User talk:Hike395

Precious

hiking mountains

Thank you for quality articles around the Geology of the Rocky Mountains and Lake Sammamish State Park, for improving and fixing templates, for welcoming and advising users, for your contributions from 2003 saying "the best part of editing WP is when several editors cooperate to make a high-quality article", such as The Three Sisters, - you are an awesome Wikipedian!

--Gerda Arendt (talk) 08:39, 6 January 2018 (UTC)

Thank you, Gerda! —hike395 (talk) 14:07, 6 January 2018 (UTC)

Two years ago, you were recipient no. 1818 of Precious, a prize of QAI! --Gerda Arendt (talk) 07:29, 6 January 2020 (UTC)

Precious

Four years!

--Gerda Arendt (talk) 06:52, 6 January 2022 (UTC)

@Gerda Arendt: Thanks so much for the kind recognition, Gerda: it still means a lot to me. I look forward to hearing from you every year! — hike395 (talk) 07:25, 6 January 2022 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

	The Technical Barnstar
	Thanks for creating and improving {{Detect singular}}, allowing it to be used in a wide variety of applications! {{u|Sdkb}} talk 22:47, 8 January 2022 (UTC)

Portal tracking

If you check "what links here" on Portal:Syria and Portal:Zimbabwe, you will find hundreds of articles that I think will eventually be listed in the Category:Portal templates with redlinked portals. A couple already were. I've gone through both of these lists and removed all the cases that had the portal listed in a portal template on the page. In the majority, the link is coming from some other template. If you want to look into this.... MB 01:07, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

@MB: I think it will be fine. Check out User:Hike395/sandbox2, which consists of {{#ifexist: Portal:Slobovia|yes|no}}. Notice that the what links here page for Portal:Slobovia now contains User:Hike395/sandbox2.

What I think is happening is that the existence of portals are being checked in many places (e.g., Template:Foo–Bar relations category/inner core), and that is showing up as "what links here". So these links are not being supplied to {{Portal}} and will not flood the redlink category. — hike395 (talk) 04:59, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

OK. This is new. In the past, I've used "what links here" to find deleted portals before they have shown up in the category but never had "spurious" redlinks. The replication lag (if that is the right term) seems very slow now, I think it will take weeks to get caught up. Module:hatnote has been changed a couple of times and that is still going through many thousands of files. MB 05:20, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

There is one today, Category:Handball clubs established in 2018 which has a portal link created by {{Handball club estcat}} MB 04:43, 12 January 2022 (UTC)

@MB: Portal:Handball doesn't exist, so I just removed {{Portal}} from that template entirely. — hike395 (talk) 10:38, 12 January 2022 (UTC)

But didn't that remove the creation of a year or decade portal also? Although many decades don't have portals either. MB 14:22, 12 January 2022 (UTC)

@MB: I can restore the decade portal, if you think that's best. I figured that without a Handball portal, having just a decade portal was strange. — hike395 (talk) 01:36, 13 January 2022 (UTC)

Fine by me as it is, I am not a big portal fan myself and don't find them useful. I just remove redlink potals when I find them, I think others may replace them with a more general portal that still exists. MB 01:50, 13 January 2022 (UTC)

Category:Portal templates with redlinked portals has 15 more today that are coming from templates auto-creating portal links. This time, the "main" portal does exist. MB 15:44, 14 January 2022 (UTC)

@MB: Easy to fix. You can do this too: just add |tracking=0 to the portal calls inside of templates that are generating junk. — hike395 (talk) 22:23, 15 January 2022 (UTC)

That turns off all tracking, which hides other errors we would potentially want to see. For example, if someone inadvertently changed |portal=Education to |portal=Educatio in Category:Education companies established in the 1880s, we would not find and fix that. I would have thought there would be a better way. {{FindYDCportal}} says it returns an empty sting if there is NO portal, so can't {{FooIndustry companies (dis)established in the YYY0s}} check that? MB 23:03, 15 January 2022 (UTC)

@MB: What was happening is that the template author(s) used {{{portal}}} instead of {{{portal|}}}, so it was looking for [[Portal:{{{portal}}}]], which doesn't exist. I changed the template to use the more typical {{{portal|}}} which does not generate errors. — hike395 (talk) 01:52, 16 January 2022 (UTC)

That seems to be a much better fix. Thanks. There have been no new errors detected, so maybe that was the last of this type of issue we will see. MB 04:00, 16 January 2022 (UTC)

