User talk:Certes/Archive 5

This is an archive of past discussions with User:Certes. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.

Archive 1

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Archive 3

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Mushin Musabah

Mushin Musabah played for the United Arab Emirates in 1985 making his debut against Saudi Arabia on 12 April 1985.0 Seancrowe7 (talk) 15:56, 2 February 2019 (UTC)

@Seancrowe7: Well spotted, and welcome to Wikipedia. You could update his article to show that. RSSSF is a good source to quote. I've left a few hints about editing on your talk page. Thanks, Certes (talk) 16:08, 2 February 2019 (UTC)

Kouch Dani

Done Giant Snowman 12:07, 15 February 2019 (UTC)

37

Thanks for changing the link for 37. When I looked for articles that link to the film, Murder of Kitty Genovese didn't come up, only a couple of actors. I've added the red link into the 'Murder' article as well. Leschnei (talk) 14:06, 17 February 2019 (UTC)

@Leschnei: IMDb lists about eight films called 37 and it's not clear that this one is any more notable than the others, but I think it's clear from the date and the "crime" description that it's the one that was intended. Certes (talk) 14:10, 17 February 2019 (UTC)

LIst of Battle of Normandy leaders listed at Redirects for discussion

An editor has asked for a discussion to address the redirect LIst of Battle of Normandy leaders. Since you had some involvement with the LIst of Battle of Normandy leaders redirect, you might want to participate in the redirect discussion if you wish to do so. UnitedStatesian (talk) 13:30, 21 February 2019 (UTC)

LLandaff Oratory listed at Redirects for discussion

An editor has asked for a discussion to address the redirect LLandaff Oratory. Since you had some involvement with the LLandaff Oratory redirect, you might want to participate in the redirect discussion if you wish to do so. UnitedStatesian (talk) 15:33, 21 February 2019 (UTC)

Disambiguator's Barnstar

		The Disambiguator's Barnstar
		The Disambiguator's Barnstar is awarded to Wikipedians who are prolific disambiguators. For all your work, especially with User:Certes/Taxa linked to surnames. Thank you! Nessie (talk) 17:11, 15 March 2019 (UTC)

Please will you work with me to draft an RFC on Portal criteria?

Hi Certes

Please will you work with me to draft an RFC on the criteria for creating/deleting/retaining portals?

I have written a very rough first draft at User:BrownHairedGirl/Draft RFC on Portal criteria, just to kick things off.

At User talk:BrownHairedGirl/Draft RFC on Portal criteria#Can we draft a joint proposal I set out why I think it would be helpful if a small group of editors of differing views worked together to draft an RFC which could establish a broad community consensus on which portals should exist and which should not. This is one of 4 invites, through which I hope to establish group of 5 editors to collaborate on ths one task.

Please can you reply at User talk:BrownHairedGirl/Draft RFC on Portal criteria#Can we draft a joint proposal, so that others can see your response?

Thanks! --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 06:01, 17 March 2019 (UTC)

@BrownHairedGirl: I'll make a more technical reply at the RfC as requested but, firstly, some background. I carried out "gnome" work for WikiProject Portals such as listing portals with various errors and writing a module to extract an article's lead. I also created two pages in Portal: namespace. I was one of the first to warn TTH privately and the project as a whole that too many portals were being created. I formally left the project in November and haven't actively sought to contribute since, though I still respond to frequent requests for reports and module enhancements. I've also continued to defend some of the project's work, on general inclusionist principles rather than from a love of portals.

I agree that most recently created portals should be deleted but I hope that some are worth keeping. The problem, of course, is finding those nuggets amongst so much debris. It is disappointing but understandable that no one is willing to look. I recently invited TTH to nominate some of the best new portals, both as evidence that such things exist and to mark them against deletion, but that didn't happen. I wonder if we can produce some tool to sort the new portals semi-automatically into snowball keeps, snowball deletes and a manageable number of maybes for manual consideration. Of course, that can only be done after we agree some criteria. That in turn needs to happen quickly: there is a strong push in several parallel forums to delete the portals and the project's toolkit as a matter of urgency. Certes (talk) 13:37, 17 March 2019 (UTC)

Thanks for that thoughtful response, Certes. I think some suite of tools is going to be needed to identify the best portals and the worst portals, and many other related issues. Given the lack of broad consensus on criteria, I think that the snow-keep set would be small, and possibly the snow-delete set too.

In the meantime, there is a question of whether there should be some speedy-deletion process (X3) for the mass-created portals. TTH specifically said that they were created at a rate which amounts on average to between one and two minutes each (Have you tried creating 500 portals? It is rather repetitious/tedious/time-consuming (from 500 to 1000 minutes)), so there was a lot of very speedy creation and it seems reasonable to me to response to that with speedy deletion if there is consensus that the set as a whole is of poor quality.

Meanwhile, thank you for your kind response to my draft RFC. I am sorry to see that you don't feel able to participate, because regardless of what else is happening, I think we need long-term criteria. And I also think that your experience could be a very valuable part of helping build that consensus. So replied[1] on the draft page to ask you to reconsider. I don't want to won't pester you, so I won't ask again ... but so long as that we process is open, your input there will always be welcome.

Best wishes, --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 23:39, 18 March 2019 (UTC)

@BrownHairedGirl: Thank you for your kind words here and on the RfC talk page. Your comments are very welcome and I certainly don't feel pestered.

We're all here to build an encyclopedia. That's a very subjective aim but for me it generally means creating or organising content rather than deleting or repelling it. Obviously we don't want every chancer's CV and every loony's conspiracy theory, but I don't see portals falling into that category. Carrying out a mass deletion during an RfC is having one's cake and eating it: rolling back to the position we found an (admittedly weak) consensus for last summer, then seeing what else can be removed. I foresee a lot of editors' hard work, which is at worst harmless, going into the bin as a result of this RfC. I am also concerned by the increasingly aggressive behaviour we're seeing across the portal deletion forums. I accept that the participants in this process genuinely believe that it will improve Wikipedia. I can't join in because I disagree, but let's hope they're right. Certes (talk) 00:25, 19 March 2019 (UTC)

Fair enough, @Certes. I strongly disagree with nearly all of that, but I respect your reasoned and principled position and the great civility with which you express it.

As above, you will be missed! And you are welcome to chip on this page for as long as it's live, and contact me in other places if you see any possibility of collaboration (or even just dialogue across a divide) .

