User talk:Beland

/Praise /Projects

Feel free to leave a note on this page in the usual manner. I only keep stuff on this page if it requires further action from me, just to keep things tidy, so sometimes I'll just move the conversation to your talk page to keep things in one spot. Feel free to move it back here when you reply, or just use {{ping}} from whatever page it's on.

My old bot Pearle has been offline for a while. My current Wikipedia coding project is Wikipedia:Typo Team/moss. -- Beland (talk) 15:18, 27 July 2018 (UTC)

Typos by occurence

Hi Beland, I wanted to say that I admire your dedication to correcting typos in Wikipedia.

I'm trying to find ways to make the process of correcting typos easier. moss project is a great project but it works one typo at a time, and it excludes many parts and kinds of typos. I've made a list on my own with typos existing on Wikipedia, ordered by frequency.

User:Uziel302/sandbox

To make it easier to check whether a word is a typo, I added short context: User:Uziel302/Typos with context and in older version you can see how it works when I don't focus on popular words.

Any feedback is much appreciated and if you know someone else that might be interested in list of that kind, please let me know.

Thanks, Uziel302 (talk) 13:40, 5 January 2019 (UTC)

@Uziel302: Interesting. I've definitely neglected certain types of mistakes just to simplify my code and get the currently overwhelmingly-large list up and getting fixed. 8) I'm curious how you generated the list of known typos? -- Beland (talk) 01:35, 6 January 2019 (UTC)

Took 10K English words from here, made variations with a simple C program, switching letters, duplicating, removing and replacing with e (can be any other letter, started with the popular one). Then removed from the list of variations anything appearing in titles of Wiktionary. I have a web version here. Will be happy to hear feedback.Uziel302 (talk) 07:17, 6 January 2019 (UTC)

@Uziel302: Ah, interesting, that's tackling the problem from the opposite end of what I do, since I start with all the words in Wikipedia and then try to figure out if they're correct or not. Certainly can't argue with the results; looks like you've got a good list of items waiting to be fixed! I'd probably just include some context on both sides of the typo. I try to do some things to make it as fast as possible for editors to go through list, like making a list to the offending article. There are definitely faster UIs, like interactive web pages, but that's the best I've had time to manufacture so far. Not sure if you're working off a local file or something when you fix typos yourself? -- Beland (talk) 03:16, 7 January 2019 (UTC)

What do you mean working off a local file? I downloaded dumps to my computer if that what you meant. My C program ran over the 65 giga file for some hours, probably didn't finish the whole thing.

When I fix typos myself I do it manually on regular wiki editor and for multiple typos of the same kind I use AWB. This is why I ordered by frequency, it lets me find stuff for AWB. I hoped you could recommend Wikipedians that might help fixing the typos, I saw your project got a lot of dedicated contributors who actually fix the typos found.Uziel302 (talk) 17:27, 7 January 2019 (UTC)

@Uziel302: To find volunteers, I mostly just linked from Wikipedia:Typo Team#Methods for searching and correcting_typos and a few "projects that need help" places, and also started using links in edit summaries. Would you be posting lists you want people to work through, or are you looking for fellow users of AWB? -- Beland (talk) 18:32, 7 January 2019 (UTC)

I can make lists with some context for one by one fixes, I don't think it has real added value comparing to your list. Especially since I don't have direct link to article and I need to search each phrase. If there is downtime where your list has no new typos to fix I can offer a list on my own. I think the main added value of a list by frequency is for AWB users who can fix many typos in a short time.Uziel302 (talk) 22:02, 7 January 2019 (UTC)

Gotcha. I think there is an official list of typos that AWB and related tools automatically try to fix, no? I've not ever tried to add anything to it. -- Beland (talk) 21:36, 9 January 2019 (UTC)

I just wondered why do you go over all the words and check if they exist, when you only show on the list the T1 typos which are close to common words, just search the list of words that are close to common words, isn't it more efficient? Uziel302 (talk) 21:12, 9 January 2019 (UTC)

@Uziel302: Well, to some degree it's because that's the way I started out doing it before I figured out that edit distance was a useful metric to separate actual misspellings from new words. At some point we'll run out of T1 lists; T2 words are mostly misspellings like T1, but T3 aren't, so in a year or two it looks like I'll have to come up with some new tricks to find the remaining misspellings. But in principle all correct spellings should be in Wikitionary, and moss has been a source of a lot of new words for that project. Different lists are better at finding those, like ranking by frequency of occurrence. The "articles with the most typos" list has also been helpful in finding species missing from Wikispecies, and also pages that are full of junk or foreign-language text. It was also interesting that the pattern detector was able to find a bunch of not-standardized rhyme patterns which I've been slowly fixing. -- Beland (talk) 21:36, 9 January 2019 (UTC)

You assume that we correct typos faster that we create them...

It looks like it takes a lot of time to generate the typo lists on your project, I guess you analyze every word in dumps, instead of just checking if it's T1.Uziel302 (talk) 09:41, 10 January 2019 (UTC)

The stats do show the number of T1s dropping. I do indeed analyze more or less every word in the main text of most articles. It takes about 26 hours for the code to run, but dumps only become available twice a month, so I'm not terribly motivated to improve speed. -- Beland (talk) 14:47, 10 January 2019 (UTC)

My project started running here: User:Uziel302/AWB cleanup.

I hope we will finish the list of frequent typos in the near future.

I guess my list of T1 isn't complete, since I only made some kinds of variations, and only on 10K words.

Can you share what defines T1 on moss?

Thanks, Uziel302 (talk) 20:14, 21 January 2019 (UTC)

@Uziel302: Hey, congratulations. I added a link from the Typo Team homepage.

