User talk:Ruakh/2015

January 2015

Grexit

You deleted grexit 2.5 years ago as a protologism, however the term has become relatively widely used: [1], [2], [3], [4]. I think it now meets the WT:CFI. Could you please restore it? TDL (talk) 04:27, 6 January 2015 (UTC)

Done. I invite you to improve the entry; it has a number of problems. For example: it claims that grexit is "uncountable", but that seems unlikely (is ?"a lot of grexit" grammatical?); it has no etymology section, and no links; it refers to Greece as "they"; and it rather makes it sound as though Greece frequently stops using the euro. —Ruakh 02:29, 7 January 2015 (UTC)

Thanks! I've done a bit of cleanup on it, as have a few others. TDL (talk) 06:31, 7 January 2015 (UTC)

Interwiki question

Sometimes it seems to me that the wonderful Rukhabot will put in interwiki links with a new line after the previous interwiki section, which then causes the interwiki sections to be out of order, as in diff, diff, or diff. Is this a known problem and/or does Rukhabot come through on a secondary sorting pass? I seem to see this happening a lot recently, and I don't know whether I should be going in and fixing the errors. Sorry to bother you. —JohnC5 ^{(Talk | contribs)} 01:14, 12 January 2015 (UTC)

Crap!

Before yesterday, that would happen if there were bad interwiki-links — e.g., if [[foo]] had an interwiki-link to [[fr:Foo]], then Rukhabot would not recognize that [[fr:Foo]] was supposed to be an interwiki-link, and would cause approximately this effect. And I was O.K. with that problem. (It was rare, and the wikitext was already wrong in such cases, and I had a separate mechanism for eventually detecting and fixing such bad interwikis.)

But yesterday, after the bot crashed due to confusion while trying to handle the [[ptcrogiolarsi:credential]] link at [[credential]], I made some changes so that it would have a narrower conception of what constituted an interwiki-link; and I must have introduced a bug in that code.

I'll investigate it tomorrow, and hopefully fix it and clean up the affected entries. :-/

Thanks for letting me know!

—Ruakh 08:00, 12 January 2015 (UTC)

Update: I've fixed the bug, and am now re-running the bot over those entries to fix them. Thanks again! —Ruakh 08:39, 12 January 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for the quick fix! :) —JohnC5 ^{(Talk | contribs)} 08:55, 12 January 2015 (UTC)

February 2015

Welcome back

This is a very belated welcome back. I know you are not entirely back, but at least a little. I consider you to be one of the best admins the English Wiktionary ever had, and am I sorry to see you not so much around any more. --Dan Polansky (talk) 14:13, 1 February 2015 (UTC)

April 2015

Rukhabot

Hi,

Could you start Rukhabot, please? --Anatoli T. ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 04:13, 2 April 2015 (UTC)

 Done. (Sorry for the delay.) —Ruakh 15:27, 9 April 2015 (UTC)

Thanks. Someone may take over the bot - expressed the wish. --Anatoli T. ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 22:34, 9 April 2015 (UTC)

Proposal to de-sysop/de-checkuser Connel MacKenzie

Since you participated in the the 2012 vote to de-sysop and de-checkuser Connel MacKenzie, you may wish to participate in the current discussion of this proposal. Cheers! bd2412 T 17:01, 7 April 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for the heads-up. Since I haven't been very active myself lately, I think I'll sit this one out. —Ruakh 15:25, 9 April 2015 (UTC)

May 2015

L.I. L.I.

Is there any reason why you punctuate your abbreviations? I’m not criticizing you, it just seems pretty unusual now to find a young person who does that. --Romanophile (talk) 08:22, 12 May 2015 (UTC)

@Romanophile: I find it funny that you, a twenty year old, called Ruakh a “young person” as if you aren't one. :) (I'm 24, F.Y.I., lest you think me a curmudgeon). —JohnC5 08:42, 12 May 2015 (UTC)

Yeah, I may be young, but I’m also insane. --Romanophile (talk) 08:53, 12 May 2015 (UTC)

That checks out. —JohnC5 09:04, 12 May 2015 (UTC)

What does "L.I. L.I." mean?

