population count changes, each wikipedia just transcludes the data from {{wikidata:France:Current Population}}. (Grossly oversimplified example).

See meta:Wikidata for current details, and meta:Wikidata/Archive/Wikidata for oodles of historic notes and discussions and related projects.

Separate, but possibly converging later on: "Excerpts". - Years ago, I was looking at the excerpts that google provides in its results (usually 140-160 characters, 20-25 words), and now their new knowledge-graph feature (seems to provide the first complete sentence, eg search:mozart ). And Relatedly, the synopsis embedded in WP:Popups. - I was wondering if we could use the same/similar method, to pull definitions out, for use within outlines and glossaries. This would introduce a bunch of new problems though (arguing over how long, how detailed, how biased, the 1st sentence in an article could/should be, etc etc etc). But might come to pass.

Addendum: *

And whilst I'm tangenting, Simple English. I'm constantly wondering about ways to hook en: and simple: together in more efficient ways. Nothing concrete yet, but ideas mulling on the burner.

ttfn, -- Quiddity (talk) 23:48, 9 August 2012 (UTC)

* Addendum: I'm sure I recall someone suggesting, or starting a template or project for this, or something... Possibly related to disambig definitions? ("how do i word it?" "just use the first sentence from the article", "yes, but not always suitable!" "we should make a new template, inside every single article, that gives a 1 sentence summary", "the horror!", etc ... ). Can't find it of course. Getting grey hair, too... -- Quiddity (talk) 05:05, 17 August 2012 (UTC)

Rich Farmbrough tried templating the leads of articles, and using the templates to standardize the leads in articles and outlines, to keep them in sync. This turned out to be impractical, because it hid the leads from newbies. Also, we needed a truncated or condensed version of the leads for the outlines. On a side note, unfortunately, Rich has been banned by the Arbitration Committee from using any automation on Wikipedia until they decide otherwise. On the bright side, this makes him more available for answering technical questions.

The outline-related work I find the most interesting is the research being done at the University of Washington concerning automated taxonomy-building. They submitted a bot proposal a couple or so years ago to automate the construction of articles from scratch. They were turned down because nobody knew who they were (i.e., they had no history or reputation developing Wikipedia). At the core of their technology was the construction of topic taxonomies by a heuristic algorithm "trained" by humans. Taxonomy of topics = Topic outline.

After an extensive search, I could find no examples of articles being built using this type of thing. Instead, the research focused on building infoboxes, not articles. Very much WikiData-ish. More semantic web than Wikipedia-like. But much of the technology in that area should be applicable to outline building and maintaining.

After looking over the types of sources available, I came to the conclusion that we could do a pretty good job building outlines with a non-heuristic algorithm. We could always make it "intelligent" later.

More later.

Sincerely, The Transhumanist 20:36, 20 August 2012 (UTC)

Ping

You may have missed my reply to you at User talk:Br'er Rabbit#Infoboxes. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 01:34, 14 August 2012 (UTC)

I did see, but I wasn't sure how to reply in a way that avoided turning it into a rehash of that entire procedure.

I will emphatically note, that the word "duped" is an exact example of what I'm concerned about.

That word has a number of very negative insinuations (gullibility, stupidity, naivete, etc).

I'm not insulted, but only because I know how to interpret your writer's voice (because I grew up in England, and I can "hear" your accent and I can grok the nuance that you (probably) intended); However a lot of people would be insulted, and that word-choice would then become a focus of the discussion. As I said at the ANI thread, communication-style is the core of the current, and most of the past incidents. (More details/thoughts in my email to you). Best, -- Quiddity (talk) 02:12, 14 August 2012 (UTC)

Ps. I meant Grantchester, not Granchester ;) -- Quiddity (talk) 03:54, 14 August 2012 (UTC)

The No Spam Barnstar

	The No Spam Barnstar
	Many thanks for your diligence on the Simplified English COI case and for keeping Wikipedia clear of spam and other nonsense! --Hu12 (talk) 10:40, 20 August 2012 (UTC)

Thankee =) (pointer note: current or archive) -- Quiddity (talk) 19:19, 20 August 2012 (UTC)

