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To do

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Copyediting project

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A few days ago, I decided to copyedit a bunch of your articles for A-class and WP:FAC, because I'm writing copyediting software and I want it to be useful for more than just my home wikiproject, Military History. I figured I'd get up to speed on WP:TROP again, add some things to the software that your wikiproject finds useful, provide some support for using the software, then move on. I could still do that, but looking over the three articles I've done so far, the things that software can handle right now aren't going to do you guys a lot of good, so I'm thinking about how to make it better.

There isn't any good copyediting software anywhere, which is why I'm trying to get something started. I started by submitting the sentence "Kittens is coot." to all the major grammar-checking packages (MS Word, Grammarly, etc.) ... only Ginger found a mistake in that sentence, and Ginger isn't a very popular product. That means none of them are checking reliably for singular vs. plural agreement, rare words, improbable strings of words, words confused for other words ... basically, they're worthless. The good news is that Google and other companies are getting much better at identifying parts of speech and sentence structure ... I can't use that right now, but soon, I hope. So my copyediting advice falls into three piles: advice that I can automate now, advice I'll be able to automate in the near future, and other stuff.

I don't think the automated stuff has to be perfect, with no false positives or false negatives, to be useful. I'll give just one example to illustrate from this edit I made yesterday to Cyclone Forrest (1992): I deleted "spared Bangladesh of" because the same thing was said more clearly and specifically later in the sentence, but if I hadn't deleted it, I would have changed "of" to "from"; "spared" takes the preposition "from". When Google can tell me if an "of" phrase is modifying a "spared", then my software will give reliable advice on the point whenever Google is reliable. But for now, I can have the software check for, say, "spared" followed within four words by "of" but not by "from". When the software gets a hit, it highlights the offending word(s), and when you hover over the highlighted word, you get a tip: " 'was spared from' something, not 'was spared of' something". If it's a false positive, for instance "The villain spared one of the two children", then it's just two seconds wasted out of your life (if you already knew it) ... and I'll try to add a feature to let you delete that tip with one click from your personal style database, if you like. If you did make the mistake and the software didn't catch it (because the "of" came more than four words after "spared"), then that's one more thing your copyeditor will have to catch before FAC ... but the point is to reduce the copyeditor's workload, not eliminate it. And besides, if you make the mistake once, you'll make it again sometime, and the next time, the software will probably catch it, and then you'll get the tip.

So, to pull this all together, I wanted to re-learn your standards and leave you with some software, but I think it's going to be a while before that's much help. But I'll do more copyediting and trade notes with people interested in copyediting TROP articles, if you guys will give me feedback I need to help make the software better. Does this sound like something you'd be interested in? - Dank (push to talk) 22:53, 8 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

P.S. The tooltip I'm using now won't give multiple messages efficiently, but I'll give you guys some code in the morning that you can copy into your userspace to see what it looks like. - Dank (push to talk) 03:47, 9 July 2014 (UTC) [reply]
Got it ... you can see what it looks like by adding the snippet at User:Dank/wishywashy.js to your vector.js file (or monobook.js, if you use that skin). After you purge (Ctrl-Shift-R in Firefox), the words wishy and washy will show up in bold on any Wikipedia page. Hover over the bolded text for style advice. - Dank (push to talk) 19:14, 9 July 2014 (UTC) (Don't need the sample code anymore.) - Dank (push to talk) 18:10, 10 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I'm converting my stuff to use functions that are already present in the Mediawiki software. First script is up, at User:Dank/Scripts. See its talk page for a description. It has just the words from the 4 TROP articles I copyedited this week that tend to be problematic for most writers. Feel free to add or delete words or edit the popup messages after you copy it to your vector.js page (or monobook.js, if you use that skin). - Dank (push to talk) 16:08, 10 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Okay, that script is done. I'll be able to do a lot more with that when the bug is fixed and I can search for more than just single words. I threw in "UTC", which isn't problematic, but I notice people are forgetting the colons recommended by WP:MOSTIME. Check it out and let me know if it's helpful, guys. - Dank (push to talk) 22:10, 11 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/2013 Atlantic hurricane season/archive1

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We're talking about what the word "season" means over there. According to List of off-season Atlantic hurricanes, the 2013 December hurricane is an "off-season" hurricane, and I'm not sure if something can be both off-season and in a season at the same time, for any definition of the word "season", but there are several ways to fudge it. You might go with something like "The hurricane season is generally considered to run from June 1 to November 30, but storms occurring before June or in December are generally included in lists of the season's hurricanes." Or: "The rare May and December storms are generally included in that year's hurricane season." - Dank (push to talk) 22:44, 9 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

How about these? "The Atlantic hurricane season tradionally begins on June 1 and ends on November 30; Atlantic hurricanes rarely form during the rest of the year.", or "According to NOAA, the hurricane season officially [or conventionally] runs from June 1 to November 30, since Atlantic hurricanes rarely form during the rest of the year." - Dank (push to talk) 14:06, 10 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]
The hurricane season is defined as the time of the year where tropical cyclones are more statistically and meteorologically likely to happen, but it is not unheard of to have storms form outside those bounds. I would prefer, "According to NOAA, the hurricane season officially runs from June 1 to November 30, but storms occurring before June or in December are included in lists of the season's hurricanes." Of course that doesn't address the real outliers, but let's not throw rocks at this hornets nest again. Titoxd(?!? - cool stuff) 18:03, 10 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Works for me. - Dank (push to talk) 18:16, 10 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

"The" before RSMC abbreviations?

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I'm not exactly sure where to post this, but can there be some sort of concrete guideline about this? I've seen uses of "was named by PAGASA" and "was named by the PAGASA" used inconsistently throughout articles, and there's also instances of "by JMA" or "by JTWC" used. "Was named by PAGASA" sounds off because if you replace the abbreviation with the full name you get "Was named by Philippine Atmospheric, Geophysical and Astronomical Services Administration", which is grammatically incorrect, yet it's still used quite often on pages. Despite this, the PAGASA themselves don't use "the" before their name [1], so should we give some sort of special treatment like with UNICEF not needing to be written out in full on first use? What do you think about this? Akbermamps 05:35, 16 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

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