This is an archive of past discussions with User:Epicgenius. 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.
Scripts++ Newsletter – Issue 25
Hey there, welcome to the 25th issue of the Wikipedia Scripts++ Newsletter, covering all our favorite new and updated user scripts since 1 March 2024. We've got a ton of wonderful editors taking back their pitchforks today. Don't worry, for they come in peace, to forcibly fix and extend existing scripts you use with sheer passion. There's so many, them forks have got what's basically their own column now! gift us with some rows before it's too late Aaron Liu (talk) 04:01, 1 August 2024 (UTC)
Got anything good? Tell us about your new, improved, old, or messed-up script here!
To a lesser extent, the same goes for PrimeHunter/Search sort. I wish someone would integrate the sorts into the sort menu instead of adding 11 portlet links.
An easily configurable script to add a link to the #p-vector-user-menu-overflow portlet with a name, target, and icon. This one should be a relatively easier one. I would do it myself, but I'm too busy rotting away on Celeste (video game).
After the ＲＩＩＪ update, Aaron Liu: Watchlyst Greybar Unsin has a dismiss button that allows you to mark an item as read in one click and cycle to the next Watchlist item.
Lordseriouspig/StatusChangerImproved is just like Enterprisey's script, except you select your status from a dropdown instead of cycling through them with a button. The WMF operates out of car-centric infrastructure anyway. Shame!
Newly maintained scripts
Aaron Liu has created Duplinks from Evad37/duplinks-alt; his fork adds a config variable to automatically highlight duplicate links on the loading of any page where the portlet link would've appeared.
Tired of staring at a bunch of filtering text and waiting for darn filter logs to load? Msz2001/AbuseFilter analyzer can parse abuse filters into a visual syntax tree and evaluate locally on-demand!
Polygnotus/DuplicateReferences finds references with the same link and displays the number of them along with a button to add the {{duplicated citations}} tag under the references section. Being lazy has never been easier!
fastest gun on the net Ponor/really-quick-block really quick add to contribution lists three buttons awesome
The 2024 Developing Countries WikiContest has now been running for a month, and we've already seen some momentous improvement in the quality of many articles about underrepresented subjects! So far, our top-scoring participants are:
Magentic Manifestations (submissions) – 338 points, mainly from nine good articles. He's a contender for the "most submissions for a single country" specialty award, with nine submissions for India.
Arconning (submissions) – 305 points, including from six seasonally-appropriate Olympics-related good articles.
Generalissima (submissions) – 290 points, the bulk from her featured article about Greenlandic interpreter Qalaherriaq and two China-related good articles.
Thebiguglyalien (submissions) – 144 points from three good articles, including two about Kiribati elections, and four reviews of good article nominees.
Looking for ways to climb up the leaderboard yourself? Help out your fellow participants by answering a few review requests, particularly the older entries. Several more nominations needing attention are listed at eligible reviews, and highlighed entries receive a 1.5× multiplier! The coordinators would like to extend a special thanks to Thebiguglyalien (submissions) for his commitment to keeping these review pages up to date.
Thanks for the heads up @Bigeez. On a quick glance, I noticed that your second sandbox is extremely long, at about 18,000 words. The Wikipedia guideline WP:TOOBIG recommends that articles should be no longer than around 15,000 words. Therefore, I have a few suggestions:
I think the details about the architects and the neighborhood could be added to the architect and neighborhood articles themselves, rather than to the UN Plaza article. Then, on the UN Plaza page, the info about the architects and neighborhood can be condensed to one paragraph each.
In addition (or alternatively), I'd suggest that 1, 2, and 3 UN Plaza all be split into separate pages. Even though they were designed as part of the same master plan, all of these buildings are also probably notable on their own.
