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- Top 1,000 editor.
- My AWB Bot1058 took just a few days to reach 16,000 edits.
- Secret to winning the Race Against the Machine: become an expert bot programmer, and hope that the bots don't learn to program themselves. HAL?
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1 April 2016 |
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The Technical Barnstar | |
Thanks for creating RMCD bot and bringing the requested moves process back on its feet! |
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The Original Barnstar |
For your contribution over at Requested Moves. Great work! Tiggerjay (talk) 03:32, 3 January 2013 (UTC) |
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The Special Barnstar | |
For your tireless (and often-times, tedious) work at Wikipedia:WikiProject Merge and surrounding environs. It is well appreciated! GenQuest "Talk to Me" 23:06, 6 March 2014 (UTC) |
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The Rosetta Barnstar | |
for cracking the code and saving the day. ty amigo. Gregkaye ✍♪ 15:26, 6 October 2014 (UTC) |
bot help
Thank you, user who knows the secret to winning the Race Against The Machine, for helpful bots and for cleaning up yourself ("removing WP:OVERLINK to an everyday word"), for redirects and templates such as {{Forms of energy}}, for detailed analysis and offering to serve as arbitrator: "Don't underestimate how far I'm willing to go to read the background", - you are an awesome Wikipedian!
--Gerda Arendt (talk) 14:06, 19 November 2014 (UTC)
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The Original Barnstar |
For your diligence toward getting Template:NRHP Focus working again. Awesome. ―Mandruss ☎ 21:08, 6 August 2015 (UTC) |
The current time is
- 07:18, April 13, 2016 AEST ( in eastern )Australia
- 06:18, April 13, 2016 JST ( in )Japan
- 05:18, April 13, 2016 AWST ( in western )Australia
- 02:48, April 13, 2016 IST ( in )India
- 22:18, April 12, 2016 GMT / BST ( in )Great Britain
- 17:18, April 12, 2016 ET ( in )Ohio
Did you know
- Martin Luther King's final Sunday sermon referenced the thesis of "The Triple Revolution", which primarily discussed the cybernation revolution of increasing automation, whereby machines would continue reducing the need for manual labor, while increasing the skill needed to work, thereby producing greater unemployment
- The Eureqa software tool used genetic programming to discover the law of conservation of energy on its own
- Much of the work I've done for Wikipedia could be offshored to anywhere, or automated (indeed much is already semi-automated; run my edit history through some machine learning algorithms to automate more)
- Here come the robots: Davos bosses brace for big technology shocks
Mindboggling facts
- The total length of expressways in China increased from zero in 1988 to 69,560 miles (111,950 km) at the end of 2014, the world's largest controlled-access highway system by length. The US has 64,352 miles (103,565 km) total – the 47,856 miles (77,017 km) Interstate Highway System plus 16,496 miles of other freeways and expressways (as of 2013, including Puerto Rico).[1]
- And although the London Underground had over a century head-start on the Shanghai Metro, which first opened in 1993, the latter now has the world's longest metro system, at 334 miles. The New York City Subway has 232 miles, but if you add the Staten Island Railway (14 mi.), Long Island Rail Road (319 mi.) and Metro-North Railroad (385 mi.), Shanghai has a way to go yet—seems they're just getting started though.
- US public spending on transport and water infrastructure has fallen steadily since the 1960s, and is now at 2.4% of GDP. Europe invests 5% of GDP in infrastructure; China's racing into the future at 9%.[2]
- Currently, just over 4 in 10 Americans age 25–34 have a college degree, while 57 percent of young Canadians have one.
- In 1995, the US was tied for first in the world in the percentage of the population with a college degree. Now the US ranks fourteenth.[3]
References
- ^ Public Road Length - 2013. Federal Highway Administration.
- ^ "Life in the slow lane". The Economist. April 28, 2011.
- ^ Madland, David (2015). Hollowed Out: Why the Economy Doesn't Work without a Strong Middle Class. p. 87. ISBN 978-0-520-28652-8.
