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)

Notes to self: Follow ups

• Bot work on User talk:Pearle and /Projects and elsewhere
• Merge Human extinction and Global catastrophic risk?
• Upload photos for /Projects
• Prosify government to better discuss civilian control of the military and other issues outside the form of government. Merge with political system?
• Automate updates to Wikipedia:WikiProject Countering systemic bias open tasks, using Template:CSBArticles?
• Clean Category:Sociology
• Wikipedia:WikiProject History of Science
• Article assessment, e.g.: http://toolserver.org/~enwp10/bin/table.fcgi?project=Bus_transport
• Jihad
• Male
• Female
• Clean up on open access

-- Beland (talk) 01:03, 28 May 2018 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Most wanted stubs

Hi Beland - is it possible to run a bot and see what turns up at Wikipedia:Most wanted stubs as the most wanted stubs to expand? Interested in what it might turn up for potential DYK expansions...Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 03:36, 13 June 2013 (UTC)

Hmm, definitely looks like it's time for an update there. Unfortunately the code I have to do that is old and creaky and I'm not sure it's compatible with the current database dumps. I'll try and take a look at it in the next few weeks. -- Beland (talk) 16:12, 18 June 2013 (UTC)

Hi again - do you still have time or inclination to have a go at this? Or would it be something that someone else could do...? I have no idea as I have no experience in any of this....Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 07:49, 25 September 2013 (UTC)

Attenuated influenza

Hi Beland, I was checking out the talk page for the live attenuated influenza vaccine and saw your question from 2011. Left an answer, though you may have lost interest or already found it. Cheers, --Synaptophysin (talk) 14:17, 27 August 2013 (UTC)

Nothing sucks like a vax listed at Redirects for discussion

An editor has asked for a discussion to address the redirect Nothing sucks like a vax. Since you had some involvement with the Nothing sucks like a vax redirect, you might want to participate in the redirect discussion if you have not already done so. TheChampionMan1234 07:48, 13 July 2014 (UTC)

More refs needed

For this content [1] Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 05:16, 5 September 2016 (UTC)

@Doc James:: Sure, I ran out of time to continue working on that today. Some of the facts (like prices) were pulled from the linked articles, but pretty much everything could use further fact-checking and referencing. Though there's some overlap with the "Developing world" section and perhaps Prescription drug prices in the United States, which might be helpful to resolve first. Any help you could give would be appreciated. -- Beland (talk) 05:51, 5 September 2016 (UTC)

Moving unreffed content

This article is a GA. [2] Not sure why you added unreffed content? Best Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 20:42, 6 September 2016 (UTC)

@Doc James: Hmm, something seems to have gone wrong with that edit, which is clearly not a whitespace change as the edit summary suggests. Looking back at my edit history, I find that I was moving that content from Malaria vaccine where it was off-topic, to an article where it was on-topic. I was actually the one who tagged that chunk as unreferenced while cleaning it up; I have no reason to believe it is false, but it seemed important enough to verify. I hadn't noticed that Malaria is a Good Article, but I probably would have made the same edit even if I had, since it's clearly a better place for that content if it's going to be in the encyclopedia at all. I will see if I can find some time to fact-check those claims, if someone else doesn't beat me to it. -- Beland (talk) 21:16, 6 September 2016 (UTC)

Two-Factor Authentication now available for admins

Hello,

Please note that TOTP based two-factor authentication is now available for all administrators. In light of the recent compromised accounts, you are encouraged to add this additional layer of security to your account. It may be enabled on your preferences page in the "User profile" tab under the "Basic information" section. For basic instructions on how to enable two-factor authentication, please see the developing help page for additional information. Important: Be sure to record the two-factor authentication key and the single use keys. If you lose your two factor authentication and do not have the keys, it's possible that your account will not be recoverable. Furthermore, you are encouraged to utilize a unique password and two-factor authentication for the email account associated with your Wikimedia account. This measure will assist in safeguarding your account from malicious password resets. Comments, questions, and concerns may be directed to the thread on the administrators' noticeboard. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 20:32, 12 November 2016 (UTC)

North Indic listed at Redirects for discussion

An editor has asked for a discussion to address the redirect North Indic. Since you had some involvement with the North Indic redirect, you might want to participate in the redirect discussion if you have not already done so. Nicole Sharp (talk) 02:00, 26 February 2018 (UTC)

14 years of editing, today

Hey, Beland. I'd like to wish you a wonderful First Edit Day on behalf of the Wikipedia Birthday Committee! Have a great day! Chris Troutman (talk) 06:27, 6 April 2018 (UTC)

Thanks

Hey - I just wanted to say thanks for all of your amazing work on Wikipedia! You've personally helped me and hundreds of thousands of other people out, and I really appreciate it. You're personally making a huge contribution to keeping the world's information clear, accessible, and high-quality. Thanks so much for what you do!