Hi Epicgenius, please take a peek at your earliest convenience. I took your advice and split them up. I realize there are necessary edits forthcoming, and I also wanted to tell you how very impressed I am with your acumen of NYC and your articles. I will email Linda (RD archivist) to tell her to become a Wiki editor and edit the articles where it is needed. Between you, her, and me, we should be able to place a decent article on the UN Plaza buildings and Dinkeloo. Cheers, Eli
In March 2019, you added lots of valuable content to Seneca Village. One particular phrase that caught my attention - "Some residents, such as foundry owner Edward Snowden, simply relocated elsewhere [in New York]". I found this to be an interesting coincidence of name (to Edward Snowden), and I found your source to be accurate.
In short, thanks very much for providing and properly citing material to Wikipedia. I appreciate your contributions, and I think it would make an interesting DYK hook if it was nominated five years ago. Cheers. LR.127 (talk) 06:19, 3 August 2024 (UTC)
Thanks for reaching out @Claudiailagan. I'm currently on vacation and may not be able to take a proper look for a while, sadly. However, I'll see if I can look at this later anyway, if someone else does not take a look at this edit request first. Epicgenius (talk) 17:26, 6 August 2024 (UTC)
Brooklyn Bridge
What the reason of the reversion? My sources say Ronald Reagan did not participate in the centennial. Even if you look at the following hyperlink in NYT, you might see the president missed this event. Vicpeters (talk) 15:11, 8 August 2024 (UTC)
You removed my PROD, stating that this one-item "list" should be merged elsewhere. Where? There is no list of all the NHRP listings in South Dakota; only a list of lists by county. A redirect to that page wouldn't be helpful, nor would redirecting directly to the actual building, which would suprise someone looking for an actual list. Mach6117:17, 15 August 2024 (UTC)
@Mach61, thanks for bringing this up. I would support merging this (along with the other one- and two-item lists about NRHP listings in South Dakota) to the National Register of Historic Places listings in South Dakota page. We already do this for other states like North Dakota.I can see why we want to avoid tiny lists. In general, I think we should be merging, rather than deleting, tiny NRHP lists because the topic of NRHP listings per state is notable. These are just split up into county lists so that we don't have a massive 500-item list for each state. If we merely deleted this particular list without merging it, however, then this would be inconsistent with all other states—Wikipedia already contains complete lists of all NRHP sites in every other state, and this would leave a gap in our coverage of NRHP sites. Epicgenius (talk) 17:38, 15 August 2024 (UTC)
Bring a picnic blanket and some potluck, as well as some sunscreen! We'll also provide a little something for everyone, but we encourage you to bring your own favorite dishes to share, especially for those food cultural topics you would like to improve on Wikipedia.
Hello Epicgenius, I've been using your script, thanks for writing it. I was wondering if there was a way for it to run on article talk pages? I do a lot of talk page maintenance, it would be nice to be able to run it in that namespace, ex... Talk:Thomas Jefferson. - FlightTime (open channel)00:56, 22 August 2024 (UTC)
@FlightTime, good question. In the case of Talk:Thomas Jefferson, every single category on that page is transcluded via one of the wikiproject templates.Sadly, the script can't sort categories that are transcluded onto the page via a template; it can only sort categories that are physically in the wikitext (i.e., categories with the code [[Category:...]]). It also is not technically possible to sort categories that are transcluded onto the page via a template. For a similar reason, it is also impossible to remove these categories using a tool such as HotCat; you have to remove the template itself in order to get rid of these categories. – Epicgenius (talk) 01:01, 22 August 2024 (UTC)
Hey Epicgenius, sorry to interrupt your vacay. I was wondering if you can assist--I know you've worked with images of buildings a lot. I ran into a problem with a user, in Houston, Georgia; the most detailed explanation of their issue is in this edit summary. I'd appreciate your advice. Thanks! Drmies (talk) 14:07, 22 August 2024 (UTC)
