User talk:Bob the Wikipedian/Archive/10

Rollback mistake?

Hi. I'm assuming that this was a mistake. Please confirm because it seems the edits have been done. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 07:43, 19 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Looking back at your contributions it seems you have reverted those edits. It might have been better if you could have left a note on Template talk:Phanerozoic 220px about what you did, instead of just using rollback because I have spent some time now trying to work out what's going on. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 07:46, 19 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Ah, yes that was a mistake! Whoops, thanks for fixing it! Bob the WikipediaN ^{(talk • contribs)} 19:48, 19 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

RE:Geological range template

Hi Bob, I don't have issue with you reverting my edits on the those templates but how you did it was somewhat misguided. Instead of using rollback a simple undo and linking to the new discussion would have helped. Reverting off Template talk:Phanerozoic 220px was also incredibly misguided as it put the edit request back up and would have confused any admin coming along (see above). Simply noting that it was reverted and a link to discussion would have sufficed I think. Woody (talk) 09:27, 19 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Yes indeed. This was the point I was trying to make above. It also demonstrates why we discourage the use of rollback except for clear vandalism. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 11:22, 19 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

It wasn't a mistake; the edits broke the taxobox time scales on thousands of articles, so they were reverted per an ongoing discussion at Template talk:Geological range. Sorry about the edit request getting reactivated, I wasn't aware there was any flag that would go up there. Bob the WikipediaN ^{(talk • contribs)} 19:45, 19 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I think you have missed the point here again, it is the use of the rollback tool that is the issue. Do you understand the difference between rollback and reverting/undoing? A normal revert (ie. use undo) would allow you to put in a customary edit summary with a link to the discussion saying why you have reverted. Also, why did you revert my edit on the talkpage in the first place? I don't understand what that was meant to achieve. No edit to the talkpage would have broken anything in the template space. Again, a simple comment underneath mine would have resolved any confusion and avoided this. Woody (talk) 22:43, 19 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

As far as why it was done in the first place, it was a rather hurried process-- the edits needing undone were all done within a few minutes by you, so I checked your contributions to find all the geological range family template edits that had been done during that period of time, and opened each one in a new tab. Checking the history on each one to make sure that you had (a) performed the most recent edit and (b) not performed the previous edit, I restored the previous versions. Unfortunately, it didn't occur to me that one of these pages was the talk page. I'm glad someone pointed it out, and I'll be more careful about that in the future.

When reverting, I have far too many options available, and I can hardly keep "revert", "rollback", and "undo" straight as I don't use these often.

You're correct about a comment on that page, I should have done that, and that would have helped make sure I didn't mess up the talk page as well. Bob the WikipediaN ^{(talk • contribs)} 23:58, 19 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

As an experienced editor and administrator I am extremely surprised to hear that you don't know the difference between "undo" and "rollback"! It is quite simple: using rollback does not allow you to give an edit summary, which in this case would have been very useful and avoided all this confusion. So next time, please press "undo" and write an edit summary explaining why you are reverting. Anyway, many thanks for responding to these points, which I feel confident have now been resolved. Regards — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 08:19, 20 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the explanation; that does help. I actually tend to use the "restore" and "revert" links in most instances, not "rollback" or "undo" -- though I do use "undo" to get rid of "buried" vandalism. In any case, I'll try not to carry out such important edits when I am so tired; that probably didn't help things!

Bob the WikipediaN ^{(talk • contribs)} 14:16, 20 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Boto

Hi, Bob. At first, you are right when you say that the contents are different. But the problem is that in this point Portuguese Wikipedia is more complete. Boto-vermelho [1], equivalent to the Amazon river dolphin, is just a species of "boto" [2]. Boto is a much wider category of animal, which comprises all kinds of South American dolphins. You can see at Brazilian-Portuguese article [3] the South America map with the ranges of all species of boto. So, English Wikipedia (and other languages too, as far as I could read) comprises only one specie. Maybe it is not Wiki editors' fault. Perhaps it is just a fact that is known in Brazil only, or mainly - because the animal lives here.

The problem is that the article boto did not link to any other language articles at all. So I linked Amazon river dolphin and all other corresponding articles and linked boto on Amazon river dolphin article. But it is o.k. as you did. For now, I just suggest you or other English editors to create an article corresponding to boto. And cancel the English redirection from "boto" search to Amazon river dolphin, because, as I said, there are other species of boto rather than just Amazon river dolphin, which is boto-vermelho (literally, "red boto"). Thank you. BrunoSR (talk) 17:45, 21 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, this is o.k. Thank you! And, just for curiosity: do you understand or know Portuguese, or did you use a good translator? BrunoSR (talk) 23:22, 22 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Ping!