Best wishes, --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 00:32, 19 March 2019 (UTC)

More taxon authorities

I've noticed your work disambiguating taxon authorities. I just came across List of taxonomic authorities named Smith, which has some incoming links, and I know I've seen some redirects along the lines of Smith (taxonomic authority) that have pointed to a particular person (perhaps not an ambiguous link, but a poor way to link).Plantdrew (talk) 02:40, 28 March 2019 (UTC)

@Plantdrew: Thanks. List of taxonomic authorities by name also has several incoming links via redirects such as Gray (taxonomy). These links are ambiguous but don't appear in reports of links to disambiguation pages, so they can be hard to spot. Fortunately, there only seem to be about 50 articles to fix, so I should be able to look at them tomorrow. Narky Blert has done most of the hard work using User:Certes/Taxa linked to surnames, which listed about 1350 articles before I pruned the fixed ones. Certes (talk) 02:58, 28 March 2019 (UTC)

@Plantdrew: We're getting there. My estimate for finishing the main project is Sunday. The collaboration page has been at User talk:Narky Blert#Taxa linked to surnames. Most problems have been pretty straightforward, but a couple have been real head-scratchers. Biologists in all fields have a nasty habit of simply including what the last guy wrote and not citing the relevant paper. (It took me over two hours to find W. Pfeffer. A couple of times, I was on the verge of writing him off as someone's unknown correspondent; but there are species like Ephialtes pfefferi, a junior synonym of Dolichomitus tuberculatus, which suggested someone well known in his day. Misattributions can also be a nuisance. I came across a link to Bulliard, where the date was a hundred years out for Jean Baptiste François Pierre Bulliard. It turned out to be an error for W.Bull; an error which is also in some of the literature; so, I've bookmarked JBFPB for checking.) Fortunately, this should be pretty much a one-off project; unlike, say, DAB pages with links, which is like shovelling flies across a barn.

I've also bookmarked Sowerby family for attention. (Links to that page are mostly lazy almost beyond belief: an editor actually took the trouble to link to all of them rather than to the specific one. That must mean that they looked at the surname page to find the link.) If you know of or find anything more like List of taxonomic authorities named Smith, point them our way.

I've seen redlinks in the form Smith (entomologist), which IMO are little better than your example. I wouldn't be surprised if there is a bunch of undetectable redlinks to C19 French authorities in the form M. Dubois, where M. stands for Monsieur; I've seen that in citations.

Wikispecies too needs attention. See e.g. the what-links-here to species:Haas. Narky Blert (talk) 07:04, 28 March 2019 (UTC)

I'm making progress but I'm unsure about Nesopupa turtoni. Edgar Albert Smith is mentioned in a comment and identified several other molluscs in 1906 (example), though he doesn't have a work listed for that year. However, Spanish and Portuguese wikipædiæ name Andrew Smith (zoologist), who lived nearer to St Helena but has the slight drawback of being dead. Certes (talk) 14:41, 28 March 2019 (UTC)

@Narky Blert and Plantdrew: The same observation applies to Pupilla obliquicosta. Most fixes are for E.A. Smith but sadly we can't assume that all c.1900 molluscs are his: Fossarus elegans and Oocorys sulcata were Sidney Irving Smith. Certes (talk) 15:10, 28 March 2019 (UTC)

Lists done, except for the two Smiths above and Erythrinus erythrinus: probably John Edward Gray but others are credible. Certes (talk) 15:53, 28 March 2019 (UTC)

N. turtoni fixed: Edgar Albert Smith. Narky Blert (talk) 16:02, 28 March 2019 (UTC)

P. obliquicosta: ditto. Narky Blert (talk) 16:06, 28 March 2019 (UTC)

E. erythrinus fixed: indeed John Edward Gray. Narky Blert (talk) 16:24, 28 March 2019 (UTC)

Thanks for those three. I had a quick glance at Sowerby but it's complicated. Hystricella bicarinata is George Brettingham Sowerby I but the synonym may not be. Certes (talk) 16:47, 28 March 2019 (UTC)

I'll let you guys know if I find anything else. I've certainly encountered some cases where initials were omitted (a la W.Bull/Bull.) leading to the wrong authority being linked, but I don't think there's any easy way to catch those. Plantdrew (talk) 18:03, 28 March 2019 (UTC)

Thanks. I know more about disambiguation than biology, so my view is that any link to a naturalist was probably created by someone with more of a clue than I have and should be left alone. There are still plenty of areas to explore, such as homonyms of surnames or redirects to them (was Roperia poulsoni really made by a carpenter?) We have also yet to explore other areas where surnames habitually appear, such as football goal scorers. Certes (talk) 19:02, 28 March 2019 (UTC)

Philip Pearsall Carpenter. From the title of this book. Narky Blert (talk) 07:00, 29 March 2019 (UTC)

Carpenters also built Dinotherium, Apteropanorpidae, Umbraculum ovalis, Euparagia and Gojirasaurus. They don't seem to have recorded anything. I hope I got the lot. Narky Blert (talk) 08:49, 29 March 2019 (UTC)

I've cleaned up the links to Sowerby family. Narky Blert (talk) 15:53, 29 March 2019 (UTC)

I've also checked Jean Baptiste François Pierre Bulliard for dodgy links-in. There were none. Narky Blert (talk) 16:08, 29 March 2019 (UTC)

@Narky Blert (or any other experts stallking this thread): Most links I fixed in this exercise are from molluscs. I've gone through malacologists' surnames where an unrelated article lives at the base name and fixed links to bands, drinks, etc. I failed to resolve a few cases that might benefit from your expertise. Some are obviously not malacologists but happen to share a surname with one.

Triactis → Johnson 1861 (why is that not in Category:Surnames?)
Belgrandiella → A. Wagner 1928
Ogasawarana & Ogasawarana obtusa → A. J. Wagner 1905
Orthotylus halophilus & Recilia hesperidum → Lindberg 1958

It may well be that these people are not notable and should simply be unlinked. Certes (talk) 00:18, 30 March 2019 (UTC)

Triactis. (1) I haven't found the specific paper, but from the subject-matter Johnson must surely be James Yate Johnson (who was, of course, missing from List of people with surname Johnson). See for example this paper. (He should not be confused with his identically-named nephew, a founding partner of patent agent firm J.Y. & G.W. Johnson. I'm impressed by the url they managed to snaffle; that could be down to Ross Manaton, who struck me as a bright lad the one time I met him.) (2) I've read somewhere that categorisation was a relatively late addition to WP. Categories can be a powerful search tool, but dreaming up all the right ones takes imagination. That said, I've added {{surname}} to Johnson. Narky Blert (talk) 06:27, 30 March 2019 (UTC)

Redirect Triactis producta is in Category:Taxa named by James Yate Johnson, so I've fixed Triactis. Easy when you know who to look for. Certes (talk) 10:28, 30 March 2019 (UTC)

I managed to unify the three Wagner links as A. J. Wagner (malacologist) (not in German WP; far too many people in de:Wagner (Familienname)#A to risk omitting the possibly-superfluous qualifier). He looks potentially notable: his 1905 paper was a big one. I've written at least six articles about forgotten C19/early C20 naturalists, one of them a major figure, which should be AFDproof.