@Drmies, thanks for the heads up. Buildings in the United States (but not artwork) have freedom of panorama, so images of them can be freely uploaded to Wikimedia sites. The Commons page about freedom of panorama in the US says: for buildings completed before December 1, 1990, there is complete FoP, without regard to whether the building is visible from a public place, because the building is public domain, except for the plans. ... For buildings completed after December 1, 1990, freedom is given only to photograph such a building.. In other words, provided that a building in the US is photographed from a public place, it is acceptable for an image of it to be published on Wikimedia sites. (Such an image can, however, be deleted if the image itself is a copyright violation.)However, this isn't a copyright issue, but an issue of whether the image of the house should be on that page. If the user is really insistent that they don't want to have a photograph on that page, perhaps the best thing to do is to open a talk page discussion. I do doubt, however, that "I don't like it" is a winning argument for them. – Epicgenius (talk) 14:16, 22 August 2024 (UTC)
Hey, thanks for the quick response! I'll bring that up with them. I was a bit bothered by the attitude and some of the comments--for instance they said the house wasn't even called that, but the NRHP registration says it quite clearly, and that's a source that's pretty reliable. OK, back to your vacation, and thanks again. Drmies (talk) 14:23, 22 August 2024 (UTC)
Hello - I appreciate what you're trying to do in moderating this problem. Admittedly, I am new to Wikipedia editing so I'll concede my efforts have been a bit ham-fisted. However, there is a real problem here. Let me explain what it is.
I myself used to write NR nominations. The quality of NR nominations before the 1980s was often spotty at best. Very few of them were fact-checked by the SHPO (State Historic Preservation Officer). This one is a particularly egregious example. I asserted my ownership of the house not to have some supra-authoritative claim over the article's existence (with admittedly one exception, see below), but because I know from firsthand sources that the owner at the time the NR nomination was written particularly wished to obscure its true "common name," i.e. "The Boykin House" by appropriating the name of the nearby (then defunct) town of Liberty Hill. The reason for this as well as the effect are both problematic, to wit:
1. At the time the NR nomination was written in 1975 there were still descendants of the enslaved people who built this house living nearby, mostly on land they and their ancestors had once sharecropped as freedmen. In a situation not uncommon in Troup County, Georgia, they had kept the name of their former enslavers and were, therefore, "Boykins". I still know a couple of them. The white owner of the house when the NRHP nomination was written particularly wanted to avoid any association with the black neighbors who (again, I must point out for the sake of sad historical irony) were the descendants of the enslaved people who had built "The Boykin House".
2. Moreover, this type of "name appropriation" is not uncommon in these situations in the South, along with its concomitant phenomenon, "name erasure," in which black settlements were obscured by not including them on maps or in government documents. In this case, it's a combination of the two: the settlement of Liberty Hill (about 3 miles north of the house) was called "Liberty Hill" by the black residents there and "Houston" by the local government and white establishment. (A Liberty Hill had already been incorporated elsewhere in Georgia so even if the residents had agreed on a town name it could never have officially been "Liberty Hill".)
Therefore, ironically, Wikipedia is actually creating a situation of "common naming" a phenomenon that did not have that name before someone uploaded a copy of the NRHP nomination to a crowd-sourced website. We therefore have a tautology: I am being criticized for changing something that is allegedly "common knowledge" even though it was mis-named by a single person and the real "common knowledge" among the people in the area long acknowledged the error. Instead, that knowledge is obscured and erased (all the more problematically in my view since it directly involves African-American history, long misrepresented by the establishment) and we have the authority of a crowd-sourced website insisting that something is true which is not, all for the sake of "authority" that is itself fraudulent.
Finally, please note that nowhere in the NRHP nomination is the name itself documented. There is no footnote or reference in the NRHP nomination itself. I would assert that this omission is still a problem on Wikipedia: any source is good enough; the quality of the sources for a particular source often go unexamined. (You are obviously free to disagree, and I am not trying to denigrate the efforts of all those who try to keep Wikipedia going.) No one doubts that the house was called "The Boykin House". The white Boykins lived there from 1840 until 1922. That is, therefore, its correct name. "Liberty Hill" is not.