See this. ~~ Hi878 ^{(Come shout at me!)} 03:30, 26 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Mail

Hi Bob, you've got mail. Graham87 05:51, 27 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Template:Taxonomy nominations for deletion

Hi, saw your responses re the nominations for deletion for various Template:Taxonomy pages, so I didn't add my comment (but will if needed). There needs to be some way of stopping these being nominated for deletion; I worry that you or Martin won't be around for a while at some time and some non-informed admin will start deleting them. Is there any way of protecting them?
Separate issue while I'm writing here: the Template:Taxonomy pages really shouldn't show up in Google searches, but I notice that at least some do. Peter coxhead (talk) 15:50, 2 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Template Speciesbox

I know you're busy, but perhaps the two points below will cancel out in terms of your workload...

I think I've fixed the italic title problem with {{Speciesbox}}: see Template_talk:Speciesbox#Italics.
I have a version of {{Speciesbox}} at User:Peter coxhead/Test which uses the parameter taxon rather than ignoring it. If genus or species are not given but taxon is, it picks out the genus and species strings from the value of taxon. I've tested it as best I can by replacing Speciesbox by User:Peter coxhead/Test in various articles and previewing the result. Do you have any test cases for {{Speciesbox}}?

(I'd much rather write Java and Prolog – tho' Lisp would be better – than templates in this awful language. I thought there was nothing worse than XSLT, but clearly I was wrong!) Peter coxhead (talk) 20:37, 8 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Speed of speciesbox template evaluation

Probably better if we talk about template technicalities here, rather than at the Speciesbox talk page, which should be more for user/usage. Having 'retired' as a computer science academic, I came to Wikipedia to edit botanical and gardening articles, not to write template code, which I seem to have been seduced into... Can you point me to any information as to how to measure the speed of template evaluation? It looks to me as though any templates which do string-handling are likely to be slow(ish), since core actions are handled within the template language rather than being built-in. I was astonished to see how {{str index/getchar}} works. Peter coxhead (talk) 06:43, 13 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Taxobox maintenance

It would appear NoomBot has finished this task. There may be a few articles which didn't have the fix applied to them (probably because the template on the page is a bit weird), but I can't run the bot again because pages which have been fixed are still in the problem categories. It edited approximately 31,000 articles. Noom _talk ^stalk 18:44, 14 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Tracking category

Why this edit? I think the tracking category should work fine; it's just a little polluted momentarily because your earlier edit placed every article with a taxobox in it. Ucucha 23:50, 14 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Template:Taxobox

Hi, this template is now broken at Epstein–Barr virus. – Acdx (talk) 23:34, 15 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Still broken, and needing work immediately. See Template talk:Taxobox. --Stemonitis (talk) 06:14, 16 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Bob, this is now fixed but please see my query at Template_talk:Taxobox#Template_messed_up.

Kleopatra note

Thanks I would not have investigated otherwise--I'll post to that talk now. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 01:43, 16 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Campus ambassador

Sure I could help out at IUPUI. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 18:18, 19 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Soricomorpha vs. Lipotyphla

Regarding this diff, would it make sense to move Soricomorpha to Lipotyphla? Thanks, ErikHaugen (talk | contribs) 23:39, 22 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

TCG

As it is right now, the computers that I use cannot handle the individual proposals page. While most of the sections now are transcluded from subpages, the last section still is not. If it could be sent off somewhere else as well, that would be immensely helpful, and I might start editing at the project frequently again. :) ~~ Hi878 ^{(Come shout at me!)} 03:08, 23 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Taxobox

Well, the template is transcluded on almost 2,500 pages, which is why I semi-protected it to prevent this from happening again. Cheers,—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); May 24, 2011; 18:24 (UTC)

That's one useful purpose vandals serve—they find holes that need to be patched and point us to them :)—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); May 24, 2011; 19:16 (UTC)

My clade template

Hi, as I guess you saw, the   is needed to keep the right-hand bar away from the text. The proper solution is to add it to every leaf in the template itself, which I haven't got round to yet.