Which abbreviations do you have in mind? There are some that I punctuate, such as etc. and a.k.a. and n/a, but others that I do not, such as IMHO and FBI. (And some that I'm probably inconsistent about, such as U.S.A./USA.) I don't know that my choices are particularly idiosyncratic.

And I'm not sure if I'm really a "young person". I mean, obviously that's relative, and subjective, and depends on the context; but a Google Search for "young person" images mostly finds people who are clearly my juniors.

—Ruakh 05:48, 16 May 2015 (UTC)

lorem ipsum lorem ipsum

O.K. is one that I frequently see from you. Most people just spell it out phonetically now. I frequently have mental images of what I imagine editors to look like. I know that you are Jewish, and I have a memory of seeing a young, animated Jewish character on television (I used to watch cartoons often), so that memory filled in the void. --Romanophile (talk) 06:10, 16 May 2015 (UTC)

Actually, I've recently decided to write OK instead of O.K., after learning that the "oll korrect" theory is hogwash, and that it's actually from a Choctaw interjection okeh of similar meaning. (Though that doesn't really change what you're saying — if I still believed it was an acronym, I would still write it with periods.)

As for what I look like — no, I'm not animated. :-)

I would tell you to do a Google Image Search for my name, in double-quotes, but oddly, none of the pictures there are me. If you're on Facebook, you can probably search for my name there and find pictures that are of me.

Anyway, short answer, I'm thirty. After a haircut, I think I probably look it; but when, as now, I've waited too long between haircuts, my massive amounts of gray hair become salient, and I presumably look much older.

—Ruakh 18:21, 16 May 2015 (UTC)

My Bot says your Bot is wrong

Hi. I have this nice bot at our company here (actually also written in Perl), which parses wikimedia projects and then munges the data further. The albanian entries created or modified by your bot constantly exhibit a wrong hierarchy by putting "Alternative forms" at level5 header when they actually should be level3. See e.g. color or any other non-Albanian entry for that. It'd be swell if you could rectify that in future runs. LinguistManiac (talk) 07:34, 19 May 2015 (UTC)

@LinguistManiac I'm not sure what this has to do with Ruakh's bot, which only adds and removes interwiki links at these entries. The headings you are referring to (such as those at edh and luaj) seem to have been added by User:Etimo. If you want to have a bot to fix them, you should request this at the Wiktionary:Grease pit, since as far as I know, Ruakh's bot does not normally do these kinds of tasks. --WikiTiki89 12:39, 19 May 2015 (UTC)

Oh - ok then, seems I have misinterpreted the history of some entries. You are right, this came from User:Etimo. Sorry for the fuzz. LinguistManiac (talk) 13:48, 19 May 2015 (UTC)

User talk:Purplebackpackonthetrail and more

I have removed the template from Trail. But I don't think you really understand why the template was there in the first place: it was there solely because Wiktionary has no template or any other means of identifying alternate accounts, nor any rules on alternate accounts (which, combined with past precedents of editors editing under different names, would suggest that the practice is not forbidden). Really, your whole "I'm a troll" post ascribes a lot of false motivations to me. You seem to think I take certain actions solely to piss off other editors, but that's clearly not the case. I ask questions about other editors' edits either because I think that they were not good for the community and/or I don't understand why they did them. I vote "keep" in RfDs because I believe the project needs as many entries as possible. And I support Wiktionary policies being closer to those at Wikipedia because differences between the two are confusing to editors of both projects, and the reasons for the differences seem to be weak. So the whole "troll" claim is kind of wrong, to say nothing of being an attack. Purplebackpack89 05:53, 25 May 2015 (UTC)

November 2015

Google books link syntax

Hello

I am a contributor on the Wikipedia in French and I used the article macrolanguage to get sources for the wp.fr article. I saw that you are using URLs that link directly to a page and highlights the choosen word in yellow, adding &pg=PA787&dq=macrolanguages to the book ID. I find this very nice, but I cannot reproduce it, for example, I want to link to the page 15 and highlight the word "zime" in this book, but it doesn't work :

• http://books.google.com/books?id=mpik3raHihIC&pg=PA6&dq=macrolanguage (your code works)
• http://books.google.com/books?id=sl_dDVctycgC&pg=PA15&dq=zime (my code isn't)

Can you please explain me what I did wrong, and what is the right syntax to do this, or maybe give me a link to an help page that is talking about this?