Ameobea (talk) 22:31, 19 April 2018 (UTC)

Geographical list titles

Note to self:

• List of average human height worldwide
• Geography of association football
• Prostitution by region
• Giant pandas around the world
• List of United Nations organizations by location
• List of accidents and incidents involving airliners by location
• List of sovereign states and dependent territories by continent
• Basic income around the world

-- Beland (talk) 18:35, 23 May 2018 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

	The Technical Barnstar
	For your quality and tireless work at WP:Typo Team/moss and in numerous other bot-related tasks LittlePuppers (talk) 22:08, 28 July 2018 (UTC)

Thanks for all your hard work!

		The Barnstar of Diligence
		Thanks for all the work you do. I appreciate your work merging Guilt-Shame-Fear spectrum of cultures. I know such merging is cumbersome and thankless. In addition, I have noticed your countless edits for MOS compliance, typo handling, and all the little things that improve the quality of everyday Wikipedia content. Thank you! Daask (talk) 20:08, 6 August 2018 (UTC)

Auto Notification for moss dump?

Hi Beland, I'd like to thank you for your work in making wikipedia improvement even more accessible via your moss project. I discovered it earlier this month and have been making great use of it in my downtime - and it can be heckin' informative to boot.

The last few days though it looks like all the basic 'Likely misspellings by article' lines were complete, and so I've been waiting on the next dump to do more. I see this morning that the next batch is ready and will be sinking my teeth into it, but I was wondering:
Is there a way to be automagically informed when the next dump is ready? Perhaps by a Talk page notice? Only to a list of users who signed up for it, of course. I think that'd be swell if it wasn't too hard to introduce and could bring more attention to the project. What do you think?
--Cheers! Elfabet (talk) 12:55, 11 October 2018 (UTC)

@Elfabet: That's a good idea! So far I've just occasionally been posting very sporadic talk page notices and thanking individual editors sometimes. It probably matters more for sections that have to wait for a new dump to be useful, like some that are sorted by frequency or that have a lot of noise that's getting cleaned up in the next run. There's a new dump coming shortly; I'll see if I can figure out a good way to handle a notification list. As for the "Likely misspellings by article" section, there are actually so many mispellings waiting for us to work on that this section should never really run dry. If we run low, I can just add more from the current dump without waiting for the next one. I don't post the report for the whole alphabet all at once because there would be way too many to fit on a single page, and we'd never get to them all in 2-3 weeks anyway. I think we ran out this time because I switched over to a new way of sorting the results that is much better at finding actual misspellings, so people who don't care about adding legitimate words to Wiktionary don't have to find the misspellings in a long list. I guess that helped us get through typos a lot faster than before and a lot faster than I was expecting...hurray! I happened to be on vacation when we ran out, which is why I didn't notice we were getting close (plus I was expecting the new dump to be ready by now). Anyway, if we get low on that list again, just drop me a message here or ping me or something, and I can add more right away. I have increased the number of sections the default report will post for the next run, so hopefully we won't run out again. And thanks very much for your help squishing typos! Without volunteer editors like you to act on them, these reports would be fairly useless. 8) -- Beland (talk) 15:34, 11 October 2018 (UTC)

Relatedly, but also probably not as useful; for the unsure or left for follow-up words/pages at the start of the list, would something like a template easily left on the article's talk page possibly help generate corrections for it? I tried it on a couple talk pages from the last batch and both saw corrections within 2 days. I copied the message I left onto the bottom of my sandbox if that would be a helpful starting place for this kind of thing. (Bonus points for filling in the sudo-code with auto-magical looky-upy wikitext, otherwise the unknown words should probably be parameters of the template).