In the moss system, potential typos are triaged by word_categorizer.py: https://github.com/cdbeland/moss/blob/master/word_categorizer.py

near_common_word() determines the edit distance between the potential typo and the first spelling suggestion from the enchant spell checking library. The code T + edit distance is assigned if there is a spelling suggestion, so T1 means that edit distance was 1. -- Beland (talk) 00:22, 27 January 2019 (UTC)

Gadget for typo correction

Hi,

In order to make typos correction easier, I wrote a gadget in Hebrew Wikipedia that allows users to click and correct typos based on 1 edit distance autocorrect. I plan to write similar gadget here and would like to hear how should I start, where do I get permissions to edit media wiki JavaScript and create a gadget everyone can add. This is my Hebrew script and I upload to the project page the list of typos my C program finds in the dumps. Thanks, Uziel302 (talk) 20:42, 13 April 2019 (UTC)

@Uziel302: I've not gone through that process myself, but maybe you were looking for Wikipedia:Gadget? -- Beland (talk) 04:18, 14 April 2019 (UTC)

Thanks, seems like I need to upload it as user script first.Uziel302 (talk) 04:43, 14 April 2019 (UTC)

Ready: User:Uziel302/typos.js. And after adding it to your commons.js you will see "implement edit" in User:Uziel302/Typos. Just corrected a few typos with it, please let me know if it can benefit MOSS project.Uziel302 (talk) 16:32, 19 April 2019 (UTC)

List of low frequency typos you can load on AWB

Hi Beland, following previous chat about Levenshtein distance 1 typos, I took all common words, made on them all possible variations and removes the legitimate words from the output. I then searched those 200K variations across Wikipedia dumps. What I found helped me create a list of less frequent replacements and a list of the articles where they are found. You can load those lists from Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser/Settings/Autocorrect and the talk page and start fixing thousands of obvious typos across Wikipedia, few seconds per fix. I hope you will find this list useful. I also hope it can help MOSS project in some way. Any feedback is much appreciated! Uziel302 (talk) 14:17, 21 July 2019 (UTC)

Explaining Los Angeles neighborhoods

Hello. I see you made some changes to some Los Angeles neighborhoods and hope you don't mind if I explain a few things to you.

City designated neighborhoods

(1) Per the City of Los Angeles, neighborhoods are named by a specific process and then given official signage. These signs are noted on the wikipedia page Los Angeles Neighborhood Signs. LAist stated that these signs indicate “official L.A. neighborhood” designation

(2) The city of Los Angeles does not have different signs for neighborhoods that nest within larger neighborhoods. The city has posted Mid-City signs from just west of downtown to almost Culver City. Within Mid-City are other neighborhoods. Here is a photo of Mid-City signage , along with Mid-City Heights sign right behind it, placing it inside the borders of Mid-City.

(3) The same goes for Baldwin Hills and Baldwin Vista. As noted, Baldwin Vista is a "western Baldwin Hills neighborhood" . But the city gives each of them their own neighborhood sign.

LA Times Mapping Project

(4) This is where is gets messy!

A decade ago, The Los Angeles Times felt there were too many designated neighborhoods in Los Angeles. Indeed, you can drive down Olympic Boulevard and go past a handful of neighborhoods in a quarter mile. So, the Mapping L.A. project of the LA Times decided to redraw neighborhood lines. The LA Times Mapping Project reduced 472 neighborhoods down to 115.

The neighborhoods of Crenshaw and Baldwin Hills were combined into a new entity called Baldwin Hills/Crenshaw. (user Been Aroundawhile, a former reporter for the LA Times, was instrumental in adding these new entities to wikipedia and deleting the city designated neighborhoods - which were promptly added back in). And if you go through the citations on the Baldwin Hills/Crenshaw page, you will see that the only usage of the name "Baldwin Hills/Crenshaw" is used by the LA Times Mapping project; all other sources refer to the neighborhoods of either "Baldwin Hills" or "Crenshaw".

(5) Regarding Mapping L.A......please look at the geography section of Arlington Heights, Los Angeles. The city has documented its boundaries and placed neighborhood signage on the corners. But the Mapping L.A. project expands Arlington Heights past those boundaries, and combines it with Country Club Park and Angelus Vista. The Mapping L.A. project does that a lot - combining multiple neighborhoods under one name for the sake of simplicity -- that is, reducing 472 neighborhoods down to 115.

(6) Comparing this map with the Mapping LA Project, Elizabeth Fuller wrote in the LarchmontBuzz that "Many people who live in and represent their neighborhoods in various ways have objected to the Times’ designations for not following city-recognized borders.” She said that Brightwell's map was a much more fine-grained view of “every L.A. neighborhood.”

(7) It appears that in 2018, even the LA Times is not sticking to the "Baldwin Hills/Crenshaw" name that it created a decade earlier and now simply uses the name "Baldwin Hills" .

(8) please do not think this is just an issue with "Baldwin Hills/Crenshaw". The Mapping Project has designated many neighborhoods that contradict city boundaries.

Conclusion

(9) Jenna Chandler, the editor of Curbed Los Angeles, wrote that Brightwell's map of 472 neighborhoods "looks more accurate than the neighborhood maps compiled by the Los Angeles Times."

(10) I hope I have laid out everything clearly. I therefore strongly object to your wording on the Baldwin Hills page that "it is part of Baldwin Hills/Crenshaw" without noting that Baldwin Hills is a city-named place and that Baldwin Hills/Crenshaw is a creation of the Los Angeles Times that neither the city nor other sources recognize. To be accurate, it would have to be stated that "The LA Times mapping project combines Baldwin Hills and Crenshaw into the neighborhood of Baldwin Hills/Crenshaw".