A favourite trick that, link only the surname even when you know an initial. (I can think of vaguely botanical, mammalological, ichthyological (nomen dubium) and herpetological references in Wagner, but nothing malacological.) Narky Blert (talk) 10:26, 30 March 2019 (UTC)

sv:Håkan Lindberg (entomolog). Narky Blert (talk) 10:37, 30 March 2019 (UTC)

Talkback

Hello, Certes. You have new messages at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard.
Message added 00:30, 31 March 2019 (UTC). You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{Talkback}} or {{Tb}} template.

North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 00:30, 31 March 2019 (UTC)

Yet another barnstar

		The Barnstar of Diligence
		Thank you so much for you first rate work on renaming the Donegal page. And then you went and fixed all those bad links. Wow!--Toploftical (talk) 20:27, 1 April 2019 (UTC)

Iron(II) and categories

Hi, thanks for the edit to ferrous. Actually there was not much contents copied from ferrous to iron(II) (and much of the contents in ferrous was my contribution anyway).
Asfor the category fix--ugh! Why did people choose to use those obscure roman numeral Unicode characters, instead of simple ascii? Everywhere, absolutely everywhere -- including on Wikipedia articles and titles -- the "II" is two separate letter "I"s. Even the Ancient Romans would have typed them that way...
Yet another "nerdy" feature that only makes Wikipedia more complicated to edit. Could we convince the Keepers of Categories to create redirects from those names to plain ascii names, so that we can use the latter?
All the best, --Jorge Stolfi (talk) 18:35, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

I agree that this does not seem to be the best name for the category, if only so that readers can type in its name. However, it's part of a uniform series along with Category:Copper(Ⅰ) compounds, Category:Chromium(Ⅲ) compounds, etc., so presumably someone knew what they were doing. And yes, I'm pretty sure that no one has found a Roman typewriter with a Ⅱ key... Certes (talk) 23:13, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

@Certes:

Hi, I found that those precomposed Roman numeral characters were added to Unicode only to allow small Roman numerals to be included in vertical-mode Asian text, like
西西Ⅶ西西

The guys in the Unicode Consortium themselves recommend against using those characters in other contexts.
Do you know whom I should contact to pass along this information?
All the best, --Jorge Stolfi (talk) 11:22, 12 May 2019 (UTC)

@Jorge Stolfi: It's probably OK to move the categories per User_talk:The_Nth_User#weird_categories. Plenty of similar cases such as Category:Platinum(Ⅳ) compounds → Category:Platinum(IV) compounds have already been renamed. WP:CMOVE and WP:C2C may be useful. I've never actually moved a category. Unless you're more experienced at this sort of thing, I would have a word at WT:WikiProject Chemistry and WT:WikiProject Categories first. Certes (talk) 12:37, 12 May 2019 (UTC)

Inert munition listed at Redirects for discussion

An editor has asked for a discussion to address the redirect Inert munition. Since you had some involvement with the Inert munition redirect, you might want to participate in the redirect discussion if you wish to do so. Shhhnotsoloud (talk) 08:42, 7 April 2019 (UTC)

Image of Benjamin M. Bitanga

Pattyperez1962 (talk) 08:51, 23 April 2019 (UTC) Hi Certes,

Good day!

May I ask your permission to change existing picture of Mr. Benjamin M. Bitanga. I have his latest picture, wearing tuxedo and in a corporate setup background.

@Pattyperez1962: Hello, and welcome to Wikipedia! Although I was the last person to edit Benjamin M. Bitanga, you don't need my permission or anyone else's to change it. However, Wikipedia can only accept pictures which are free content or fair use, for copyright reasons which are explained at WP:Images. If your picture is suitably licensed then you can upload it to Wikipedia or Commons and edit the article to use the new image. There is one more complication: Wikipedia only allows new editors to upload files after they have made ten text edits. Hope that helps, Certes (talk) 12:00, 23 April 2019 (UTC)

Disambiguating newspaper titles

Thanks for fixing my errors (among oh so many others) in linking to The Daily Telegraph rather than The Daily Telegraph (Sydney). I am hoping you may be able to help me fix a another issue or 2.

In my case the error arose from copy the wikipedia citation from Trove eg see details tab of this article - as you would know from the disambiguation page there are half a dozen or so different Australian papers with similar names, all of which Trove currently point to the British paper. I will see if we can get Trove to change the links. It does prompt me to consider another newspaper with similar issues: The Australian (disambiguation). Fortunately there is no overlap in publication years - the current paper has been published since 1964, while the colonial paper was published in 1824-1848. There were a couple of Western Australian newspapers from the early 1900s, but I would be surprised if anyone was referring to those.

Do you know if it is possible, whether using WP:JWB or something else, to easily disambiguate links to The Australian based on the date of publication ?

The second question arises from that thought bubble but is somewhat more obscure. There are 2240 wikipedia articles on members of the NSW parliament. The Parliament has published useful biographical details on all of them. In the usual way they have changed the url, causing link rot which may or may not be linked to an archive url. Fortunately the new url contains an ID number. I have created Template:cite NSW Parliament which is a simple CS1 specific-source template. The obvious advantage of the template is that if they change the url, it is easy enough to come up with a way to fix the links. While it seems to me to work well, manually going through all 2240 articles is a huge endeavour. What I am hoping is that you can point me in the direction of a way to automate the process of updating the urls to the template & what that would take.

Thanks again. Find bruce (talk) 02:12, 25 April 2019 (UTC)

@Find bruce: I hope I've got the Telegraphs right. It really helped that the Trove references were uniform and consistently mentioned New South Wales (or Tasmania for the Launceston paper), but a few mentions in the text (probably from other editors) were less obvious.

I found 23 suspect references to The Australian using these searches: [2] [3] [4] [5]. (One comes up blank: no one has made that particular mistake.) They won't find prose such as Joe Scribbler wrote for The Australian in 1826 but should pick up most errors in references including Trove. From there it's an easy step to fix the links with JWB (or AWB, which has more functions but won't run on my PC).

The MPs could be done with JWB but 2240 is a lot of button pushing and should probably get consensus first (which sounds like a formality in this case). The best way forward for that one may be a bot request. Certes (talk) 10:05, 25 April 2019 (UTC)

P.S. it looks as if we're not the only ones getting confused: [6]! Certes (talk)

Had a laugh at the postcript thanks. I was happy that not all of the errors were mine & even happier that it was easier than I feared - I hadn't realised you could perform a powerful search like that. Gaining consensus is always a sensible suggestion, especially if it is going to affect a whole bunch of pages. Apart from anything else people often come up with refinements that improve the implementation. I had heard of AWB (& now JWB) but had been holding off on it because of (1) the need to learn it & (2) the risk of borking things up in a dramatic way. It sounds like it is probably time to learn - any suggestions on a good overview to start with ? Find bruce (talk) 11:21, 25 April 2019 (UTC)

@Find bruce: If you use Microsoft Windows then go for AWB. If not then try AWB (and come back and help me out if you succeed!) or fall back to JWB which has fewer features but works everywhere. You do need to request permission first (that section applies to JWB too).