I hope you see why the above is problematic and why I have made an effort to change it. As the owner of this house and as someone with training in historical research (and the ethics that accompany it) I believe I had to make an effort to change the entry. If you have a suggestion about how to fix this problem (and the skills I will need to edit the solution) then please suggest them to me. I am not trying to be a problematic Wikipedia contributor, but I am rather frustrated.
Now, I know I will have to accept the photo. I knew it was out there and never liked the fact, but this summer a friend of mine saw it on her airplane seatback screen when she hit "landmarks" on the airline's moving map. Of course, it had been "scraped" from Wikipedia. I defy anyone not to find that a little creepy. Yes, I own the house, but I bought it in 1992 before the "invention" of the internet and the even worse phenomenon of AI. I may have to live with it, but you can't blame me for trying to edit out the photo. If its appearance is part of the merciless, rolling barbarity of the Internet I'll simply have to put up particularly prominent NO TRESPASSING signs. Alas.
However, I don't have to accept mis-representation, all the more so when the platform doing it is ironically creating the very problem that needs to be corrected. I'm assuming you (like me) want the best Wikipedia possible. Again, if you have a suggestion (like a re-titling along the lines of "Boykin House (sic Liberty Hill)" or "(aka Liberty Hill)" I am open to that.
At the very least I've documented my own effort to fix the error. If it's not corrected then it's not my fault.
Thanks for the detailed response @Libertyhellion, it is much appreciated. My comment above was primarily in regard to the image, not about the house's NRHP status or its name. I do understand that it might be a bit creepy to have a picture of your house on the internet. However, I'm not sure what recourse is available, given the fact that—unless you live in a gated community, or your house is a mile from the nearest road—your house is visible to everyone. From a copyright standpoint, it is permissible to take an image of a building in the US from a public place and then upload it to Wikipedia.While I can't look into the broader naming dispute right now, I do recommend that you cross-post this to the article's talk page. I also recommend that you look for any books, websites, newspapers, or other sources that describe your house. Perhaps these sources might refer to your house by another name, in which case the article's name could be changed. Otherwise, Wikipedia has to adhere to the "common name" guideline, which says: Although official, scientific, birth, original, or trademarked names are often used for article titles, the term or name most typically used in reliable sources is generally preferred. – Epicgenius (talk) 12:58, 24 August 2024 (UTC)
Thanks very much for the helpful response, Epicgenius. I'll take your advice and if i can find a way to document that the preferred common name is "the Boykin House" I'll run that past the moderators. As I mentioned in my long reply I simply want to honor the families, both Black and white, who were the actual builders of the house. Since the town of Liberty Hill was also a Black settlement, I feel like it is a matter of correcting an important historical error.
Drmies - last night I wrote this very long explanation of my attempts to correct the entry on "Liberty Hill (LaGrange, GA)" - however, I actually sent it to Epicgenius rather than to you, as I had intended. I'm cutting and pasting below. At the very least I wanted to make it clear why I believe the common name issue is important, especially in our area of Georgia where Black history has often been erased or obscured. Text below:
Hello - I appreciate what you're trying to do in moderating this problem. Admittedly, I am new to Wikipedia editing so I'll concede my efforts have been a bit ham-fisted. However, there is a real problem here. Let me explain what it is.