Regards, SyntaxTerror (talk) 03:59, 14 November 2015 (UTC)

actually, I noticed a problem with the page count in this book, but I still don't know how to make this link. --SyntaxTerror (talk) 14:52, 14 November 2015 (UTC)

For me, the first one is the one that doesn't work. Searching for the title in Google Books returns only editions marked as "No Preview". Are you able to view it? I've noticed that some books aren't equally available on all the different local Google domains: sometimes someone will provide a link to google.de that I can't view properly until I change it to Google.com. This would be the reverse of that, if it's not something else. At any rate, if google.com won't let you see the page when you search it from Google Books, it won't let you see the page if you link directly. Chuck Entz (talk) 18:23, 14 November 2015 (UTC)

In your case, the page identifier is RA2-PA15: https://books.google.com/books?id=sl_dDVctycgC&pg=RA2-PA15&dq=zime. I don't know if there's a surefire way to determine this in all cases; in your case, I saw that page 15 included an occurrence of Zime followed by Kado (plus punctuation), so I searched Google Books for "zime kado" so that that specific page would appear as a search result. The URL for that search result contained pg=RA2-PA15. —Ruakh 21:52, 14 November 2015 (UTC)

December 2015

Tbot

What is the current status of the templates t/t+ and Tbot? Are those templates ever updated, how and by whom? I think it would be nice to have the t/t+ distinction in Russian Wiktionary, where currently only local [[page links]] are used. If there is some kind of Tbot today, I want to suggest to Russian Wiktionary to invite it there. --LA2 (talk) 15:45, 4 December 2015 (UTC)

I used to run a bot task to update them, but I ultimately stopped after CodeCat (talk • contribs) broke it in a particularly frustrating way. (I had created a Lua module, Module:JSON, for converting Lua data to JSON. The bot used this module in order to retrieve some configuration data underlying {{t}} and {{t+}}, that's necessary as part of figuring out what page is actually being linked to. But CodeCat's favorite pastime is breaking things, and true to form, she rewrote a chunk of the module to remove the functionality I needed, replacing it with garbage. She didn't even bother to notify me, even though she knew what I was using the module for; fortunately, my task detected the problem and aborted immediately, rather than making wrong edits.) Since I have a job, and a life; and since I figured that if I fixed the issue, CodeCat would just find another way to break things; and since no one seems to care very much about this bot (in that no one has asked me about it); it doesn't seem to be worth my time and frustration to keep updating it to accommodate her.

I don't think anyone else is updating it, either.

But for what it's worth, the translation-adding JavaScript does support {{t}} / {{t+}}, so although they don't get updated automatically anymore, the vast majority of occurrences of {{t+}} are probably still correct. So it's still probably better than nothing.

—Ruakh 08:00, 5 December 2015 (UTC)

Yes, I've noticed that the javascript now knows which template to use, which is quite impressive. But if it can be done in javascript, maybe it can be done in Lua, as part of the template:t? LA2 (talk) 16:17, 5 December 2015 (UTC)

No. The JavaScript runs on the client side, and works by making an HTTP request to the specified Wiktionary and seeing if it has the appropriate article. (Search inside User:Conrad.Irwin/editor.js for this.hasWiktionaryWithEntry.) Scribunto runs on the server side, and doesn't offer any way to do that (or any other way to retrieve information about pages found on other Wiktionaries); and even if it did, it would probably be way too expensive to use for this purpose. It's one thing to check for specific pages for a translation being added; it's quite another to check for target pages for every single translation on a page being viewed. —Ruakh 18:21, 5 December 2015 (UTC)

Typical of CodeCat. Make changes and never explain why. Especially problematic since CodeCat has apparently irrevocably broke a bot. Purplebackpack89 03:03, 6 December 2015 (UTC)

Since everything runs on WMF's servers, checking the existence of a crosswiki link should be as cheap as an in-wiki link... this ought to be hacked into ifexists... LA2 (talk) 04:33, 6 December 2015 (UTC)