I hope that I have stated everything clearly. Yours, Phatblackmama (talk) 18:53, 9 June 2020 (UTC)

@Phatblackmama: Ah, that's an interesting practice with the signs. The Brightwell map is great, and I've been using it as a reference for my edits on the discussion at Talk:List of districts and neighborhoods of Los Angeles; it also reports that some small neighborhoods are considered part of larger neighborhoods, though that nesting doesn't always agree with the LA Times. Neighborhoods are generally a fuzzy concept, and different people have different ideas about where they start and end. The Mapping LA project has apparently redrawn its maps based on reader feedback, so it represents at least an approximation of what locals generally agree on (to the extent that they agree). That may or may not align with the official city definition, especially in terms of flat vs. nested definitions, but that doesn't make one or the other incorrect. I'm not sure Baldwin Hills/Crenshaw is entirely a creation of the LA Times, though it's difficult to tell from afar. Apparently there's a mall called Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza? But attributing the assignment to Baldwin Hills/Crenshaw to Mapping L.A. is good practice, so I've modified the Baldwin Hills, Los Angeles article. The article Baldwin Hills/Crenshaw, Los Angeles just says that this is a neighborhood, not that it is a creature of the LA Times. If you think it's not a real thing, perhaps this article should be deleted and its contents split between Baldwin Hills, Los Angeles and Crenshaw, Los Angeles? That would lose all the data supplied by Mapping L.A., so alternatively this entity could be described as a statistical grouping, if that's really all that it is. Given that the LA Times has used the term as if it's a neighborhood name, I'd say it's probably more than just a statistical grouping, even if sometimes it talks about only Baldwin Hills. (Just like it's sensible to talk about the Fenway neighborhood in Boston, where I used to live, even though the officially designated city district is Fenway-Kenmore and that's also a neighborhood real estate agents talk about. Actually, that reminds me that real estate agents are a good source of information about how neighborhood names are defined and used by people on the ground. I see online some LA rental agents talk about "Baldwin Hills" alone, but this one uses "Baldwin Hills-Crenshaw". -- Beland (talk) 20:32, 9 June 2020 (UTC)

Re: Baldwin Hills/Crenshaw...the Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza was named in 1989, long before the LA mapping project, and derives its name from its location, straddling two adjacent neighborhoods (sort of like how the Wiltern Theater, located at Wilshire and Western, derived its name). The LA Times (I can only assume) saw that name and, 20 years later, decided to combine the two neighborhoods. That makes sense, if your goal is reducing the number of neighborhoods in LA, as noted above.

You note that in Boston, wikipedia uses official names, such as Fenway-Kenmore. In this case, the official names that the city and state use are: Baldwin Hills and Crenshaw. Other sources stick to those official names...You spent time googling "Baldwin Hills/Crenshaw". I am sure you saw google's info box when searching for "Baldwin Hills/Crenshaw"...you get the mall, not a neighborhood (https://ibb.co/59s9ffd). Versus googling "Baldwin Hills", which displays an info box with a city map and neighborhood information (https://ibb.co/m4YYYhz). Or "Crenshaw", which does the same (https://ibb.co/ZB1pZ7c).

You also mention that you found one real estate agent who uses that name. That is not a notable source.

To be clear, I have no problem listing "Crenshaw", "Baldwin Hills", and "Baldwin Hills/Crenshaw" in the grid. But each listed individually...respecting the fact that the city and state considers them separate and distinct neighborhoods and, concurrently, that the LA Times considers them to be one. Wikipedia must remain neutral. Phatblackmama (talk) 00:35, 10 June 2020 (UTC)

@Phatblackmama: Well, the Wikipedia policy on naming is to use the common name, not necessarily the official name, though that's for two names for the same thing, not two names for related things of different sizes. I use Duck Duck Go, not Google; I get an infobox for Baldwin Hills/Crenshaw, Los Angeles when I search on "Baldwin Hills/Crenshaw" and not when I search for "Baldwin Hills Crenshaw". Google happens to ignore the punctuation that makes the difference and Duck Duck Go doesn't. Both are using Wikipedia to power infoboxes for neighborhoods, so it's a bit circular to rely on them for what Wikipedia should title its articles. Notability is not a criterion for sources; that's for determining what articles to have.

Are you sure the LA Times' naming isn't reflecting a real overlap in identification or naming or culture? After all, Baldwin Village has apparently been part of Crenshaw since it was The Jungle(s), but now it has "Baldwin" in the name. -- Beland (talk) 02:17, 10 June 2020 (UTC)

When searching "Baldwin Hills/Crenshaw" you do get an info box..for the mall, not a neighborhood. But you use duck duck go, which processes around 1.5 billion searches every month. Google, in contrast, processes around 3.5 billion searches every day. Needless to say, more people see the mall when searching "Baldwin Hills/Crenshaw" and a neighborhood when searching "Crenshaw" or "Baldwin Hills". A lot more people. And Bing comes up with the mall also.

You correctly note that some of the information in the info boxes on google are from wikipedia. But not the maps. They use city maps, not the LA Times mapping project.

And Notability is not a criterion for sources, but one real estate listing is hardly a reliable source to define a neighborhood. That's all ya got?

It seems that you are trying to come up with some reason as to how or why the LA Times came up with the entity "Baldwin Hills/Crenshaw". That is not our job. We are supposed to cite sources....and both city and state, and the Los Angeles Times (prior to the mapping project), use the separate names of "Baldwin Hills" and "Crenshaw". And, a decade after the mapping project finished, the city, state, Laist, curbed and Los Angeles magazine have not used the name "Baldwin Hills/Crenshaw" either as a stand-alone or as a parent neighborhood. Phatblackmama (talk) 04:02, 10 June 2020 (UTC)

@Phatblackmama: Well, it sounded like you were theorizing that the LA Times had the goal of reducing the number of neighborhoods on its map, and used the name of a mall as a pretense to combine two neighborhoods, with the implication that they somehow didn't deserve to be combined, and also emphasizing that no source other than the LA Times used the name. I'm not proposing that real estate agent should be used as a source an an article; I'm just pointing out that while other cartographers might not use the term, it is in use in commerce. It's a completely reliable source, but only to establish that this particular real estate agency uses the term to describe the same area described by the LA Times. I'd say it's not suitable as a reference for an article not because it's unreliable, but because it's a primary source. Secondary sources like cartographers consult with primary sources like businesses and readers and their work product is much more useful for writing articles. As I wrote on Talk:List of districts and neighborhoods of Los Angeles, I think a more likely theory is there are some blocks certain people call "Crenshaw" (like Google Maps does) and other people call "Baldwin Hills" (like Brightwell) and the LA Times decided not to pick one over the other, or couldn't draw a clear boundary between those identities. If you don't agree, that's fine; we have already agreed to recognized the LA Times definitions as one of several sources to be cited in LA neighborhood articles.