A new one today, from {{YYY0s in women's weightlifting category header}}, redlink portal at Category:2000s in women's weightlifting. I might be able to figure out a fix from looking at previous fixes, but probably much faster if you did this one. MB 01:10, 26 April 2022 (UTC)

@MB: Wow, Category:Portal templates with redlinked portals suddenly sprouted, I don't know what happened. The template you highlighted linked to Portal:weightlifting, which does not appear to exist. I just deleted the portal call. I have no idea why it took months to show up in the tracking. — hike395 (talk) 02:37, 26 April 2022 (UTC)

A few new ones are showing up almost every day. A couple times, there has been a big burst like this too. It seems like some process is hitting pages that haven't been edited in years. There have been some redlinks in other cats too on pages that have not changed in years. MB 02:46, 26 April 2022 (UTC)

There are three today also coming from a header template if you can take a look. MB 15:40, 10 May 2022 (UTC)

Nevermind, I did a null edit and that fixed them. MB 15:42, 10 May 2022 (UTC)

Template help

Hey, the redlink portals are occurring just a couple a day, so that has been going smoothly. There has also been a recent change to detect redlink hatnotes (Category:Articles with hatnote templates targeting a nonexistent page). There are about 20 like Category:Sports leagues established in 1871 that have a {{see also}} to Category:Sports leagues disestablished in 1871. This is coming from {{Sports leagues established in YYYY category header}} which just creates the hatnote for the corresponding disestablished category. Is there a way to check if the category exists here? (it doesn't for about 20 years out of 150). MB 01:15, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

@MB:  Done --- I simply replaced {{See also}} with {{See also if exists}}. — hike395 (talk) 01:33, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

Thanks. I could have done that myself, but I have never heard of that template before. MB 01:39, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

Today there are over 200 redlink portals in film cats, from {{YYYY genre films category header/core}} which add a portal for the film genre. There is no Portal:Drama, Portal:Action, or Portal:Thriller. I thought about creating redirects to Portal:Film, but these genres could be things besides films. Portal:Drama was a redirect once before and deleted for that reason. So it's probably better to do something inside the template - either no portal or portal:film, unless you have a better idea. (There are some corresponding genre portals that do exist, like Portal:Comedy which is used in Category:2007 comedy films). MB 00:16, 3 February 2022 (UTC)

@MB: I put in an explicit check to see whether the genre portal exists. It's not strictly necessary, but it should the tracking category tidy. @Gonnym: you may wish to set |tracking=no for portal calls in new category header templates. — hike395 (talk) 07:54, 3 February 2022 (UTC)

via cleanup

When you cleanup via, do take care to do the proper cleanup. You're just removing the URL, you're not fixing the actual problem. These are the proper fixes. You're making a mess. Please revert your AWB run because you're creating more problem than you solve. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 09:24, 20 March 2022 (UTC)

@Headbomb: No problem. Reverted. I'll stop attempting any fixes. — hike395 (talk) 12:34, 20 March 2022 (UTC)

Thanks. You can still fix things, just more carefully. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 15:58, 20 March 2022 (UTC)

It's too complex to be tractably automated, so I'll leave it to other editors. — hike395 (talk) 20:59, 20 March 2022 (UTC)

Do not remove OnTheMap links from the via parameter. They are needed for verifiability in stable articles and frankly, running AWB scripts at this pace is akin to bot-like editing. SounderBruce 19:22, 27 March 2022 (UTC)

@SounderBruce: Happy to stop, because there doesn't seem to be consensus on what |via= should do. I was trying to emulate (some of) Headbomb's edits: if I understand correctly, |via= should be used if the content deliverer is different from the publisher, and we want to show that this is on purpose, not by accident. In the case of Edmonds, Washington, OnTheMap is a US Census website, the publisher is the US Census, so |via= isn't appropriate, because the URL already is a US Census site. Having a URL in |via= causes a CS1 error (if you look at reference 64 in Edmonds, Washington, you'll see there is a red error message). My goal was to slowly chip away at those errors.

Given your objection, I can't run AWB to fix |via= at all, because this appears to be controversial, so I will truly give up on the whole fix. I only made 76 edits (at 2/minute, which I don't believe is bot-like editing). Would you like me to revert those 76 edits? — hike395 (talk) 03:26, 28 March 2022 (UTC)

@SounderBruce: Later: playing around with https://onthemap.ces.census.gov/ --- it's quite a neat tool. I just figured out how to generate deep links to the result of OnTheMap, see, e.g., the report for Edmonds. Would it make more sense to make that be the main URL for the reference, instead of linking to the page which links to raw LODES data access? — hike395 (talk) 07:03, 28 March 2022 (UTC)

Must be a new feature. I'll have to test to see if the link actually sticks (the Census website in particular is awful at permalinks) before I fix the dozen or so articles that would be affected. SounderBruce 07:21, 28 March 2022 (UTC)

We could use http://web.archive.org to save the generated html page, and then not worry if the url dies later.