Thank you

... I tuypo a lot. KillerChihuahua^?!? 03:45, 21 August 2012 (UTC)

np. (For me, I pretty much always get there/their/they're wrong the first time, if typing at speed. ;) -- Quiddity (talk) 04:24, 21 August 2012 (UTC)

Ditto. Thanks for that, I guess I got tilde-happy. BigNate37_(T) 23:03, 21 August 2012 (UTC)

np. I often do the same. C'mon liquidthreads! (or whatever it is we're waiting for, this year). :) -- Quiddity (talk) 23:08, 21 August 2012 (UTC)

International English

Hi. I decided to revert your edit to the lead section of the International English article. Your edit summary said you were worried about phrasing, but actually there's already a disambiguation of Globish in the main text (within the section on English as a lingua franca in foreign language teaching), with a link to Globish (Nerriere). Unfortunately, because of all the commas and parentheses the sentence has become almost unreadable, and as this particular addition is redundant I thought it best to simply take it out. I'm quite inclined towards subclauses and parenthesis myself, so I promise this isn't a stylistic judgment, just one of accessibility. — JRYon (talk) 20:29, 22 August 2012 (UTC)

No problem. For context, I was cleaning up Template:Frequency list, and reading some of the refs in scattered articles, and in that case I couldn't determine whether the way Robert Crum had used "Globish" was a widely used definition, or his own personal extrapolation of the Nerriere controlled vocabulary (mixed with his understanding of "international English"); and Globish (Gogate) certainly doesn't help the confusion! Anyway, I'm happy to leave it to you (and anyone familiar with the article's topic). Thanks for the note though :) -- Quiddity (talk) 20:36, 22 August 2012 (UTC)

A cup of coffee for you!

Thank you for your kind words. Best, MistyMorn (talk) 09:33, 28 August 2012 (UTC)

Bug in GLOSS software?

Would you know why Glossary of chess#Piece shows up as "Chess piece" in the glossary? In the same P section, "Pawn and move" shows up as "Handicap in chess", as well. (Does there seems to be a bug in the s/w to replace name= with content= !?) Ihardlythinkso (talk) 21:14, 28 August 2012 (UTC)

Hi. That can be fixed/changed by normal link-text piping. (Done)

For explanation: The {{term}} template uses "|term= ... " to make the subsection-links work (caps-sensitive), and also to create the default name that is displayed; but if we want to make the term itself a link elsewhere, or add more variants (with an {{anchor|alt1|alt2|etc}} template), then those things need to be added to a "|content= ..." field.

Hence, the easy

{{term|term= Piece}}

or the complicated

{{term|term= Piece |content= [[Chess piece|Piece]] {{anchor|piece|pieces}} }}

Hope that clarifies everything, do let me know if anything is still unclear. :) -- Quiddity (talk) 21:36, 28 August 2012 (UTC)

Ok I get it, thanks! (I guess I'd thought the s/w would automatically pipe, knowing term= already [otherwise, what's the function of term= if simply overridden by content= ?]) Thanks again. Ihardlythinkso (talk) 08:44, 29 August 2012 (UTC)

The best way to understand it, is view-source. (View->Source in most browsers, often ctrl-U. In Firefox you can highlight some text, and rightclick to view-selection-source).

Here's the 3 types (with different words for clarity):

• {{term|term= Piece}}
• {{term|term= Piece |content= [[Monkey|PipedMonkey]] }}
• {{term|term= Piece |content= [[Monkey|PipedMonkey]] {{anchor|pizza|cheese|olive}} }}

And here's what those 3 create:

Piece

PipedMonkey

PipedMonkey

("may the source be with you!") -- Quiddity (talk) 02:33, 31 August 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for the explain. I guess the function of 'term=Piece' when 'content=[[Monkey]]' is specified, is for establishing link with Glossary of chess#Piece !? Thanks again, Ihardlythinkso (talk) 02:46, 31 August 2012 (UTC)

Exactly. In the source an "id=..." is the within-page-link. Our ==headings== automatically create id=headings and the {{anchor}} template just creates more id's

The other method for creating within-page-links (outside of Wikipedia), is with a named anchor tag. eg <a name="foo">.</a> would let you link to this line via http://.../thispage.html#foo