The interface is fairly intuitive. Simple replacements are easy but to do complex things you'll want to learn regular expressions which can find and replace text that matches a pattern like "Telegraph (some text that varies) Tasmania". I would take it easy at first, edit one page checking both the diff and the preview then look at the diff by browsing Wikipedia after you've saved it, then speed up once you're comfortable with the controls. Certes (talk) 11:52, 25 April 2019 (UTC)

@Find bruce: Thanks for fixing The Australian. Is there any way to improve Trove to help editors get such links right in future? I've fixed plenty of links recently which went to a different paper, a newspaper SIA or the topic the paper was named for. Apart from the various Daily Telegraphs, the main Australian fixes were:

The Mercury → The Mercury (Hobart)
Southern Cross → The Southern Cross (South Australia)
Sun-Herald → The Sun-Herald
The Telegraph → Telegraph (Brisbane)
Tribune → Tribune (Australian newspaper)

I've not listed cases from the rest of the world or the few obscure papers with one stray link such as The Evening Telegraph → The Evening Telegraph (Charters Towers). By the way, if you're doing semi-automated edits, beware of tennis articles. Old Australian newspapers are a popular source for player rankings correctly attributed to the (London) Daily Telegraph. Certes (talk) 13:02, 26 April 2019 (UTC)

I was chatting to user Kerry Raymond thinking she may know who to contact - it turns out among her many hats she was in contact with them previously, so she is already on to it. It also turns out some of the issues are also arising from wikipedias end. It would be good for us to be able to work with Trove because its a fabulous resource. I will mention it to Kerry & keep you in the loop. Find bruce (talk) 13:16, 26 April 2019 (UTC)

I am starting to get the hang of AWB (I use windows so no problems there) - it's not exactly intuitive, but that's probably a good thing. I've been thinking about the Trove issue & think that between us we should be able to come up with a decent workaround. As you say Trove references are uniform, so for the most part a simple find & replace works - eg (inside template) [[Tribune]] → [[Tribune (Australian newspaper)|Tribune]] if "nla.gov.au" is inside template. I am happy to regularly run an AWB fix for these issues, but I am looking for help in three ways

I am hoping @Kerry Raymond: will be able to give me a list of the links trove is using, and what they should be using,
I'm not sure about the best way to make the list of pages to check. Individually it is easy enough to make a list on what links to eg Tribune, but I am not sure how to make a list where nla.gov.au appears on the page - I thought Wiki search (text) for "nla.gov.au" would work, but it only comes up with 1,000 pages & there are way more links than that
Semi automating the disambiguation where Trove links to the same page - this can wait until I have identified the specific pages.

Thanks Find bruce (talk) 01:41, 10 May 2019 (UTC)

@Find bruce: I don't have a list of the links Trove uses for the newspapers. I do have a current list of all the newspapers title (extracted from [7]), which, when sorted, shows us that (for example) there are a number of newspapers called Tribune available on Trove and hence potentially needing disambiguation:

Tribune (Hobart, Tas. : 1876 - 1879)
Tribune (Melbourne, Vic. : 1914 - 1918)
Tribune (Philippines : 1932 - 1945)
Tribune (SA edition, published in Sydney : 1951 - 1964)
Tribune (Sydney, NSW : 1939 - 1976)

but I think we have enough info in the citations to tell them apart, e.g.

{{cite news |url=http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article198301309 |title=Advertising |newspaper=[[Tribune]] |volume=XIV, |issue=1142 |location=Tasmania, Australia |date=3 July 1876 |accessdate=10 May 2019 |page=1 |via=National Library of Australia}}
{{cite news |url=http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article154656645 |title=Advertising |newspaper=[[Tribune]] |volume=XIII, |issue=730 |location=Victoria, Australia |date=3 January 1914 |accessdate=10 May 2019 |page=1 |via=National Library of Australia}}

shows the location is different for the two newspapers and clearly the Tasmania ones are the Hobart Tribune and the Victoria ones are the Melbourne Tribune. So we should be able to use the location to disambiguate between the citations, provided we don't have two newspapers of the same name in the same state. If there are two newspapers with the same title in the same state, most likely they did not co-exist and that we could disambiguate them by date. So I think if we know we have a newspaper that needs to be disambiguated, then we can probably seek out and fix them in AWB (famous last words). I'm doing some other AWB work at the moment, but shortly I will experiment. Kerry (talk) 05:44, 10 May 2019 (UTC)

As it turns out, these two newspapers don't appear to be cited here on Wikipedia apart from this User Talk page, which is probably just as well as we don't appear to have Wikipedia articles for them to be disambiguated to, but let's assume they are Tribune (Hobart) and Tribune (Melbourne) for the sake of the experiment. Certainly this AWB regular-expression pattern works:

(\{\{cite news \|url=http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article[^}]*newspaper=)\[\[Tribune\]\]([^}]*location=Tasmania, Australia)

with this replacement :

$1[[Tribune (Hobart)]]$2

and the rule for the Melbourne Tribune follows the same pattern (apart from Tasmania/Victoria, Hobart/Melbourne)

So it's quite viable to develop a series of AWB scripts to disambiguate the Trove newspaper citations, given they do have a very regular (in both senses of that word) structure. Kerry (talk) 07:15, 10 May 2019 (UTC)

While it would be best of all to fix the problem back at base at Trove, the problem is that the digitisation of the newspapers is somewhat distributed among many Australian libraries and they are *supposed* to provide the anme of the Wikipedia article for that newspaper (creating it if necessary), see Wikipedia:GLAM/State Library of New South Wales/Newspaper project procedures as an example of how they are supposed to go about it in New South Wales. But many libraries don't seem to bother doing that and just provide the name of the newspaper as they know it. In some cases, the issue is caused by subsequent renaming of the newspaper article on Wikipedia, but I think the bulk of the problem appears to come from the contributing libraries themselves. I try to write stubs for the redlinked newspapers that I notice turning up in Trove citations in Wikipedia articles, but I only do it when I see it. I don't know of any easy way to seek out all the redlinked newspaper articles that appear in Trove citations in order to tackle the task more comprehensively. If we can compile a reasonably complete list of which newspapers are not being correctly linked and what the linked article should be, I can certainly approach Trove about fixing it, but on past experience, they will delay it to their next major refresh of the code base (which for cost cutting reasons happens infrequently -- the last one was a few years ago). Of course that would not fix the existing citations, but I think we can sort those out with AWB. Having dropped into this conversation part way through, I am not sure I have a clear sense of what you guys are trying to achieve in the short/long term and to what extent I can be of assistance. Kerry (talk) 07:15, 10 May 2019 (UTC)