‘We Need an Energy Miracle’
Bill Gates nails it: Interview by The Atlantic. Something on the order of the Drake Well or Chicago Pile-1. Maybe some computers running genetic programming algorithms will help us find it, before "time runs out". A breakthrough in stellarator or tokamak research could be a game-changer.
Women On $20s
The non-profit organization "Women On $20s" conducted a poll to choose a woman to put on a newly designed US twenty-dollar bill (to replace Andrew Jackson). The two leading vote-getters were Eleanor Roosevelt and Harriet Tubman. Others on the ballot were Rosa Parks, Wilma Mankiller, Susan B. Anthony, Sojourner Truth, Clara Barton, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Margaret Sanger, Rachel Carson, Shirley Chisholm, Alice Paul, Frances Perkins, Barbara Jordan, Patsy Mink and Betty Friedan. As I was not familiar with some of these names, I looked them up and linked to them here. I think Jeannette Rankin should have been included on this ballot.
Wikipedia peaked in 2008?
A five-year update of Google Ngram data would help answer that question. By the way, for more on Culturomics and the Google Ngram Viewer, I highly recommend ISBN 978-1-59448-745-3.
Issues I've patrolled
Errors
- Pages transcluding {{error}}s
- in main namespace
- in talk namespace
- in file namespace
- in category namespace
- Category:ParserFunction errors
- Category:Template loop warnings
Redirects
- Category:Articles with redirect hatnotes needing review
- Category:Missing redirects
- Inconsistent similar redirects
- Userspace redirects
- Broken talk pages
- User:RussBot/Non-disambiguation redirects/001
MediaWiki software limits
- Category:Pages where template include size is exceeded
- Category:Pages with too many expensive parser function calls
- Category:Pages where expansion depth is exceeded
- Category:Pages where node count is exceeded
Disambiguation
- Wikipedia:WikiProject Disambiguation/Malplaced disambiguation pages
- Wikipedia:WikiProject Disambiguation/Incomplete disambiguations
- Links to Hardware requiring disambiguation, using the What links here tool
Magic words
- Category:Pages with DEFAULTSORT conflicts
- Articles using the INDEX magic word
- Articles using the NEWSECTIONLINK magic word
- Articles using the NONEWSECTIONLINK magic word
Miscellaneous
- Category:Fulfilled page move requests
- Category:Articles for merging with no partner
- Category:Wikipedia non-free files lacking article backlink
- Category:Wikipedia non-free files with red backlink
- Diffusion of Category:Computer hardware
- Wikipedia:Database reports/Linked misspellings
- Wikipedia:Templates for discussion/Holding cell
- Category:Articles with invalid date parameter in template
- Category:Shortcut templates with missing parameters
- Category:Wikipedia edit requests
- Category:Administrative backlog
- Category:Wikipedians looking for help
- {{Raw backlog status}} – that's a lotsa backlog cats!
Hyphen-minus, En dash and Em dash
After editing Wikipedia for several months I became aware that these are actually three distinct characters with nuanced uses. The WP:DASH guideline explains how the nuances are applied in Wikipedia articles. These characters vary in length, from hyphen-minus (shortest) to em dash (longest):
The hyphen, or minus sign, is the key between 0 (zero) and = (equal sign) on most keyboards, which also have a numeric keypad, and the minus sign there enters the same character. It is the standard ASCII hyphen. The two dash symbols generally can't be entered by striking a single key on most keyboards, so must be entered by other means. Wikipedia:How to make dashes gives short and long explanations. A problem with the easiest-to-learn method, copy and paste, is that it's not always easy to tell which character you're copying, as the differences in their lengths can be subtle. An en dash looks the same as a hyphen on an edit page. One way to be sure you're using your desired character is to use HTML character entity references: – (–) and — (—), but these can reduce HTML text readability.