So, if you ever want to link to a subsection of a webpage, you can just view-source, and hunt for an id= or name= and then stick that after a #

:) -- Quiddity (talk) 02:58, 31 August 2012 (UTC)

Precious

	return
	Thank you for returning and trying to make other quality contributors return, with a rarely simple invitation: "Try to work/smile/love/laugh/work alongside the other humans", - you are an awesome Wikipedian! --Gerda Arendt (talk) 11:34, 1 September 2012 (UTC)

Thank you! and Thanks for reading all the way to the bottom of my userpage! That stack of navboxes is intimidating, but I'd hoped the commentary would lure some people in... =) -- Quiddity (talk) 18:10, 1 September 2012 (UTC)

Thanks

Thanks for the link to the wikipedia Editor Lifecycles research: I had looked many timesfor something like that! --Squidonius (talk) 03:12, 3 September 2012 (UTC)

No problem :) I'm continually fascinated by archetypes.

Note to self (and talkpage stalkers): Wikipedia talk:WikiFauna#Cute but.... -- Quiddity (talk) 18:25, 3 September 2012 (UTC)

Talkback

Hello, Quiddity. You have new messages at The wub's talk page.
Message added 09:53, 10 September 2012 (UTC). You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{Talkback}} or {{Tb}} template.

the wub "?!" 09:53, 10 September 2012 (UTC)

WP:UPDC

Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Wikipedia:User page design center

Please change your vote to "keep". I'd appreciate it. Thank you. The Transhumanist 01:18, 14 September 2012 (UTC)

Replied at thread. —Quiddity (talk) 22:18, 14 September 2012 (UTC)

Potential mobile features we might build

Your input would be most appreciated here. Talk page stalkers also welcome :) Cheers, Maryana (WMF) (talk) 19:29, 2 October 2012 (UTC)

Thanks

Hey there -- thanks for the help with the archive box, much appreciated! Hope all's well with you. -Pete (talk) 03:50, 9 October 2012 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #27

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

• Development
  • Wikidata branch was merged \o/ (about 10.000 lines of code) This also means that MediaWiki now has shiny new ContentHandler features to enable storing data and other content types
  • Updated demo system
  • Fixed MediaWiki core bugs and responded to feedback about the ContentHandler
  • Looked into Solr
  • Added statement interface for items
  • Added claim interface for entities
  • Added IRIValue and GeoCoordinateValue
  • Added GeoCoordinate parser
  • Added base for the ValueFormatters extension
  • Initial work on create claim API module
  • Initial work on better API transformation handling of the data model components
  • Made the API aware that entities, not items are the thingies we really want to get
  • Finished implementation of non-JavaScript edit buttons
  • Switched local integration server to use core master branch
  • Improved how recent changes from the repository are displayed in the client
  • Worked on tests for recent changes on the client
  • Added Wikipedia-compatible URL rewrites for subdomains en, de, hu and he (en.wikidata-test-repo.wikimedia.de/wiki/Helium leads to the item)
• Discussions/Press
  • Discussion on Hebrew Wikipedia about being deployment target number 2
  • Written a blog post looking back at August and September
• Events
  • KESW
  • upcoming: Wikimedia CEE meeting
• Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • We’ve started a page to design the Main Page of Wikidata
• Open Tasks for You
  • Hack on one of these
  • Design the Main Page of Wikidata

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Global message delivery 13:31, 12 October 2012 (UTC)

Please comment on Talk:MassResistance

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Paul Laffoley

Dear Quiddity,

I am the person who put in the most recent changes to Laffoley's page, which you removed, making the serious, and false, charge that my changes constituted a copyright violation. They emphatically do not. I am an expert on the work of Paul Laffoley. I have worked with Paul since 1989. I edited The Phenomenology of Revelation and contributed the principle essay to the Architectonic Thought-Forms. I am currently working on another project with Paul, for whom I updated the opening paragraph, correcting the narrow focus on his employment with Emery Roth, and instead summarizing the progression to his mature work.

Thanking you in advance for refraining from any further false claims about copyright,

Sincerely,

J M Wasilik