I think we've achieved our short-term aim of fixing links which led to either a list of newspapers or the wrong newspaper. The long-term aim is for future links to get the right destination first time more often. One step towards that is aligning Trove's list of links with Wikipedia's article titles. There are other things we could do at the Wikipedia end, such as making titles like The Tribune and The Daily Telegraph lead to disambiguation pages, so new links would be flagged as needing attention. However, they may have disadvantages and would require discussion. Certes (talk) 11:15, 10 May 2019 (UTC)

Disambiguating more newspaper titles

@Find bruce and Kerry Raymond: I've found a method for discovering and fixing more wrong links but it's labour intensive and may need help from someone with a knowledge of Australian newspaper history. I'm working through the list at https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/?q=# picking out by eye the titles which clash with Wikipedia articles on another topic, and searching for articles which may need attention. As an example, the hits beginning with A are:

Advertiser (search): three articles, all for a Hurstbridge, Victoria paper which has no Wikipedia article under that name but I suspect may be a successor to the Evelyn Observer. If so then we could create a redirect such as Advertiser (Hurstbridge) and link to that.
Advocate (search): 13 articles, all for The Advocate (Melbourne). Easy fix.

plus several false alarms such as Alfred and Arrow which turned out not to have any bad links. As well as fixing existing links, this should produce a mapping of newspaper titles to Wikipedia articles which Trove might import in its next release.

Does that sound like a useful line to pursue? Certes (talk) 20:16, 10 May 2019 (UTC)

@Find bruce: I have the complete list of newspapers on Trove. We could establish a spreadsheet with 3 columns, the first with the name of the newspaper as Trove calls it, the second with the Wikipedia link auto-generated in a citation for that newspaper, the third with the Wikipedia link that should be used in a citation for that newspaper. Where column 2 and 3 differ is where we have our problems. I can create that "spreadsheet" with the first column as a table on Wikipedia or we can share it as a spreadsheet via Google Drive or similar or whatever other way you like. Keeping it as a true spreadsheet makes some tasks easier to perform compared with maintaining it as a wiki table (e.g. filtering to see which entries haven't been complete, comparing the 2nd and 3rd column for differences, sharing it with the Trove pople), but if we want it on-wiki, then it has to be a table. Obviously if it is off-wiki, we can link to it from the wiki. Either way, I suggest we host it the table or the link to the spreadsheet over in WikiProject Australia space (since this is obviously the community most invested in the Trove issues). What do you think? Kerry (talk) 00:27, 11 May 2019 (UTC)

An advantage of a table on-wiki is that we can see visually as redlinks where we have newspapers without corresponding Wikipedia article. Kerry (talk) 00:30, 11 May 2019 (UTC)

A little experimentation suggests that so long as we keep the on-wiki table simple (no merged cells etc), I can copy it out into Excel without too much problem, so maybe let's do it on-wiki in the first instance? 00:35, 11 May 2019 (UTC)

More experimentation shows me that the table is too massive for keeping on-wiki (there are 1446 newspapers digitised on Trove). I tried to create it as an on-wiki table but it fails (times-out) every time I try to save it. So I don't think a single on-wiki table is going to work for us. We would have to break it up over a number of separate pages, say starting letter A to Z or similar, which then loses a lot of benefits as the clashes might occur across the seperate tables but would be harder to spot. Kerry (talk) 00:49, 11 May 2019 (UTC)

It seems we are all thinking along the same lines, short term is fixing current links, longer term is avoiding the errors. @Kerry Raymond: Thanks for clarifying that a spreadsheet is probably best for the mapping exercise. Manually checking where Trove links to will take some work for the 1446 titles. We should be able to narrow it down to 4 groups (1) trove links to correct article (2) incorrect links that are or can be fixed by a redirect (miscapitalisation, alternate name etc) (3) redlinks, many of which will be can be fixed by a redirect (alternate name etc), such as the Advertiser (Hurstbridge) that Certes notes above & (4) incorrect links that will need to be fixed, on WP & hopefully via trove. In terms of reward for effort, I am sure many of the titles are not currently linked on wikipedia which puts them much lower down on the priority list. I agree with Kerry's idea of trying to recruit some more people from Wikiproject Australia Find bruce (talk) 03:09, 11 May 2019 (UTC)

yes, I am conscious of the boredom factor in dealing with 1446 (and growing) entries. I think it may be possible automate some of it. "Never send a man to do a machine's job" Kerry (talk) 05:01, 11 May 2019 (UTC)

This SPARQL query lists Australian periodicals known to Wikidata, with their Wikipedia article titles, Trove IDs and basic information: [8] (Click the white triangle in a blue square to run it.) There will be some errors and omissions, notably papers without Wikipedia articles, but it could be a useful starting point. It may also be worth contacting editors who produced a similar spreadsheet for U.S. newspapers: see WT:WikiProject_Newspapers#Is_there_a_spreadsheet_for_this_project?. Certes (talk) 11:15, 11 May 2019 (UTC)

Could the problem be that some Trove archives are simply not associated with a Wikipedia page, and in this case the Trove title is used as a Wikipedia title? For example, https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/title/10 is linked to The Mercury (Hobart) so that article gets linked correctly, but https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/title/1347 has no Wikipedia link so perhaps the title The Daily Telegraph is used for linking, and it happens to hit an article on a different topic. Certes (talk) 10:39, 12 May 2019 (UTC)

@Find bruce and Kerry Raymond: Do we want to take this further or shall I just tidy up the cases I've found? If we want to do more then I have two lists:

460 newspapers on Wikipedia with 260 Trove IDs, according to Wikidata
1333 newspapers on Trove with 1447 Trove IDs, according to Trove, with no information on Wikipedia article titles

I think the next step would be to get Trove's opinion of which Trove IDs correspond to which Wikipedia article. I could write a simple program to screen-scrape the data but it would mean loading 1447 Trove pages. Even if done slowly, that might upset our friends at Trove (or even get my IP blocked). Trove may be able to supply the information in one simple file but I don't think that's online. Then we could correlate everything by Trove ID, sort out any discrepancies and fill some gaps. Alternatively, perhaps we just want to tidy up Wikipedia's bad links, which at a guess might be 500 bad links for 50 different papers, and call it a day. Any thoughts? Certes (talk) 13:51, 17 May 2019 (UTC)

I talked a little with @Find bruce about this: and I am not sure where we are at. I think we all think have having a spreadsheet that captures the relevant information would be worthwhile, and the basis for automating the fixes, but I think the number of newspapers and the amount of manual work likely to be involved is a bit discouraging. I might try an email to the Trove team and see if we can get what we want from them; it would certainly save us a lot of work. Kerry (talk) 05:22, 24 May 2019 (UTC)

Australian newspaper results

@Find bruce and Kerry Raymond: I've worked through Trove's list of titles checking suspicous looking titles. For example, I looked at Advertiser but not Williamstown Advertiser which is unlikely to be an article on the wrong topic. I also skipped links to disambiguation pages, as we already have good procedures for finding and fixing these as they arise. (I did check The Telegraph, which subsequently changed from a SIA to a dab.) I've fixed the links which proved to be wrong. Here's a table of changes.