These characters can easily be entered using the "toolbar/toolbox/edit field" at the bottom of edit pages—the box that includes Sign your posts on talk pages: ... Cite your sources: under the default Insert Drop-down list. The first character to the right of the Insert drop-down list is the en dash and the second character is the em dash (that's en dash and em dash, not hyphen-minus and en dash—I suppose there's no need for putting the hyphen-minus in the toolbar since it can be directly entered using its keyboard key).
There is actually a figure dash which I think is supposed to be shorter than an en dash, and a horizontal bar which may be longer than an em dash. In my Google Chrome browser, they look the same to me. There are also distinct hyphen and minus characters. There are no character entity references for these, but they can be entered using numeric character references. Copy and paste each of these eight hyphen/minus/dash/bars into your browser's search tool, and you'll find that your browser may be able to tell the difference between each of these eight unique characters, even if you can't! This is not an exhaustive list. For example, there are also soft hyphens. Template {{unicode}} may be used to render these characters in a unicode font. Each character is shown first using {{unicode}}, and then without it. The differences may become more apparent on zoomed pages (see Image Zoom). For Google Chrome, Change text, image, and video sizes (zoom).
- - is a hyphen-minus (ASCII keyboard)
- - - is a hyphen-minus (002D)
- ‐ ‐ is a hyphen (2010)
- ⁃ ⁃ is a hyphen bullet (2043)—it's probably not a good idea to use hyphen bullets for a list such as this one!
- − − is a minus (2212)—this can also be entered from the Insert bar, it's between the ± and × (in my browser, it looks more like an en dash than a hyphen, go figure!)
- ‒ ‒ is a figure dash (2012)
- – – is an en dash (2013)
- — — is an em dash (2014)
- ― ― is a horizontal bar (2015)
I confess that my ego was stroked a bit when an editor copied an earlier version of this to start WP:Hyphens and dashes.
Mathematical symbols for arithmetic operations
Three of the four symbols for arithmetic operators—plus and minus signs, multiplication sign and obelus—(+−×÷) can be entered using the Insert bar. Plus sign (+) is on the keyboard (shift-equal sign) or numeric keypad. If you don't want the shorter hyphen-length minus sign, use the Insert bar to get the en dash-length minus sign. Multiplication (×) is not the same as the character (x).
Prime and double prime
Two more symbols on the Insert bar enter the symbols for feet or minutes (the prime) and inches or seconds (the double prime).
- ′ is a prime (2032)—a prime (′) is not the same as an ASCII keyboard or 0027 apostrophe-quote (') '
- ″ is a double prime (2033)—a double prime (″) is not the same as an ASCII keyboard or 0022 double quote (") "
Latest tech news
Technical help links
- Tech News weekly summaries
- Special:SpecialPages
- Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 108#How to edit—or request an edit—of Special:SpecialPages
- Ask and eventually you may receive
Per m:Tech/News/2014/06:
- You can now link to diffs using
[[Special:Diff/12345]]
and similar links. Wikimedia code review
- You can now link to diffs using
- Now I see movement on another aspect of this, apparently a reaction to another village pump "ping": see bug 45221 and Wikimedia code review
- Ask and eventually you may receive
- Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 108#How to edit—or request an edit—of Special:SpecialPages
- m:Help:Introduction
- m:MediaWiki Handbook
- Help:HTML in wikitext
- Help:Substitution
- Help:Template
- mw:Help:Templates
- m:Help:Template
- Help:Labeled section transclusion
- Help:Magic words
- mw:Help:Magic words
- m:Help:Magic words
- m:Help:Variable
- m:Help:Parser function
- mw:Help:Extension:ParserFunctions
- mw:Help:Parser functions in templates
- mw:Manual:Index.php
- mw:API
- mw:How to become a MediaWiki hacker
- Unicode Code Converter
History
Editor engagement experiments
Every now and then I run into something interesting over the course of editing.
- Wikipedia:Editor engagement experiments
- m:Editor engagement experiments
- mw:Editor engagement experiments
Subpages
xxx