Just FYI, search engine results are automated (I'm a programmer; I've built search engines and built robots that used search engines to answer questions), and the top results and infobox results have not necessarily been verified by a person to be correct, and higher-traffic doesn't necessarily mean more accurate for any given query. If I ask Google "what is the population of Mars", it tells me "ten billion humans". "Who is the king of Mars?" Abraham Lincoln. Google results are also personalized based on search history, so not everyone sees the same results. The infobox result from Duck Duck Go for "what is the population of Mars" happens to be Colonization of Mars, but ::shrug:: it got lucky. -- Beland (talk) 04:36, 10 June 2020 (UTC)

Chemistry notation

I don't know how often you look at your Moss subpages, but I have been plugging away at C, along with a few other editors. Today I had an "Aha!" moment that got me so excited that I can barely type without typos.

Your bot had flagged a chemical formula on the page Calculus (dental). When I went to the page, there were several other chemical formulas. The one you had flagged was done simply with letters and subscripts, and the others done with ... the "chem" template at Template:Chem! I had never noticed that one before. And it's a very easy template! I have taken the liberty of adding an instruction to the new in 2020 section of your Moss Quick Start page; feel free to edit that if needed.

Example: Ca₉(Mg,Fe)(PO₄)₆(PO₃OH) gets converted to Ca
₉(Mg,Fe)(PO
₄)
₆(PO
₃OH). They look identical.

But I'm not sure if what to do about chemistry formulas with words. For instance, should I change cis-11,12-dichloro-9,10-dihydro-9,10-ethano-2-anthroic to cis-11,12-dichloro-9,10-dihydro-9,10-ethano-2-anthroic? They look the same, but I'm wondering if there's a reason not to do this. Formulas with words aren't mentioned on the "chem" template page. (If you know anything about this, please tell me.)

Ira

Ira Leviton (talk) 18:45, 12 August 2020 (UTC)

@Ira Leviton: Ooo, excellent catch! That seems like the right way to dispatch a large number of funky possible typos, and it's also easier to read. I updated Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Chemistry#Symbols to explicitly say editors should use {{chem}} or {{chem2}} so hopefully that will catch on. I wouldn't put names into the same templates as chemical formulas...if anything in the name looks close enough to a part of a formula, it could come out wrong, especially as the template is edited over time. It's also possible someone will want to do something more with the symbols or the names, like automated verification or drawing of chemical structures for pop-ups or something. In that case it's definitely better to have a separate template for names vs. formulas, and actually for chemistry names vs. proper names in general. For {{DNA sequence}} we created a new template...not seeing any existing template for this purpose, maybe we can make {{chemname}} just echo back the first parameter? -- Beland (talk) 20:01, 12 August 2020 (UTC)

Oh, and if there is an existing article on the chemical in question, making a redirect tagged with {{R from systematic name}} would also work. -- Beland (talk) 20:04, 12 August 2020 (UTC)

You make some good points regarding chemical names. I think it's a new template for them is a great idea if one currently doesn't exist. They're very similar to non-English words, except that the lang and transl templates don't apply to this situation. Thanks for your quick reply.

Ira

Ira Leviton (talk) 20:28, 12 August 2020 (UTC)

Heads-up on a revert

Hi Beland! I reverted two of your edits to Adventure Time (season 7) and Adventure Time (season 8) because they caused accidental goofiness with a few other transcluded pages. I just wanted to give you a heads up why I did that! Thanks.--Gen. Quon (Talk) 20:20, 19 September 2020 (UTC)

I did similar at List of Ang Probinsyano episodes because, despite your summary just link to per-season lists, as is common practice, this is not common practice at all. Common practice is to transclude the episode tables in the season articles to the LoE page, minus the episode summaries. --AussieLegend (✉) 18:13, 20 September 2020 (UTC)

Posting at AN/I

Hello, I just wanted to offer my apology for the way I responded to you in your complaint at AN/I. It was out of line--apparently you caught me on an emotional ebb and I should have remembered that discretion is the better part of valor. While I do generally favor robust free speech on Wikipedia, I should have expressed an opinion rather that unhelpful snark. All the best. Dumuzid (talk) 02:37, 9 November 2020 (UTC)

@Dumuzid: Oh hey, much appreciated. -- Beland (talk) 08:34, 1 February 2021 (UTC)

Conversion of Unicode Roman numerals to plain text

Hello; I think I've noticed on a couple of articles now that you have gone through and replaced Unicode Roman numerals which I've gone to the trouble of putting in, with plain text. The reason I am doing this is because the Unicode numerals are machine readable as numbers, whereas plain text has to be re-parsed into a number. Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Mathematics#Special symbols says,

As a rule of thumb, specific mathematical symbols shall be used, not similar-looking ASCII or punctuation symbols, even if corresponding glyphs are indistinguishable.

So please don't do this on pages I've worked on (and it doesn't seem like a good idea to do on other pages where it appears to have been done intentionally, either), unless you can present some very good reasoning you haven't mentioned in edit summaries. (Is there a potential template-related concern you might have? I'm noticing xtools says 1% of all your enwiki edits have been to templates.) Even if it weren't for the specific mathematics style rule, I'd think that MOS:STYLERET would apply. Cdlt, ‿Ꞅtruthious 𝔹andersnatch ͡ |℡| 14:30, 19 November 2020 (UTC)

@Struthious Bandersnatch: Hmm, that section doesn't talk about Roman numerals specifically...from what I've previously seen, we tend to prefer ASCII representations of numbers and disfavor precomposed Unicode characters, including ordinals like "1st" (MOS:ORDINAL) and fractions like 1⁄2 (MOS:FRAC). MOS:ORDINAL writes "II" in ASCII. The precomposed Unicode characters seem to be disfavored partly because not all fonts support them, they may cause weirdness or confusion if readers copy-and-paste them, and partly because editors prefer symbols they can type on their keyboards. In the 2020-11-01 database dump, I see for example 1,412,537 instances of "III" but only 288 instances of "Ⅲ", which leads me to believe if nothing else this is a de facto consensus. That also means that any machine reading of Wikipedia content (which is actually something I do for spelling and grammar-checking purposes) already has to cope with ASCII representations of Roman numerals. Writing Roman numerals in two different ways would actually make searching for them in text more difficult; pretty much no one is going to write something like /III|Ⅲ/ in the search bar. -- Beland (talk) 17:34, 19 November 2020 (UTC)

To take this in reverse order: search engines should be handling the search bit internally; for example I've tested in the past that Google seamlessly handles searching for words containing the long s, ſ, instead of the typographically-modern one. ...But I can't quickly test this out on Wikipedia because it seems all of the archaic quotes I've accurately transcribed in the past have had their ſ's replaced, despite the fact that there does not seem to be any MOS rule about it. Sigh. Though I would note that searches for the single letters "ſ" and "s" produce the same first page of results.