I myself used to write NR nominations. The quality of NR nominations before the 1980s was often spotty at best. Very few of them were fact-checked by the SHPO (State Historic Preservation Officer). This one is a particularly egregious example. I asserted my ownership of the house not to have some supra-authoritative claim over the article's existence (with admittedly one exception, see below), but because I know from firsthand sources that the owner at the time the NR nomination was written particularly wished to obscure its true "common name," i.e. "The Boykin House" by appropriating the name of the nearby (then defunct) town of Liberty Hill. The reason for this as well as the effect are both problematic, to wit:
1. At the time the NR nomination was written in 1975 there were still descendants of the enslaved people who built this house living nearby, mostly on land they and their ancestors had once sharecropped as freedmen. In a situation not uncommon in Troup County, Georgia, they had kept the name of their former enslavers and were, therefore, "Boykins". I still know a couple of them. The white owner of the house when the NRHP nomination was written particularly wanted to avoid any association with the black neighbors who (again, I must point out for the sake of sad historical irony) were the descendants of the enslaved people who had built "The Boykin House".
2. Moreover, this type of "name appropriation" is not uncommon in these situations in the South, along with its concomitant phenomenon, "name erasure," in which black settlements were obscured by not including them on maps or in government documents. In this case, it's a combination of the two: the settlement of Liberty Hill (about 3 miles north of the house) was called "Liberty Hill" by the black residents there and "Houston" by the local government and white establishment. (A Liberty Hill had already been incorporated elsewhere in Georgia so even if the residents had agreed on a town name it could never have officially been "Liberty Hill".)
Therefore, ironically, Wikipedia is actually creating a situation of "common naming" a phenomenon that did not have that name before someone uploaded a copy of the NRHP nomination to a crowd-sourced website. We therefore have a tautology: I am being criticized for changing something that is allegedly "common knowledge" even though it was mis-named by a single person and the real "common knowledge" among the people in the area long acknowledged the error. Instead, that knowledge is obscured and erased (all the more problematically in my view since it directly involves African-American history, long misrepresented by the establishment) and we have the authority of a crowd-sourced website insisting that something is true which is not, all for the sake of "authority" that is itself fraudulent.
Finally, please note that nowhere in the NRHP nomination is the name itself documented. There is no footnote or reference in the NRHP nomination itself. I would assert that this omission is still a problem on Wikipedia: any source is good enough; the quality of the sources for a particular source often go unexamined. (You are obviously free to disagree, and I am not trying to denigrate the efforts of all those who try to keep Wikipedia going.) No one doubts that the house was called "The Boykin House". The white Boykins lived there from 1840 until 1922. That is, therefore, its correct name. "Liberty Hill" is not.
I hope you see why the above is problematic and why I have made an effort to change it. As the owner of this house and as someone with training in historical research (and the ethics that accompany it) I believe I had to make an effort to change the entry. If you have a suggestion about how to fix this problem (and the skills I will need to edit the solution) then please suggest them to me. I am not trying to be a problematic Wikipedia contributor, but I am rather frustrated.
Now, I know I will have to accept the photo. I knew it was out there and never liked the fact, but this summer a friend of mine saw it on her airplane seatback screen when she hit "landmarks" on the airline's moving map. Of course, it had been "scraped" from Wikipedia. I defy anyone not to find that a little creepy. Yes, I own the house, but I bought it in 1992 before the "invention" of the internet and the even worse phenomenon of AI. I may have to live with it, but you can't blame me for trying to edit out the photo. If its appearance is part of the merciless, rolling barbarity of the Internet I'll simply have to put up particularly prominent NO TRESPASSING signs. Alas.
However, I don't have to accept mis-representation, all the more so when the platform doing it is ironically creating the very problem that needs to be corrected. I'm assuming you (like me) want the best Wikipedia possible. Again, if you have a suggestion (like a re-titling along the lines of "Boykin House (sic Liberty Hill)" or "(aka Liberty Hill)" I am open to that.
At the very least I've documented my own effort to fix the error. If it's not corrected then it's not my fault. I've made a good faith effort.