Let me know if you want me to revert the other 74 |via= edits. — hike395 (talk) 07:26, 28 March 2022 (UTC)

Talk:Koyaanisqatsi

Not sure I understand why you chose to undo my edits. The most recent threads were three years stale, and I deliberately chose one-click archiving as I feel it is a better fit for low-traffic talk pages and the previous auto archiving hadn't done a thing in nine years. Beeblebrox (talk) 04:34, 16 July 2022 (UTC)

Hi, Beeblebrox! I was following the advice given at the Archiving help page, which says

It is customary to periodically archive old discussions on a talk page when that page becomes too large. Bulky talk pages may be hard to navigate, contain obsolete discussion, or become a burden for users with slow Internet connections or computers.

To me, the purpose of archiving is to reduce Talk pages down to a manageable size, not to eliminate discussions that are only four years old. I think it's important for editors to see what issues other editors have been grappling with, even if those issues are a few years old. I've seen old discussions flare back up after some years. If we entirely archive a Talk page and leave it empty, editors are not going to seek out the archive issues. To me, it's a matter of transparency and not hiding information.

Currently, Talk:Koyaanisqatsi currently only contains 3 threads and is only 2600 bytes long. I think that's easy to navigate. I thought about unarchiving more threads, but I could see why nine-year-old discussions could be considered obsolete. I thought having 3 threads might be a good compromise. What do you think? — hike395 (talk) 04:53, 16 July 2022 (UTC)

By the way, the autoarchiving was only set up in 2020: one more thread would have triggered it. The parameters seem typical for a quiet Talk page. — hike395 (talk) 04:57, 16 July 2022 (UTC)

Nomination for deletion of Template:US mountain location

Template:US mountain location has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the entry on the Templates for discussion page. – Jonesey95 (talk) 17:42, 13 September 2022 (UTC)

New template

Can you please make sure you don't remove the archived urls when introducing your newly created template into the articles? Thanks. M.Bitton (talk) 23:35, 25 September 2022 (UTC)

@M.Bitton: Thanks for reminding me! For recent dates, there was simply a URL change, and so I don't think archive-url is necessary. But for older links, the content may have changed, so keeping an archive-url is important for those. — hike395 (talk) 00:17, 26 September 2022 (UTC)

Thank you for adding the "archived-url" to the template. What's going to happen to the articles that have been already edited (such as Arabs, where many archived urls have been removed)? Do you intend on going through them again? M.Bitton (talk) 00:21, 26 September 2022 (UTC)

Yes, I'm just going back to look at them now. It looks like the accessdate for the links in Arabs is in 2021, so the most recent version at the CIA should be fine. The template just wraps {{cite web}}, so we can add links to archive.org if we need them. — hike395 (talk) 00:26, 26 September 2022 (UTC)

I didn't see any |archive-url= for links with |access-date= before 2021 and with |url-status=dead, so I think everything is fine. If I keep going, I'll make sure that I preserve archive links to older versions. It's very tedious: AWB doesn't help that much. — hike395 (talk) 00:48, 26 September 2022 (UTC)

@M.Bitton: Unless you were also thinking of archive links where |url-status=live? Those aren't required for WP:V, but could help in the future. Let me know. — hike395 (talk) 00:55, 26 September 2022 (UTC)

The thing with their site is that they tend to change information from time (sometimes, even contradicting their previous articles), and when that happens, whatever the original link (source) was supposed to support ends up not being sourced any more. That's why I the archived-url is important to keep. M.Bitton (talk) 01:01, 26 September 2022 (UTC)

@M.Bitton: I agree. There are annual archives of the World Factbook available at the CIA, going back more than 20 years. I'll have the template link to those, also, for verifiability. — hike395 (talk) 01:04, 26 September 2022 (UTC)

Treeline

Good morning My professor (University of Basel, Switzerland) would be very happy to discuss the "tree line" with you. Please contact him at: ch.koerner@unibas.ch (he is not used to wikipedia, therefore, email would be better for him). Best, Hantzzz (talk) 08:56, 26 September 2022 (UTC)

Mr Körner wrote me these words, he would be very glad if you could reply him :-) Thank you very much.