And actually, I'm now seeing that searching for both "Ⅷ (W–Z)" and plain text "VIII (W–Z)" deliver a hit to Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships where I've used the Unicode numeral.

And I mean, if people have already been replacing them en masse over STYLERET, it does not surprise me greatly that there would be vanishingly few instances left.

I've gone and previewed the DANFS article in all five skins and even on my Linux system the fonts look correct.

I understand that other people prefer to simply type the letters, but part of the point of STYLERET would sort of seem to be that other peoples' casual utilitarian habits shouldn't steamroll my specific styling opinions in the encyclopedia content creation work I'm doing. This is a thoughtful reply on your part, though; thank you. --‿Ꞅtruthious 𝔹andersnatch ͡ |℡| 18:49, 19 November 2020 (UTC)

@Struthious Bandersnatch: I'm seeing similar but definitely different results on Google for "billy Ⅲ" (581,000 hits) vs. "billy iii" (69,400,000 hits) so whatever mapping is happening behind the scenes seems to be incomplete. Personally, I haven't yet targeted "Ⅲ" in particular, so I've only removed them if there were other changes on the same page. I'd estimate I've done fewer than 100. Even if I've removed 1000, that's still a ratio on the order of 1000:1, which is lopsided enough to be unsurprising if "Ⅲ" was considered an error rather than an acceptable alternative style. I did a quick search to see what people outside Wikipedia have to say about this issue, and it turns out that the Unicode standard itself says the ASCII characters are preferred; the precomposed characters are only there for compatibility with Asian vertical text writing systems. (See Unicode 7.0.0, Chapter 22, p. 754.) -- Beland (talk) 06:43, 21 November 2020 (UTC)

What I see in your link says,

Many characters in the Unicode Standard are used to represent numbers or numeric expressions. Some characters are used exclusively in a numeric context; other characters can be used both as letters and numerically, depending on context. The notational systems for numbers are equally varied. They range from the familiar decimal notation to non-decimal systems, such as Roman numerals.

And it mentions that Roman numerals are a partially acrophonic system, and there's a bunch of discussion of the other acrophonic systems Unicode supports. I am, of course, not advocating for using these characters as letters, like in “triⅵal” or something, but exclusively numerically.

I see the note that everything is designed to maintain proper orientation in combination with Asian writing systems but this seems like a reason in favor of using Unicode Roman numerals, not a reason to purge them or regard them as an unacceptable styling preference.

Your Google results are interesting, but if it's actually an error, it's a reason to fix the search engine, not something that should be determinative of styling practices on Wikipedia.

I'm glad to hear that you are probably not the cause of my newly-discovered "ſ" woes, if you've been doing this stuff on a limited scale. Cdlt, ‿Ꞅtruthious 𝔹andersnatch ͡ |℡| 20:24, 21 November 2020 (UTC)

@Struthious Bandersnatch: I was looking at the section that starts:

Roman Numerals. For most purposes, it is preferable to compose the Roman numerals from sequences of the appropriate Latin letters. However, the uppercase and lowercasevariants of the Roman numerals through 12, plus L, C, D, and M, have been encoded in the Number Forms block (U+2150..U+218F) for compatibility with East Asian standards. Unlike sequences of Latin letters, these symbols remain upright in vertical layout.

English Wikipedia doesn't use vertical writing, so it would not be helpful to use characters intended for vertical writing. Feel free to report this problem to Google, but there are many search engines and new ones being created all the time. Wikipedia makes plenty of style decisions to make it easier for search engines to find content, most notably MOS:STRAIGHT. In this case, I think it's reasonable for search engines to expect that Wikipedia follows the Unicode standard. -- Beland (talk) 23:51, 21 November 2020 (UTC)

We already do, though—that's what you've documented above. For most purposes, you are saying that editors make a utilitarian and/or style choice to just type letters in. For my styling purposes, I am choosing to follow Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Mathematics#Special symbols. You can't just overrule that by personal fiat. If you really believe your reasoning is incontrovertible and inevitable and precludes all other styling variations, simply go and get it added to the MOS somewhere and if there's community consensus I will abide by it. Until then, as I asked above, please at least in places I've done work, follow the maths MOS and MOS:STYLERET.

And—it would not be helpful to use characters intended for vertical writing—you brought the use case of copying and pasting into this discussion, not me. By your own reasoning, Wikipedia content could easily end up in a web page or document with vertical writing. And you're pushing pretty hard to imply that the associated sentence says the Unicode Roman numerals are solely for the purpose of use in vertical layouts in East Asian writing systems, but that is not what it says.

And obviously you are the one who is claiming you've found an error or an “incomplete mapping” or whatever at Google—I'm pretty confident they're probably accounting for factors neither of us have considered in our discussion of Wikipedia styling, rather than having made some simple mistake you discovered in looking up a ©1991–2014 document which Google probably had a hand in writing. Again, if you are confident in your conclusions, it's incumbent upon you to do whatever sort of bug report you're talking about here. --‿Ꞅtruthious 𝔹andersnatch ͡ |℡| 00:57, 22 November 2020 (UTC)

@Struthious Bandersnatch: Though I do not agree with your hypotheses, at your suggestion, I have reported the discrepancy in search results to Google. It is not feasible for me to QA special character handling for every search engine in the world, and I do not intend to try. Copying the horizontal text from Wikipedia into a vertical text environment would be problematic, as we use obviously use horizontal punctuation in horizontal writing. I think it should be obvious that horizontal text should also use horizontal Roman numerals. Most Roman numerals on the English Wikipedia, and I assume all the ones you have added, are in English-language text for which a precomposed character is always inappropriate, and would produce the wrong result when rotated (not that I can imagine anyone trying to do that with English Wikipedia content). I have been removing precomposed Roman numerals from Japanese URL titles used in English Wikipedia citations, and no one has so far complained. At your request, I have started a community conversation at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Mathematics#Precomposed vs. ASCII Roman numerals. Feel free to jump in and explain your objection to ASCII Roman numerals. -- Beland (talk) 03:19, 22 November 2020 (UTC)

Thanks! I think we've done a good job of exploring the issue here, so hopefully we and others can provide the community with a good basis to make a decision from. --‿Ꞅtruthious 𝔹andersnatch ͡ |℡| 04:06, 22 November 2020 (UTC)

A cup of coffee for you!