Otherswise, I guess, I could leave the C/E template with the word in question in the note parameter, but this could be a nicer touch, if feasible. --Cheers! Elfabet (talk) 19:44, 12 October 2018 (UTC)

@Elfabet: Hmm, I think there's a way to construct links that start a pre-filled edit, but I'm not familiar with the details. Adding an "ask a question on the talk page of this article" link to every single likely misspelled word might be a bit much anyway, so for now I created {{Typo help}} and added quick copy-and-paste instructions at Wikipedia:Typo_Team/moss#Investigation needed. Thanks for this idea! -- Beland (talk) 17:48, 13 October 2018 (UTC)

Moss confused by hard newline

In your new all-inclusive "B" page, we see that Brooke Burke has "buther". The only such text I can see is "but\nher", and of course there's nothing wrong with the newline. Is the parser eliding the newline, or is there something really odd about this page? If the former, perhaps it needs to be fixed quick, as there are probably other cases. David Brooks (talk) 18:57, 14 October 2018 (UTC)

@DavidBrooks: Good catch; I see the same problem on other pages. I must have introduced a bug. It will take at least a day to re-run the spell check, so I'll revert "remainder of A" to the old good dump and take down the others until I can get a clean run posted. -- Beland (talk) 19:01, 14 October 2018 (UTC)

@DavidBrooks: Hmm, actually "Remainder of A" at least seems to be better with the new dump than the old just due to the number of typos that have been fixed naturally in articles, compared to the smaller number of articles affected by this bug. I'll still try and hunt down the bug, though. Feel free to leave notes on any items you see affected by it; that may help debugging. -- Beland (talk) 19:05, 14 October 2018 (UTC)

Would it worth while to put a note on the project page about this glitch? I suspect most people wouldn't read it until you fix it anyway. David Brooks (talk) 19:15, 14 October 2018 (UTC)

@DavidBrooks: Found the problem and fixed it; new reports should be ready in about 25 hours. It looks like it only affects situations where there's a new line but no blank line; it was in some code that was trying to normalize things to one line per paragraph for the grammar checker I'm experimenting with. It definitely made the compound word report wacky, but it looks like it didn't affect too many likely misspellings. (This case probably made it through because "buther" is too close to "butter".) Feel free to add a note somewhere if you think it's worthwhile; otherwise I'll just update the reports when the new results are ready. And BTW, thank you for all your typo fixing! We really are making shockingly fast progress on fixing misspellings now. -- Beland (talk) 21:38, 14 October 2018 (UTC)

No problem. I'm just taking a break from my regular project, so I may disappear any time, but I'll probably dip in from time to time. It's good to work one one of those activities where you can make several edits per minute. No need for a notice, I think. It's a rare enough occurrence, and no harm can come if someone looks at what isn't an error. David Brooks (talk) 01:01, 15 October 2018 (UTC)

Jargon words

I have made this point in a couple of places: we should beware of "correcting" valid jargon words, especially in the multiple-occurrences section. In both the cases I noted recently (turrited and sinous) , the apparent typo really wasn't, although they were determined by SMEs to be obsolete spelling, or potentially a source error, so the correction was permissible. But because we think something looks like a typo, it may be hubris to apply a general correction to highly specialized text. I realize that actually could apply to any mis-spelling, but it is more likely when the word appears in several articles in related topics. My point: do you think it would be valuable to add a caution to your general instructions, or am I being too pedantic? David Brooks (talk) 22:13, 20 October 2018 (UTC)

@DavidBrooks: I think it's helpful advice to caution editors that what looks like a typo (including what the system reports as a typo) might be a valid technical word, and to check with experts if they aren't completely sure. Though if a word is so technical a general editor doesn't know it, I'd also say that's a good candidate for rephrasing. -- Beland (talk) 23:14, 20 October 2018 (UTC)

Editor of the Week

		Editor of the Week
		Your ongoing efforts to improve the encyclopedia have not gone unnoticed: You have been selected as Editor of the Week in recognition of your great contributions and hard work! (courtesy of the Wikipedia Editor Retention Project)

User:Darylgolden submitted the following nomination for Editor of the Week:

I nominate Beland to be Editor of the Week. He is a prolific editor, having made over 69000 edits, mostly gnomish in nature. Their work in setting up Wikipedia:Typo Team/moss is particularly commendable. This is a project that automatically finds typos on Wikipedia through a database search. Since its inception, the project has led to thousands of typo corrections and numerous entries added to Wiktionary. Beland's technical skills and general editing is truly invaluable to the project, and they're definitely deserving of this award.

You can copy the following text to your user page to display a user box proclaiming your selection as Editor of the Week:

{{User:UBX/EoTWBox}}

Thanks again for your efforts! ―Buster7 ☎ 00:30, 4 November 2018 (UTC)