As of now, there's a new version at User:Peter coxhead/Template/Clade which provides for each numbered child N, three parameters: |sbarN=, |barN= and |ebarN=. Thus |sbar1=green is for child 1 and means "start a green bracket"; |bar3=green is for child 3 and means "continue a green bracket"; |ebar5=purple is for child 5 and means "end a purple bracket". (I haven't added more than 5 yet!). There's a test at User:Peter coxhead/Test/Clade. Not sure whether this is sufficiently useful to become a public template, but I was interested to see it working. (I think I'm catching the template editing bug from you and Martin...) Peter coxhead (talk) 20:49, 31 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Handling ranks below species (again)

Bob, I'm not sure quite where to put this post, since it affects the templates {{Taxobox}}, {{Automatic taxobox}} and {{Subspeciesbox}} and the way they use {{Taxobox/core}}, so I thought I'd put it on your talk page first and you can suggest where to go next. Maybe ToL level as I think you mentioned before. The stuff below is written so it can be moved.

The templates {{Taxobox}}, {{Automatic taxobox}} and {{Subspeciesbox}} can all be made to handle taxa below the rank of species (with varying degrees of ease and appropriateness of output), which they do by 'feeding' {{Taxobox/core}}. There is an immediate problem with the display for plant taxa below the rank of species.
The generated taxobox displays "Trinominal name" with a wikilink to either Trinomen (animals) or Ternary name (the rest). However:

It was recently agreed by discussion now at Talk:Infraspecific name (botany) that neither "trinomial name" nor "ternary name" are appropriate in the case of taxa governed by the ICBN which does not use these terms, but instead uses "infraspecific name". Although infraspecific names in botany do have three parts, they differ significantly from zoology in that a "connecting term" is obligatory; many infraspecific ranks are allowed (as a minimum subspecies, variety, subvariety, form and subform); and taxa can be referred to by a classification rather than just a name (the Code gives the example of the name Saxifraga aizoon subf. surculosa which could be referred to by the classification Saxifraga aizoon var. aizoon subvar. brevifolia f. multicaulis subf. surculosa).

Accordingly the page formerly at "Ternary name" has been moved to Infraspecific name (botany) (with the more manageable redirect Infraspecific name, and all links which used the term "ternary name" or "trinomial name" in relation to botany have been changed.

So the displayed taxobox should also be changed.
One suggestion is that for taxa below the rank of species covered by the ICBN, instead of [[Ternary name|Trinomial name]] the taxobox should have [[Infraspecific name (botany)|Scientific name]].
Zoological taxa and taxa of the rank of species and above would be unaffected.

Of course, we could suggest changing "Binomial name" (and "Trinomial name" for animals) to "Scientific name" at the same time, or this could be left for later. What do you think? Where should this be posted? Peter coxhead (talk) 17:47, 2 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Ok, will do. What is your advice about my second to last point immediately above? Peter coxhead (talk) 18:04, 2 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Well, I agree with you, but I wouldn't like to fail to get consensus for the change for ranks below species because of opposition to the change for species. We'll see. Please add your support when I post (no time today). Peter coxhead (talk) 18:24, 2 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Project

Hi Bob, just poking my head around to see if Wikipedia's still here! I noticed that you were looking for a WP project, I'm not sure how the automatic cladogram went in the end. If you're looking for ideas, one thing that might be promising would be to create an extension to handle automatic taxoboxes. This would in effect be a parserfunction, the advantage being that the code is parsed in PHP rather than through Wikipedia, so can be produced much more rapidly (reducing load times) and won't count as much towards parser limits. It might also allow more flexibility, for instance to include child taxa without having to have a bot update things. Something similar is/was being proposed for citation templates (see here). In practice, one would create an automatic taxobox by typing {{#taxobox:Parus major|etc=etc}}. I'm too busy to take this on myself, but let me know what you think and I'm sure that I'd be able to help out if it sounded like a fun project! Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 20:29, 11 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Birdbox looks okay to me; perhaps I changed something whilst I was fiddling. Certainly this was a problem. Is there a buggy use case I could look at? Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 21:01, 11 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Can you spell out what you're trying to do? There might be a better way. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 22:52, 11 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Gratias!

Just a bit of Latin for you. Thank you so much for reviewing and fixing the page Bluetongue Lizard (mythology). It's my first real professional article created. I've been busy fixing the page Feather and Bone: The Crow Chronicles, so busy in fact that I was unable to ask for anybody to review the page. I'll just be adding little bits as I find them and perhaps a picture of the Ngarra salt lake. So thank you for reviewing it! Pumagirl7 ^{Leave a message} 12:39, 15 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Note

Hi Bob. You fully protected {{Taxonomy key}} with the cascading setting on, so you may be interested in this request for the cascading protection to be removed. Cheers, Dabomb87 (talk) 16:41, 18 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]