Can't you just branch the module, starting Module:TheOldJSON from the old code that worked? LA2 (talk) 04:42, 6 December 2015 (UTC)

Re: WMF's servers, ifexist: Well, 'ifexist' itself is marked as an "expensive parser function" (see mw:Help:Extension:ParserFunctions#ifexist limits). But even if it weren't . . . I'm not an expert on the WMF architecture, but it's apparent that the various WMF sites have separate MediaWiki installations and configurations, separate MySQL databases, etc.; so it may not be so trivial for a page on one site to know of the existence of a page on a different site. (Note that, even within a single site, MW depends on a high level of prerendering and caching and so on, with a "job queue" that updates pages when other pages change in a way that affects them . . . and this "job queue" naturally relies on the fact that (e.g.) en.wikt can find all pages that depend on an en.wikt page when it's edited, because the only such pages are other en.wikt pages, so it can just check the DB table that says which pages refer to which other pages.) There are some exceptions — MediaWiki Commons seems to know about uses of its images on other WMF sites, for example — but each exception seems to depend on specially coded nontrivial software. So I don't foresee the {{t}}/{{t+}} use-case being prioritized by WMF developers. (Of course, it doesn't hurt to ask.)

Re: Module:TheOldJSON: Yes, of course I can; but do I want to? I'm a human, with human motivations. This conversation is the first hint I've had that anyone might care enough about {{t}}/{{t+}} for it to be worth it for me to keep spending time and energy investigating and fixing issues every time CodeCat (talk • contribs) decides to break it. (Keeping in mind that naming a module 'Module:TheOldJSON' is a bit like wearing a "kick me" sign; she'd delete it as soon as she noticed it.) And speaking of human motivations . . . I'm not a huge fan of "my" version of Module:JSON being demoted to Module:TheOldJSON, while her garbage edits, that made it worse in almost every way, get to stand as Module:JSON. (In fairness: she did add one interesting/cool feature. But she could easily have added that feature without breaking everything.)

—Ruakh 06:26, 6 December 2015 (UTC)

Quite honestly, I've hoped that this functionality could be restored for a while, but I never said anything because I figured that you had lost interest in the project; plus, I probably value your Hebrew contributions more, but it would feel even more out of place to leave a message along the lines of "hey Ruakh, I sure wish we had more people making high-quality Hebrew entries *nudge nudge*" than to enquire about technical matters as LA2 did. I suspect that a good deal of other people also wanted that functionality back, but decided not to say anything. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 06:33, 6 December 2015 (UTC)

I sent a question to wikitech-l. Let's see where it goes. LA2 (talk) 16:27, 6 December 2015 (UTC)

Thanks. The replies there were about what I expected. (In particular, Tim Starling's statement that "It's possible to do that for interwiki links, but it increases the amount of time it would take to implement such a feature.")
OK, I'll see about reviving the translation-bot.
—Ruakh 00:32, 7 December 2015 (UTC)

OK — after a few false starts, it seems to be working again. (For now.) —Ruakh 07:17, 7 December 2015 (UTC)

Ruakh, I thought I'd let you know that I, too, value your bot's work. I just had assumed that you were too busy to run it and didn't want to bother you about it. Oh and חג חנוכה שמח! --WikiTiki89 16:14, 7 December 2015 (UTC)

חג שמח! —Ruakh 16:38, 7 December 2015 (UTC)

It seems Rukhabot is doing both the functions of Tbot and Interwicket. Thanks a lot for both, I wanted to show my appreciation too. --Daniel Carrero (talk) 06:04, 8 December 2015 (UTC)

Thanks. :-)   —Ruakh 06:37, 8 December 2015 (UTC)

Thanks

I've noticed all the interwiki links appearing ... thank you! (And חג שמח!) Benwing2 (talk) 05:41, 8 December 2015 (UTC)

No problem. Unlike the {{t}}/{{t+}}-updating (see previous section), my interwiki-bot didn't actually require any changes from when I last ran it in September. I'd just been lazy, and didn't notice it had been a few months. :-P   —Ruakh 06:37, 8 December 2015 (UTC)