"Dear colleagues who care for this Wicki-page on treeline. I found the page only by chance and read it with great interest. I would love to come in contact with you, given the treeline concept underwent some development over that past two decades and the web page could profit from some edits. I am the author of ‘Alpine Treelines’ Springer, Basel, a book that was also translated into Chinese. I am happy to share a few recent works with you. You can find my profile under https://duw.unibas.ch/en/koerner" Hantzzz (talk) 12:54, 5 October 2022 (UTC)

@Hantzzz: Please tell Professor Körner that I very much respect his work: I first cited his work at treeline back in 2010. We could engage in a private conversation, but it would be more in the Wiki style for Professor Körner to post comments/suggestions/criticisms at Talk:Treeline. There is no requirement for formatting, or even getting a Wikipedia account -- it would be wonderful to get his feedback, either positive or negative. Could you perhaps show Professor Körner how to post to a talk page? — hike395 (talk) 15:43, 5 October 2022 (UTC)

Thank you very much for your reply. Christian Körner would be really happy if you could contact him via email (ch.koerner@unibas.ch) 2A02:1210:32F4:5500:39E4:D402:2D0E:2940 (talk) 15:22, 6 October 2022 (UTC)

Dear colleague at hike395... I am not familiar with these wicki routines and it would be easier for me to communicate per e-mail at

ch.koerner@unibas.ch

The description of the alpine treeline is a great improvement over much earlier attempts, but it still suffers from a few formal and conceptual shortcomings, and I found the literature somewhat outdated (I know, an always true statement).

Maybe you cannot change this because spell checkers did not get grips on the new terminology, but you would best use treeline and NOT tree line. The latter brings a lot of useless hits at searches. Just as the outdated timberline, we should all use treeline for coherence. Timberline refers to timber, and thus misguides users. Whether something is a 'tree' in biology is not related to its usfulness as timber. I discuss this in Alpine Treelines, Springer 2012 (with a Chinese translation). The line of the closed forest shoud be termed forest line (as suggested), and for the transition from forest line to the uppermost individual trees the term treeline ecotone has been suggested. I am discussing the problem of 'line' in alpine treelins. The ecotone may be wider or narrower for disturbance or normal forest dynamics reasons. All more formalistic issue.

Conceptually

Here the problems go deeper. Are we approaching this problem from a geographical or from a biological perspective? For a Geographer any forest edge on a mountain may be a treeline. A biologist would ask, is, what I see, the biological limit of the life form tree or have people cut the trees higher up, did a fire devast the forest (as in many places (e.g. Klimanjaro), or do we see the outcome of millennia of pastoralism? Also absence of soil like on Kinabalu does not permit trees to grow at the life form limit. Since we biologists always ask for theory and testable hypothesis the only thing that matters for us is tree biology and not human interference, fire, stochastic phenomena (not predictable). To make the story short: humans cannot shift the treeline, but they may cause the absence of trees from the treeline. I summarized this both in the Encyclopedia of Biomes (Elsevier) and in Trends Ecol Evol 2021. I think the endless dispute of what is a treeline and what not can only be resolved of a distinction is made between the upper edge of fundamentalniche of the life form tree and the edge of realized niche. With the first it is possible to predict climatic treeline positions across the globe at 78 m precisition (10 m in NZ), with that remaining error reflecting the limited climatic data for remote places (see Paulsen and Körner 2014, Alpine Botany). I am happy to provide pdfs on request to ch.koerner@unibas.ch. There are other issues such as the inappropriate use of the term tundra outside the Arctic or the inclusion of drought driven tree absence in the term treeline. With that idea we have subSaharan treelines and the term loses sense.Not all physiological tree limits are treelines. Drought is clearly not a common phenomenon of mountains. But locally, there are drought driven tree distribution limits. Notable the dier a mountain the higher the treeline up to a limit of 250 mm precip when trees cannot grow anywhere.

Causes for treeline

I stop here to see whether there is an interest to dive into this terrain. The explanation is related to tree architecture and aerodynamics, with trees reaching the biologically universal low T limit for plant growth, but they reach it at lower elevation than non-trees for physical reasons. So physiologically trees are not inferior to other life forms, but the upright growth sets a thermal limit. This is why krummholz does not represent a treeline but may be included in the ecotone term. All explained in Alpine Treelines (Springer) 2A02:1210:502E:5900:8876:70FC:FCF7:CBE3 (talk) 11:36, 30 October 2022 (UTC)

Problems with #invoke and an unnamed parameter

After seeing you use of {{#invoke:Template wrapper I have decided to use if for another wrapper project. However I have run into a problem and I am hoping that you can suggest a simple solution.