Appreciate the moss project, awesome work! Mindfulsheep (talk) 23:50, 16 December 2020 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

The Admin's Barnstar

For the closure at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Biography#RfC: Changing MOS:DEADNAME on how to credit individuals on previously released works, a very detailed and thorough assessment that must have taken a long time to compose. I know people can be reluctant to close such RfCs because it will usually only end in negative feedback, never positive feedback, so here's a barnstar to counteract that. :) — Bilorv (talk) 13:29, 4 February 2021 (UTC)

RfC archived without being closed

Hi. Could you please take a look at this request for closure? This RFC was archived without being closed and I am quite uncertain what to make of it. Surtsicna (talk) 17:53, 4 February 2021 (UTC)

@Surtsicna: Done! Sorry that was not a fun conversation, but thanks for working through it to build consensus. -- Beland (talk) 10:29, 5 February 2021 (UTC)

Block of EEng

You may not have had this brought to your attention yet, but your block of EEng for "continued incivility" when he does not appear to have done anything more that is particularly uncivil after your initial message on his talk page (unless you count any disagreement with your opinion as incivility) appears to be mistaken. Please reconsider your block. —David Eppstein (talk) 20:39, 7 February 2021 (UTC)

@David Eppstein: Though I do not agree with it, most of EEng's reply was civil. The part that was not was:

And, frankly, if you can't see how absurd it is to imagine that there aren't definitive sources for Senate chairmanships, then you aren't competent to be sticking your nose into this matter. Really.

Whether EEng's assessment of my competence is correct or not, according to WP:CIRNOT, that's a personal attack. It does happen to be directed at me, but it's exactly the uncivil behavior my first message to EEng was admonishing, and appears to have been repeated as an in-your-face demonstration that they do not regret doing it and will happily do it in the future whenever they see fit. Would you advise simply ignoring that in the future, or is there a different course of action you would recommend? -- Beland (talk) 22:52, 7 February 2021 (UTC)

A less-confrontational course when being informed that one's actions suggest a gap in one's knowledge of something relevant would be to fill the gap and thank the informant for pointing it out. Alternatively, if one's actions were performed in full knowledge of that thing but for some other overriding reason, it might be more constructive to explain what that reason is and why it is overriding. —David Eppstein (talk) 23:21, 7 February 2021 (UTC)

@David Eppstein: As a participant in a conversation trying to come to consensus on article text, sure, and I often do ignore personal attacks and respond in the way you suggest. But this was not that type of conversation, it was an enforcement of WP:CIVILITY. If the response to an admonishment to be civil is immediate incivility, how would you handle that from an enforcement perspective? -- Beland (talk) 00:06, 8 February 2021 (UTC)

That's kind of a loaded and misleading question, because I'm not convinced that the response actually was incivil, nor that invoking WP:CIR is automatically incivil. WP:CIR exists for a reason — everyone has a level of expertise and competence beyond which they shouldn't try to edit, and we need to be able to discuss situations in which some editors appear not to be recognizing their own limits, either to suggest to them that maybe they could try to do something else more constructive (although this rarely works) or to discuss the situation with other editors and organize a plan to protect the encyclopedia from patterns of harmful edits. Banning mention of competence is not a helpful response to this pattern. —David Eppstein (talk) 00:18, 8 February 2021 (UTC)

@David Eppstein: Well, if I agreed that EEng's response as quoted above was civil, then I would certainly consider the comments to Surtsicna to be civil, and I never would have admonished in the first place. I hope that explains why I did not follow the course of action you recommended above. Looking back over the conversation again, I see that Surtsicna certainly considered EEng to be uncivil, and now I feel even worse about what they had to put up with:

What I lack is the will to continue communicating with someone who appears to be incapable of a civil discussion. On this discussion page alone you have insulted multiple editors, but I suppose I have fared better than those who have had their opinions declared idiocies, no less. Surtsicna (talk) 16:53, 23 January 2021 (UTC)

I very much agree that competence is required, and in my admonition to EEng I tried to make clear the sort of steps that should be taken when first dealing with someone who appears to be incompetent. The exchange below is I think a pretty good example of incompetence being cited as a personal attack, rather than a kind and considerate attempt to productively deal with a chronically unhelpful person:

So, do you actually believe that it's not possible to find a published reliable source for Biden's chairmanships and so on, or are you just being difficult? EEng 13:03, 14 January 2021 (UTC)

I do seriously believe it is not possible to find published reliable sources about all these people preceding or succeeding Joe Biden in the given date ranges...Surtsicna (talk) 21:15, 14 January 2021 (UTC)

To be blunt, seriously believing that there aren't complete and definitive sources for the chairmanships of Senate committees brings into serious question your competence to edit this article. Seriously. Did you even try? [35] EEng 05:15, 15 January 2021 (UTC)