Trove ID	Title	Wikilink	count
148	Advertiser	Advertiser (Hurstbridge)	3
792	Advocate	The Advocate (Melbourne)	13
371	Bunyip	The Bunyip	13
291	Chronicle	The Chronicle (South Australia)	19
1188*,1228	Construction	Construction and Local Government Journal	1
1161	Critic	The Critic (Adelaide)	6
858	Critic	The Critic (Hobart)	3
1058	The Daily Mail	Daily Mail (Brisbane)	16
742	Daily Telegraph	The Daily Telegraph (Launceston)	~60
1296,1297, 1347	Daily Telegraph	The Daily Telegraph (Sydney)	~300
975	The Evening Star	The Evening Star (Boulder, Western Australia)	7
395,396,407	Herald	The Herald (Adelaide)	?
319	Leader	The Leader (Melbourne)	14
10=	The Mercury	The Mercury (Hobart)	33
253	Mirror	The Mirror (Western Australia)	5
78=	Morning Chronicle	Morning Chronicle (Australian newspaper)	3
461	News	The News (Adelaide)	23
258	The Northern Miner	The Northern Miner (Queensland)	73
824,825,841	Quiz	Quiz (Adelaide newspaper)	3
499	Referee	The Referee (newspaper)	10
89=	The Register	The Register (Adelaide)	8
310	Richmond Guardian	Richmond Guardian [unlinked]	5
826	Southern Cross	The Southern Cross (South Australia)	3
1170	Sport	The Sport (Adelaide newspaper)	6
39=	Sun-Herald	The Sun-Herald	~10
-	Sunday Sun	Sunday Sun (Queensland)	1
1181	The Sunday Sun	The Sunday Sun (Sydney)	1
-	The Sunday Telegraph	The Sunday Telegraph (Sydney)	~20
505=	Sunday Times	The Sunday Times (Sydney)	48
840	The Telegraph	Telegraph (Brisbane)	~12
1002=	Tribune	Tribune (Australian newspaper)	~25
942	Truth	Truth (Brisbane newspaper)	~12
982	Truth	Truth (Perth newspaper)	~6
699=	Truth	Truth (Sydney newspaper)	~15
891	The Week	The Week (Brisbane)	33
407	Weekly Herald	Weekly Herald (Adelaide)	3
426=	Western Herald	Western Herald (Bourke)	18
191	Worker	The Worker (Brisbane)	11
861	The World	The World (Hobart)	4

- not listed on Trove

= Trove already links to the correct enwiki article

* Trove already links to a different enwiki article

~ estimate; total is larger but includes non-Australian papers

? already covered by another editor; I fixed a few recently added links

I think I've done all I can for now. Trove may be interested in adding the missing links above to their title pages. I would be happy to help reconcile the mapping from Trove to enwiki articles if we can get a list of Trove's links to Wikipedia or confirmation that it's ok to screen-scrape such a list from their website. Certes (talk) 09:56, 28 May 2019 (UTC)

Thanks for your efforts Certes - the list is a lot shorter than I feared. Most of the issues I had come across were miscapitalisations or alternative/former names which are easily cured with a redirect. I will check against your list and see if I have any to add. In terms of scraping, I am asking from ignorance, but wonder if access to the Trove API would help ? Find bruce (talk) 12:06, 28 May 2019 (UTC)

I've had a quick look at the API and it looks useful for many purposes but doesn't seem to return a Wikipedia article name. There are Wikipedia URLs for "works" but these seem to reflect the topic rather than the source. (So an Age article about Flinders Street might give me the article name for Flinders Street, Melbourne but not for The Age.) I have retrieved JSON for a few papers with articles but it doesn't include the article name. I also see that some Wikipedia articles use {{Trove newspaper}}; these could also be applied consistently if we get a definitive mapping from article to Trove ID. Certes (talk) 12:25, 28 May 2019 (UTC)

Hello

Please examine Special:Contributions/37.26.148.208. 37.26.146.192 (talk) 21:00, 30 April 2019 (UTC)

Yes.

Thanks for the notice. Another editor has blocked that address for a month. The admins are aware of this type of unwanted contribution and are discussing solutions. Certes (talk) 23:12, 30 April 2019 (UTC)

Ongole mandal

Thanks for info on Guntur Urban mandal, I'll improve its references. Also, please check the page Ongole district, former district. What should be done with it?--Vin09 (talk) 12:24, 1 May 2019 (UTC)

@Vin09: I'm not an expert on Indian divisions but I think Ongole district is exactly right as it is. The district seems to have a new name with no significant change of boundary etc., so there's only one topic there. The article has the current name (Prakasam district) and the former name redirects to it. Certes (talk) 12:47, 1 May 2019 (UTC)

Ok, Ill follow your advice. Thanks for your valuable information. Cheers!--Vin09 (talk) 13:00, 1 May 2019 (UTC)

@Vin09:, @Certes: Thank you for your contributions to Andhra Pradesh mandal articles. It seems like you got adequate reference to move Guntur mandal to Guntur Urban mandal. But, all mandals in Andhra Pradesh are named as per 2011 Census of India. This can also be seen in Nellore district, which got an official name: Sri Potti Sreeramulu Nellore. We can change the name to Urban mandal as per context once we got Census of India references. If you got any thoughts on Indian mandal articles, please share with us.—IM3847 (talk) 07:14, 2 May 2019 (UTC)

@IM3847 and Vin09: I have no opinion on the best title for that article. I just think that it should continue to exist as an article, rather than being a redirect to a disambiguation page. Certes (talk) 10:01, 2 May 2019 (UTC)

Fine.--Vin09 (talk) 10:04, 2 May 2019 (UTC)

Template:UsersSpeak

Hi, I see that you have changed the UserSpeak template code a while back: the problem is that now languages that don't have a specific code, such as Lebanese Arabic, can't be displayed. Is there any way I can customize the text (both the code on the left and the language after the phrase "These users can speak")? Nehme₁₄₉₉ (talk) 16:54, 2 May 2019 (UTC)

@Nehme1499: I've added a new, optional parameter, so you can now use |link=Lebanese Arabic. There is also a parameter (which you may not need) to change the text displayed as a wikilink, e.g. |text=the variety of Arabic spoken in Lebanon. Certes (talk) 17:57, 2 May 2019 (UTC)