I have set up a simple template in User:PBS/test3 which contains:

One={{{1}}}

A={{{A}}}

B={{{B}}}

I have a wrapper template User:PBS/test4

{{#invoke:Template wrapper|wrap|_template=User:PBS/test3|_alias-map=
|A=This parameter is set in test 4
}}

And finally a test of the two template in User:PBS/test5. When I call test3 from test five it acts as I expect. However if I call test4 from test five it does not pass on the value in unnamed parameter 1=value Do you know if this a limitation with #invoke, or have I made a mistake? If it is a limitation do you know if there is there a common work around? -- PBS (talk) 11:44, 26 September 2022 (UTC)

@PBS: In test4, you need to set |_include-positional=yes, see Module:Template_wrapper/doc#include-positional. — hike395 (talk) 12:00, 26 September 2022 (UTC)

Many thanks it worked a treat. -- PBS (talk) 12:05, 26 September 2022 (UTC)

did you break a template?

It appears that something in your recent edit to {{Include-USGov}} broke it. See the articles that currently populate Category:CS1 errors: URL–wikilink conflict.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 22:27, 6 October 2022 (UTC)

@Trappist: It was actually [1], but there is a simple fix, now implemented. — hike395 (talk) 22:29, 6 October 2022 (UTC)

{{Include-USGov}} is now stricter about what it accepts as |agency=. All cases now fixed. — hike395 (talk) 22:46, 6 October 2022 (UTC)

And now {{USGS}}. See Category:CS1 errors: chapter ignored. You know, we have sandboxen, test cases, and the Show preview button for a reason. Please use them.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 23:27, 6 October 2022 (UTC)

I did use them! I didn't anticipate this case, so there was no test coverage. — hike395 (talk) 00:20, 7 October 2022 (UTC)

Those were not problems in the template, but problems in calling {{USGS}}. — hike395 (talk) 00:27, 7 October 2022 (UTC)

(edit conflict)

{{Include-USGov}} still broken? This from Bangkok:

{{Include-USGov |agency=Overseas Security Advisory Council |title=Thailand 2012 Crime and Safety Report: Bangkok|date=14 March 2012 |url=https://www.osac.gov/Pages/ContentReportDetails.aspx?cid=12189 |website=Overseas Security Advisory Council website |publisher=Bureau of Diplomatic Security, U.S. Department of State|access-date=24 September 2012}}

 This article incorporates public domain material from "Thailand 2012 Crime and Safety Report: Bangkok". Overseas Security Advisory Council website. Bureau of Diplomatic Security, U.S. Department of State. 14 March 2012. Retrieved 24 September 2012.

and this from Joint Declaration of Pope Francis and Patriarch Kirill:

{{Include-USGov|agency=United States Department of State|policy=https://2009-2017.state.gov/misc/87529.htm|author=Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor|year=2005|title=Russia|journal=International Religious Freedom Report|location=Washington, DC|publisher=Department of State|issn=1936-4156|url=https://2009-2017.state.gov/j/drl/rls/irf/2005/51576.htm|access-date=2019-05-26}}

 This article incorporates public domain material from Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor (2005). "Russia". International Religious Freedom Report. Washington, DC: Department of State. ISSN 1936-4156. Retrieved 2019-05-26.{{citation}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)

—Trappist the monk (talk) 00:30, 7 October 2022 (UTC)

 Fixed --- Thanks for reporting those to me. I was attempting to do something fancy with |work= and |publisher=, but it clearly was not robust against corner cases. I added all of your reported bugs as new test cases. Please let me know if you see anything else. — hike395 (talk) 02:14, 7 October 2022 (UTC)

Template:EPA content/doc?

—Trappist the monk (talk) 15:00, 7 October 2022 (UTC)

 Fixed Thanks, easy fix (remove wlink from |agency=). Is there an existing template or module that strips wlinks from strings? — hike395 (talk) 15:09, 7 October 2022 (UTC)

A found a couple of other calling templates and fixed those, also. — hike395 (talk) 15:57, 7 October 2022 (UTC)

Went through main namespace with AWB and stomped on all incorrect usage of |agency=. There should not be any other Title/URL conflicts. — hike395 (talk) 17:03, 7 October 2022 (UTC)

Added {{delink}} to {{Cite USGov}} to avoid future errors of this sort. — hike395 (talk) 17:17, 7 October 2022 (UTC)