Congratulations, Epicgenius! The article you nominated, 1271 Avenue of the Americas, has been promoted to featured status, recognizing it as one of the best articles on Wikipedia. The nomination discussion has been archived.This is a rare accomplishment and you should be proud. If you would like, you may nominate it to appear on the Main page as Today's featured article. Keep up the great work! Cheers, Gog the Mild (talk) via FACBot (talk) 00:05, 28 August 2024 (UTC)
WikiCup 2024 August newsletter
The fourth round of the 2024 WikiCup ended on 29 August. Each of the 8 contestants who advanced to Round 4 scored at least 472 points, and the following contestants scored more than 700 points:
Congratulations to our eight finalists and all who participated. Contestants put in extraordinary amounts of effort during this round, and their scores can be seen here. So far this year, competitors have gotten 36 featured articles, 55 featured lists, 15 good articles, 93 in the news credits, and at least 333 did you know credits. They have conducted 357 featured content reviews, as well as 553 good article reviews and peer reviews, and have added 30 articles to featured topics and good topics.
Any content promoted after 29 August but before the start of Round 5 can be claimed during Round 5, which starts on 1 September at 00:00 (UTC). Invitations for collaborative writing efforts or any other discussion of potentially interesting work is always welcome on the WikiCup talk page. If two or more WikiCup competitors have done significant work on an article, all can claim points. If you are concerned that your nomination—whether for a good article, featured content, or anything else—will not receive the necessary reviews, please list it on Wikipedia:WikiCup/Reviews Needed. Remember to claim your points within 14 days of earning them, and importantly, before the deadline on 31 October.
Got anything good? Tell us about your new, improved, old, or messed-up script here!
Featured script
Improve a script
Requested scripts
Updated scripts
Newly maintained scripts
New scripts
Magentic Manifestations (submissions) – 338 points, mainly from nine good articles. He's a contender for the "most submissions for a single country" specialty award, with nine submissions for India.
Arconning (submissions) – 305 points, including from six seasonally-appropriate Olympics-related good articles.
Generalissima (submissions) – 290 points, the bulk from her featured article about Greenlandic interpreter Qalaherriaq and two China-related good articles.
AirshipJungleman29 (submissions) – 245 points, mostly from the achievement of bringing Genghis Khan to featured status.
Thebiguglyalien (submissions) – 144 points from three good articles, including two about Kiribati elections, and four reviews of good article nominees.
This process may take up to 7 days. Feel free to contact me with any questions or comments you might have during this period. Message delivered by ChristieBot, on behalf of Rollinginhisgrave -- Rollinginhisgrave (talk) 04:43, 3 August 2024 (UTC)
. The article is close to meeting the good article criteria, but there are some minor changes or clarifications needing to be addressed. If these are fixed within 7 days, the article will pass; otherwise it may fail. See Talk:New York State Pavilion and Talk:New York State Pavilion/GA1 for issues which need to be addressed. Message delivered by ChristieBot, on behalf of Rollinginhisgrave -- Rollinginhisgrave (talk) 07:01, 3 August 2024 (UTC)
; see Talk:New York State Pavilion for comments about the article, and Talk:New York State Pavilion/GA1 for the nomination. Well done! If the article is eligible to appear in the "Did you know" section of the Main Page, you can nominate it within the next seven days. Message delivered by ChristieBot, on behalf of Rollinginhisgrave -- Rollinginhisgrave (talk) 18:22, 3 August 2024 (UTC)
Template:TransLink (BC) station layout has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the entry on the Templates for discussion page. Mackensen (talk) 23:24, 14 August 2024 (UTC)
Generalissima (submissions) with 1,150 points, mostly from 3 featured articles, 2 featured lists, 7 good articles, and 13 did you know nominations;
Arconning (submissions) with 791 points, mostly from 2 featured lists, 8 good articles, 4 did you know nominations, and plenty of reviews;
AirshipJungleman29 (submissions) with 718 points, mostly from a high-multiplier featured article on Genghis Khan and 2 good articles; and
BennyOnTheLoose (submissions) with 714 points, mostly from 1 featured article on Susanna Hoffs, 2 featured lists, and 3 good articles.
) – Epicgenius (talk) 13:19, 30 August 2024 (UTC)