Ok perfect, thanks! Btw, wouldn't it be better if the template page had a documentation explaining the parameters? Nehme₁₄₉₉ (talk) 18:03, 2 May 2019 (UTC)

Yes, I'm working on that. My previous change didn't add any parameters to what others had written but it does need an explanation. Certes (talk) 18:04, 2 May 2019 (UTC)

Nomination of Portal:Adele for deletion

There is currently a discussion taking place as to whether Portal:Adele should be deleted at MfD.
You are being notified because you were a participant in the previous nomination discussion.
Thank you, –MJL ‐Talk‐^☖ 21:02, 24 May 2019 (UTC)

Orthodoxy in North Korea listed at Redirects for discussion

An editor has asked for a discussion to address the redirect Orthodoxy in North Korea. Since you had some involvement with the Orthodoxy in North Korea redirect, you might want to participate in the redirect discussion if you wish to do so. Thryduulf (talk) 17:28, 25 May 2019 (UTC)

Nomination for deletion of Template:Road marker UK A2

Template:Road marker UK A2 has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the template's entry on the Templates for discussion page. Imzadi 1979 → 02:20, 27 May 2019 (UTC)

Links

Thanks for you're fixing of incoming links, I see you just recently fixed quite a few Reading links for Berkshire among the many others you've fixed. How many bad links can you find for Kettering and Mansfield? I fixed 1 for Kettering last year but I only did that by going to the what links here and searching for "Ohio" in the title however presumably JWB allows you to find the links with other text too, that is to say links to Kettering that also have "Ohio" on the page somewhere. I think that the town in Northamptonshire is primary for the name since the place in Ohio is merely a suburb and the normal practices of including the state is probably enough. However I don't think that's the case with Mansfield since there are a number of other large places with that name. Crouch, Swale (talk) 12:35, 28 May 2019 (UTC)

@Crouch, Swale: JWB doesn't do searching but Wikipedia's built-in search is powerful enough for this job. The edits you linked from September were from a database dump where I identified pairs of widely linked articles Foo and Foo, Bar. Kettering and Mansfield didn't cross my threshold (500 links to each) but I've had a look at them. Kettering was easy; distinguishing the Mansfields took some research. I'm currently fixing sporting links such as footballers employed by the arsenal. Whilst looking for failures to link Reading F.C., I stumbled across several links intended for Reading, Berkshire. That place didn't come up in last year's search because Reading was a dab until last November, so incoming links created before then were reported automatically and got fixed as they appeared. Now the literacy article has the title, bad links are harder to spot and will pile up.

I should probably liaise more with other editors who do similar things. I'm active in WikiProject Disambiguation but this isn't quite their thing: the links I'm fixing are unambiguous but wrong. I also worked with WikiProject Red Link Recovery but the links aren't red, just the wrong shade of blue. Certes (talk) 13:30, 28 May 2019 (UTC)

Thanks, yes I was surprised to see a few even for the Australian Mansfield but indeed that one is quite ambiguous. One day I hope to see if I can use JWB myself but interestingly look at the links for Kenton when that was turned into a DAB, there were 69 for London (which was formerly PT), 9 for Devon, 4 for Newcastle upon Tyne, 2 for Suffolk but only 1 for Ohio even though the Ohio one is clearly more important than the English ones. Similarly for Somerton there were 4 for Somerton, Oxfordshire and 1 for Somerton, Victoria but there were none for the pop 14,287 Somerton, Arizona or the pop 33,931 Somerton, Philadelphia (the Somerset one is only pop 4,697). Alone those lines would you support making Arsenal a DAB? Crouch, Swale (talk) 13:42, 28 May 2019 (UTC)

@Crouch, Swale: Americans tend to say "Kettering, Ohio" even when it's not ambiguous, and doubly so when there are other Mansfields within the U.S. to confuse with theirs. Many of the errors I fixed last year were where the U.S. place was at the basename (or a primary redirect to it), such as Lincolnshire articles linking to Boston. I started an essay here and made a full list of the Foo (bar) parenthetical qualifiers here but never got round to doing similar paperwork for the mainly geographical comma-separated pairs.

I'm not sure about Arsenal. It's in a growing category where there is an encyclopedic primary topic but, unless you work in an armoury, means something different in everyday life. I still see consensus to force-feed the readers the topic that's good for them, rather than allowing them to fritter their time away on the populist ephemera they came for, but that may change. Certes (talk) 14:29, 28 May 2019 (UTC)

Useful list: Locations in the United States with an English name. Of course it excludes plenty of cases such as Perth but it's a start. Certes (talk) 17:47, 28 May 2019 (UTC)

Yes I agree Kettering isn't that ambiguous since the only other major one isn't even a separate settlement so should be OK. Indeed for Perth obviously that gets many bad links like Birmingham and Canterbury do. Crouch, Swale (talk) 18:57, 28 May 2019 (UTC)

@Crouch, Swale: List done; about 600 articles. Several articles proved to be about non-UK settlements (Boston, MA) or other topics (Rye cereal), some had incoming links not about a place (Epsom Derby), and a few fell into both camps (Duke of Wellington). Sadly I don't think we can do much to automate the process ongoing. I'll revisit links to places one day, but for now it's probably time to fix links to some other field. Certes (talk) 15:23, 4 June 2019 (UTC)

Thanks, yes I see the Rye article had quite a few bad links for the East Sussex town compared to some of the US places but that's probably partly due to editors used to seeing US places including the state, see User:Crouch, Swale/NC v PT#Examples of incoming links as examples of bad links, notice that for Somerton there weren't any links for the Arizonian city. Indeed yes it shouldn't be done fully automatically but the semi-automatic tools are helpful. Interestingly I fixed the links to Danbury which wasn't moved and out of the 50 mainspace links I found 39 that were indeed for the Connecticut city, 10 for the Essex village and 1 for Danbury, Wisconsin. Crouch, Swale (talk) 17:10, 4 June 2019 (UTC)

I looked at Danbury and found no errors. I didn't exhaustively check every link: York alone has over 5000. I semi-automatically produced lists of suspicious links which I checked manually; about 2/3 of them needed changing. Some errors will remain because my filter incorrectly passed them as credible, but it may not be worth the effort of finding them. I also ignored links to dabs, which show up in the usual reports. Certes (talk) 17:30, 4 June 2019 (UTC)

There aren't any links in the mainspace to Danbury because I disambiguated them all on the 2nd. Crouch, Swale (talk) 17:35, 4 June 2019 (UTC)

Thanks for fixing typos

Hi Certes,

I greatly appreciate your dedicated work on AWB cleanup and would love to hear from you about my latest project: User:Uziel302/Typos, where I upload lists of high probability typos and with a script I wrote I correct the real typos in one click. No need to set up AWB setting for each replacement, and if the replacement is inaccurate, you can put alternative replacement in a simple popup.