It is possible that Surtsicna takes the fact the sources supplied by other editors fail to verify the claims made in the infobox as good evidence that such sources might not exist. I accept anyone not familiar with Congressional recordkeeping might think that, and lack of such familiarity is certainly not a sign of incompetence or an invalidation of the request for sources. Reading that comment carefully, though, it is now unclear to me whether Surtsicna is saying that it is not possible to find a source in the article, which is what is required by WP:V, or if they are saying it is not possible to find one in the world. It is possible Surtsicna is not a native English speaker, so that may be a simple misunderstanding. EEng has also rudely backed Surtsicna into a conversational corner, giving them a choice between believing something which EEng thinks is implausible and labelling themselves as an unreasonable person, giving EEng an opportunity to mock any possible response. And given that EEng and Levivich were arguing instead of fulfilling the burden of proof which Surtsicna correctly says is required by WP:V, it is also possible that Surtsicna is just repeating this back because it seems like swearing an oath is the only way these editors will take the requirement to supply reliable sources seriously, and do the work to actually find them and put them in the parts of the article they want to keep. These latter interpretations are not an indication of incompetence, much less being such a bad editor one should just give up editing the article entirely. Now I'm actually wondering if EEng had located the requested sources before asking the impossible question, with the intent of sharing them after the impossible question was answered and making Surtsicna look stupid for picking the first answer, or was just expecting to be able to easily find them. An appropriate response to a genuinely clueless editor on this issue would have been to simply provide the requested sources, which would both satisfy WP:V and actually educate them about a gap in their knowledge rather than simply yelling at them that they were wrong. At the very least, some amount of criticism has to be directed at the problems in the person's edits before it's necessary to start talking about the person themselves.

I can see deciding an editor is helplessly incompetent after a history of chronic and gross editing errors (and I've had to deal with that kind of editor at AN/I) but even then, telling them that in such a rude and hyperbolic fashion is not appropriate. It was not a last resort for EEng; it was a first resort, at best used without trying to resolve what might have been a simple miscommunication, and at worst used after intentionally bullying Surtsicna into making a stupid-looking comment. An intermediate possibility is that EEng is just super arrogant, overly dismissive of other people's legitimate opinions, and thinks that verbal abuse is a good conversational tactic to make other people agree with them or pay more attention or something. (EEng did write to me "And look! It worked: [1]!") EEng has a history of personal attacks and making snarky and unproductive comments for fun. I guess if I assume good faith, EEng genuinely believes the accusation of incompetence, but abusively calling someone incompetent does not require a genuine belief that they actually are, and in the latter case, WP:CIR is irrelevant. Looking at the entirety of the dispute, Surtsicna seems to be a competent editor who had to put up with uncivil editors while arguing their case. In the end, the changes Surtsicna advocated to the article were supported by consensus in the RFC that they called. These two groups of editors seem to have complementary skills, and I wish they could have worked together more cooperatively; now it seems they are barely on speaking terms. -- Beland (talk) 06:07, 8 February 2021 (UTC)

Because of me, no doubt. EEng 20:20, 8 February 2021 (UTC)

It takes at least two people to have an argument, but mostly, yes. -- Beland (talk) 01:09, 9 February 2021 (UTC)

As mentioned elsewhere, you sure feel free to just make stuff up. EEng 06:21, 9 February 2021 (UTC)

If you think it would be a productive use of your time and my time, feel free to detail your version of these events. Not knowing the thinking of either editor I was only able to hypothesize. -- Beland (talk) 18:11, 9 February 2021 (UTC)

No need for me to do that, since a dozen editors already reviewed them and were able to see what was going on without assistance. And given how well your latest efforts at reading minds and imputing motives was received, in future when you're making stuff up ("hypothesizing") it would be much better if you'd label it as such instead of presenting it as fact.

And do me a favor, please: stop saying I labeled S. as incompetent. I said that someone who actually believes, on sober consideration, that there aren't sources on the history of US Senate committee chairmanships probably isn't competent to edit an article on a US senator. EEng 21:38, 9 February 2021 (UTC)

I have always tried to be careful, especially when talking about living people, to distinguish between events which I believed actually happened and possibilities I am suggesting. If you think it is a productive use of time and there is a specific claim I made above that you believe was factually inaccurate, I am happy to revisit the claim and clarify or restate if needed. Your exact words were "seriously believing that there aren't complete and definitive sources for the chairmanships of Senate committees brings into serious question your competence to edit this article". Given it was Surtsicna who had just expressed that belief, I think it is pretty clear that "your" refers to Surtsicna. If you meant "your" in the sense of "one's", it still includes Surtsicna in the class of people who you consider incompetent. You later said "is moving you perilously close to WP:CIR territory" when responding to Surtsicna, which I can only interpret as meaning you consider this editor to be borderline incompetent. After than, you said "It is now apparent that you lack the competence to usefully contribute to this discussion." which is an extremely insulting attempt to silence another editor, in addition to directly labelling that specific person as incompetent. If it was not your intent to label Surtsicna as an incompetent editor, then I think it would be appropriate for you to apologize to this user and withdraw these remarks. -- Beland (talk) 22:06, 9 February 2021 (UTC)

It's amazing. My words (which you just quoted) in the original discussion were brings into serious question your competence to edit this article. "This" article. I questioned his fitness to edit a particular article for a particular, stated reason. Then, here on this page, I reemphasized that restricted meaning. And yet you continue to say that what I did was directly labelling that specific person as incompetent. So there's no need for me to apologize to S. for calling him an incompetent editor, because I didn't call him that. But I will say that were I to call you an incompetent admin, I wouldn't apologize for that either, since Exhibit A is this exchange right here. Like S., you keep claiming people (and guidelines) say what the didn't or don't say, and even when the truth is rubbed in your face over and over, and even after a score of editors vociferously denounce your judgment as completely out of calibration, you're either incapable of absorbing it or just can't bring yourself to acknowledge it. That kind of admin we don't need.