Any feedback is much appreciated.

Thanks, Uziel302 (talk) 17:40, 2 June 2019 (UTC)

@Uziel302: Thanks for producing this. It looks very useful and I see you've already received helpful feedback elsewhere. I mainly fix typos as a side-effect of other JWB tasks such as mending wikilinks, but I'll certainly keep a note of the script for use next time I find a set of articles to correct. Certes (talk) 08:59, 3 June 2019 (UTC)

Ruth_Deech,_Baroness_Deech

I am inviting you to contribute to resolution of dispute on the page you one edited. Talk:Ruth_Deech,_Baroness_Deech#Josef_Fraenkel Cautious (talk) 19:45, 2 June 2019 (UTC)

@Cautious: Thanks but I've no helpful insights into that subject. My edit was simply to divert a wikilink to the correct article. Certes (talk) 23:06, 2 June 2019 (UTC)

Revert of changing Rivers to a disambiguation page

I do not think that Rivers should redirect to River. I believe that Rivers should redirect to Rivers (disambiguation) or simply replace it. Here are my reasons:

Just because "similar change previously reverted" does not mean that the change is incorrect. Perhaps nobody questioned the change as I am now doing.
To have a link for "Rivers" is not particularly helpful. Everybody knows what a river is. The only time such a link might be sensible is in a discussion of, say, topography, in a statement such as, "streams and Springs should not be grouped with rivers in analyzing the soils of the region." One should simply link to the singular form as I have done here. The whole idea of having plural nouns redirect to their singular form just adds an unnecessary level of complexity to WP IMHO.
The most common reason that somebody might have the word Rivers in an article is because it is the name of something. There are many things named Rivers. Almost never does a page need a link to the plural of river.
A person who can't remember what province Rivers, Manitoba is in, or the first name of songwriter Johnny Rivers, or the first name of football player Derek Rivers, and so on for the many other people with the last name Rivers, will be frustrated if they type in Rivers. They simply get taken to the page River which is absolutely no help.
Somebody looking for a person named Rivers is taken to river and may not even realize that a disambiguation page for Rivers exists. Most users are not sophisticated enough to type in the words Rivers (disambiguation). WP should try to help people, not hide things.
On the page Category:Redirects from plurals we find the statement, "When editing Wikipedia and using wiki markup, in many cases it is preferable to add the plural directly after the link (example: links)." I could not agree more.--Toploftical (talk) 19:11, 12 June 2019 (UTC)

@Toploftical: Those are all good points, and consensus can change. I suggest inviting a wider audience by starting a RM to get other opinions and perhaps raise points we may not have considered. To be honest I'm not sure which way I'd !vote; I'd want to read the arguments first. Generally I support disambiguation pages being at the base name, as it avoids taking readers to the wrong article and reduces the number of bad wikilinks. In this case I think "rivers" has a primary topic (waterways) but it's not clear-cut and similar cases are split between dabs and redirects from plural. Certes (talk) 23:05, 12 June 2019 (UTC)

@Certes: Thank you for the response. I do want to use something like RM but I am afraid the technical details have utterly defeated me. First of all, I am not sure exactly on what page the request should appear–-on the page Rivers I suppose. I tried variations of {subst:RMassist| Rivers | Rivers (disambiguation) | reason = reason for move} but frankly I do not know what I am doing. I really tried.

What I want to do is to start a discussion about making the redirect go to Rivers (disambiguation) as I tried to do. I am not sure how RM applies because it is not really changing a page name; it involves changing the kind of page it is.

Could you do me a huge favor and insert the necessary wikicode on the page Rivers. Once I see it, I will add my remarks as above. Thanks.--Toploftical (talk) 13:42, 13 June 2019 (UTC)

@Toploftical: Done at Talk:Rivers (disambiguation)#Requested move 14 June 2019. Certes (talk) 10:10, 14 June 2019 (UTC)

Just to clarify: keeping Rivers as a redirect but changing its target to Rivers (disambiguation) would leave a malplaced disambiguation page. We would then need to swap the two, leaving Rivers as the dab and Rivers (disambiguation) as a redirect to it. The net effect would be to move Rivers (disambiguation) to Rivers, which is what I've suggested in the RM. Certes (talk) 23:51, 14 June 2019 (UTC)

Newspaper lists are actually set index articles

Hi, Certes. You recently turned three set index articles into disambiguation pages: Daily Journal, Daily Post, and Daily Record. SIAs tend to look like dabs, but they are quite different in the way they are treated; SIAs are actually articles, while dabs (as you know) are navigation guides. Their differences are elucidated at WP:SETNOTDAB. I will be reverting these three pages to their SIA version, and just wanted you to know why. Cheers! — Gorthian (talk) 03:55, 30 June 2019 (UTC)

@Gorthian: Thanks for the explanation. Until last year these pages were tagged as {{disambiguation}} and they are still in dab format. A few weeks ago, I contacted the editor who removed the dab tags and got no objections. Such pages are magnets for bad wikilinks where editors write, for example, Daily Record intending Daily Record (Scotland). (I've recently fixed several hundred such bad links, and other editors have helped too.) WP:WikiProject Disambiguation has a comprehensive set of tools for detecting and fixing such errors, including notifying editors automatically, but they only cover dabs and not SIAs. Do you have a process for maintaining links to SIAs? Certes (talk) 08:37, 30 June 2019 (UTC)

I don’t know of any tools that would help with misguided links to SIAs. But since they are a form of list article, links to SIAs are perfectly permissible, as are references, red links without corresponding blue links, etc.

For me, the defining difference is that the list article includes only one type of item; in this case, newspapers. Daily Post is a common name for newspapers. An SIA called Daily Post could also be titled List of newspapers named Daily Post. If there were something else entirely, like a song called “Daily Post”, then you might need Daily Post (disambiguation). The fact that there are unlike items called by the same name is the original raison d’être for dab pages. — Gorthian (talk) 20:32, 30 June 2019 (UTC)

@Gorthian: The problem with this discussion is that we're both right. The page is a valid dab and also a valid SIA. The principle of putting the readers first doesn't help us decide, as the formats serve equally well; the only visible difference is the boilerplate footer. In such cases I've felt free to use technical convenience as a tie-break, but I think there's a more general conversation to be had about which is preferable when either will do the job.

To address one specific point: yes, links to SIAs are perfectly permissible, as long as they refer to the entries as a group. I could write Daily Post is a popular name for newspapers or add a hatnote "For similarly named newspapers, see Daily Post, just as I could – adding (disambiguation) – if it were a dab. But 99% of wikilinks aren't like that; they are saying that someone worked for a particular Daily Post or citing the Daily Record (Scotland) as a reference, like this one which appeared a few minutes ago. Certes (talk) 12:49, 1 July 2019 (UTC)