Since discussion with you is like talking to someone from another universe with an alternate set of rules of logic, I'll take Tryptofish's advice and quit now. Feel free to rattle on and have the last word, I won't be paying attention since it will likely be just a repeat what you've said before as if I haven't just shown it to be completely false. Bye! EEng 23:02, 9 February 2021 (UTC)

Before this escalates any further, I'm going to suggest that we all just move on. It's very clear that Beland isn't going to change EEng's mind and EEng isn't going to change Beland's mind. And that's not the end of the world. It's also clear that there isn't any kind of consensus for administrator intervention in this. So let's all please drop it. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:14, 9 February 2021 (UTC)

I agree with Tryptofish. --Mirokado (talk) 22:17, 9 February 2021 (UTC)

I agree with Mirokado's agreeing with Tryptofish but, in keeping with longstanding policty, not with Tryptofish himself. EEng 23:02, 9 February 2021 (UTC)

I disagree. I think this pointless debate should be continued at EEng's talk page until the page reaches 1 MB. We only need another 21 kB. nagualdesign 22:26, 9 February 2021 (UTC)

And I disagree with you, so let's continue that as well! --Tryptofish (talk) 22:28, 9 February 2021 (UTC)

@EEng: To "label someone as incompetent" does not inherently imply "incompetent at everything". I was never under the impression you were labelling anyone as incompetent at everything, and that would have been somewhat worse. I thought "incompetent at editing the Joe Biden article" and "incompetent at editing the Joe Biden talk page" were pretty clear from context, it's more wordy, and in my opinion it's not all that important a distinction, so I did not bother to disambiguate. The use of the label, whatever the scope of skill, is still an insult, uncivil, and what WP:CIRNOT is warning against. You did not make clear in your above message that you were objecting to the scope of skill vs. the scope of person getting the incompetence label. I'm sure it was clear to you when you were writing it, but you have the benefit of knowing your underlying intention in advance, which I did not. We do not communicate in pure logic, and humans (certainly including me) misinterpret messages all the time. These ambiguities in language can easily be overcome with polite clarifications and requests for clarification. There is no need for insults like "talking to someone from another universe with an alternate set of rules of logic"; if it feels that way, I think it is because you aren't considering how another person might interpret the same words differently than you, or have a different set of incomplete facts from your set of incomplete facts. Anyone's free not to continue this conversation if they don't want to, but I'm as yet unconvinced that EEng is incapable of appreciating the harms of and avoiding uncivil behavior. -- Beland (talk) 01:24, 10 February 2021 (UTC)

EEng block

It seems to me that there is a difference between "I'm blocking you because you kept on doing it after I cautioned you to stop it" and "I'm blocking you because I cautioned you and you said that you think my reasoning was wrong". You had other options. The page is under Am Pol DS, so you could have put a civility restriction on the page and then been strict about civility. And as a far as I can tell, the editor who asked you to look into closing the RfC did not ask you for help with civility in the discussion. It comes across as though you came into the talk page well after anything that you based the block upon was over, and you were looking for an opportunity to make a civility block in order to make a point about the need for more civility.

I'm not an admin, and I'm a long time wiki-friend of EEng. And I've told him multiple times that I think he should be kinder to editors he thinks are acting foolishly, and I do see where you are coming from here, after looking at his comments on the talk page. I'm also someone who is very concerned about the lack of civility on-wiki, and I'm well aware of the concept of "unblockable" (or repeatedly blocked to no effect) editors who have a cadre of defenders. So I was conflicted about whether or not I should post this. Ultimately, though, I think that this block is just going to create a big stink over the block, without really changing anything, so I think you should consider how to deescalate it. --Tryptofish (talk) 21:17, 7 February 2021 (UTC)

I would add that your rationale is self-defeating. Frankly, I'm more concerned about the editor time we are losing when editors are uncivil to each other and some of them stop editing entirely. ...you are blocked from editing for one week. So because you're concerned about losing editor time you're going to block a prolific editor for a whole week? Seems more like you didn't like being talked back to, even though you admit that he was correct. nagualdesign 21:49, 7 February 2021 (UTC)

@Nagualdesign: Well, in terms of editor productivity lost, if EEng causes five other editors to abandon the project in the course of their future editing career, a permanent ban would be a productivity improvement. If a week-long block prevents one other editor from quitting more than a week earlier than they otherwise would have, then a week-long block is a productivity win. If other editors are less likely to be uncivil because they don't see EEng being uncivil, the effect multiplies. -- Beland (talk) 22:37, 7 February 2021 (UTC)

Not all editors are productive. Many of them waste a great deal of other editors' time. If EEng causes a counterproductive editor to take a step back or leave the project entirely I'd say that's a net win. In my experience he's always even-handed and always has this project's best interests at heart. And questioning someone's competence is not what I'd consider as incivility, but maybe that's just me. nagualdesign 23:35, 7 February 2021 (UTC)

@Nagualdesign: In this case, the editor EEng was being uncivil to called for an RFC, and the article change the victim was advocating for gained consensus. EEng's behavior only delayed reaching that consensus, demoralized a productive editor, and soured the discussion for other participants and would-be participants. -- Beland (talk) 00:11, 8 February 2021 (UTC)

You sure feel free to just make stuff up. From what I can see I moved the discussion forward by getting the editor I was being uncivil to the editor who needed a reality check to stop obsessing on his (and your) misunderstanding of MOS. You might recall my prediction that you would waste a lot of editor time -- a prediction that has been proven true beyond my wildest dreams. Probably best if you quit while you're ahead. EEng 20:02, 8 February 2021 (UTC)

You asked me a question in the AN thread that is now closed, so I'll reply here. In brief, you can apply DS (when authorized by ArbCom or by the community) to multiple pages within the DS topic area. --Tryptofish (talk) 18:58, 8 February 2021 (UTC)

@Tryptofish: Sure, but what if the editor is uncivil on a different topic or on a user talk page? If a person just can't have a civil conversation when they deal with certain types of opposition, the topic is less important than the participant. -- Beland (talk) 01:07, 9 February 2021 (UTC)

Well, the world isn't perfect, and I don't really have a good answer for that, especially in the hypothetical. But I'd say that it's never the total responsibility of a single administrator to police any given member of the community. If some hypothetical user is really becoming a problem for the community across multiple topic areas, there will be complaints from the community across multiple topic areas, and there will be the opportunity to consult about it with other admins. --Tryptofish (talk) 20:38, 9 February 2021 (UTC)

@Tryptofish: That's good advice. It's what I've done in the past with problematic editors, and I'll do that in the future, even though it takes a lot more time to document the history in order to successfully communicate and reach consensus. -- Beland (talk) 20:43, 9 February 2021 (UTC)