User talk:RoySmith

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Earth Day 2022 Edit-a-thon - April 22nd - 2PM EST

You're invited! NYC Earth Day 2022 Edit-a-thon! April 22nd!

Sure We Can and the Environment of New York City Task Force invite you to join us for:

This Edit-a-Thon is part of a larger Earth Day celebration, hosted by Brooklyn based recycling and community center Sure We Can, that runs from 1PM-7PM and is open to the public! See this flyer for more information: https://www.instagram.com/p/CcGr4FyuqEa/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

-- Environment of New York City Task Force

Tech News: 2024-28

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MediaWiki message delivery 21:29, 8 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Your GA nomination of Robert Weinberg (urban planner)

The article Robert Weinberg (urban planner) you nominated as a good article has passed ; see Talk:Robert Weinberg (urban planner) for comments about the article, and Talk:Robert Weinberg (urban planner)/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 Pbritti -- Pbritti (talk) 02:04, 11 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Promotion of Arthur O. Austin

Congratulations, RoySmith! The article you nominated, Arthur O. Austin, 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 The nomination discussion has been archived.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, David Fuchs (talk) via FACBot (talk) 00:05, 13 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Fri July 19: Wikicurious in NYC, Editing Wikipedia for Beginners

July 19: Wikicurious: Editing Wikipedia for Beginners @ Civic Hall

You are invited to join the Wikimedia NYC community for the inaugural event of the beginner-focused Wikicurious series at Civic Hall! All are welcome, and newcomers and aspiring editors are especially encouraged to attend.

Registration via Eventbrite is required for building entry, and is also encouraged on the event page on Meta.

The Wikicurious series at Civic Hall is supported by Craig Newmark Philanthropies. Wikimedia NYC is an official affiliate and supported by the Wikimedia Foundation.

All attendees are subject to Wikimedia NYC's Code of Conduct.

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--Wikimedia New York City Team via MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 16:51, 13 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Google Maps

I was looking at the U.S. Route 13 in Maryland article, which is also a good article, and I noticed that the parts addressing the terrain US 13 passes through (such as "US 13 passes through wooded areas") has Google Maps as a source. Do you think I could use Google Maps as a source for I-85 passing through forest and rural areas? Let me know your thoughts and I'll reply back ASAP. Thanks. NoobThreePointOh (talk) 02:34, 15 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Nvm, I figured it out. Do you mind letting me get back on the 17th and finishing up the rest of the article? I'm almost done, and I saw on the GAN page that there are reassessments that have been open for as early as June 14th. I'm not asking for a massive extension, but just for the 17th so that I can get back to my computer and add the citations. I understand if you don't want to grant me the extension, but I have in fact made improvements on my computer, although they haven't been saved yet. NoobThreePointOh (talk) 08:52, 15 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I'm not sure what to tell you. There's a request for reassessment open. At some point somebody will pick it up and make a decision. I have no control over when that happens. RoySmith (talk) 14:32, 15 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Ok. All I hope is that I make it back to my computer before it closes and finish up whatever improvements I make to the article. I think I've found out what sources to use for the sentencing and what to remove from the wording. NoobThreePointOh (talk) 16:14, 15 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

An automated process has detected that when you recently edited West Farms Soldiers Cemetery, you added a link pointing to the disambiguation page Daily News.

(Opt-out instructions.) --DPL bot (talk) 06:23, 15 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Four Award for You!

Four Award
Congratulations! You have been awarded the Four Award for your work from beginning to end on Arthur O. Austin. Generalissima (talk) (it/she) 18:06, 15 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2024-29

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

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Recent changes

  • Advanced item Wikimedia developers can now officially continue to use both Gerrit and GitLab, due to a June 24 decision by the Wikimedia Foundation to support software development on both platforms. Gerrit and GitLab are both code repositories used by developers to write, review, and deploy the software code that supports the MediaWiki software that the wiki projects are built on, as well as the tools used by editors to create and improve content. This decision will safeguard the productivity of our developers and prevent problems in code review from affecting our users. More details are available in the Migration status page.
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Changes later this week

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MediaWiki message delivery 01:29, 16 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Re the wikirefs tool

Just tried it on The Argosy (magazine) and got an internal server error; my mistake that it should have been Argosy (magazine) (which it coped with), but presumably it doesn't like being asked about non-existent pages. I like what I see of the tool so far, particularly that it preserves links in the references. I could imagine an option to restrict what comes back to only refs with links, or only ones without. Perhaps an option to ask for X randomly selected ones, and an option to copy them to the copy-paste buffer in some appropriate wikitext form -- I use a standardized bullet list with wording that you can see here, for example, but anything pasteable into a GA or FA review would work.

One thing I find myself doing in spotchecks is that I get an intuition pretty quickly about whether there are problems to be found, and if I suspect problems (I'm more right than not, but my instincts are not infallible on this) then I'll go looking for structures that I know from experience are more likely to reveal errors. A couple of examples:

  • Direct quotes, e.g. in reception sections, are rarely wrong, so if I'm hunting errors I'll often skip these.
  • Situations of the form "Here is a sentence with multiple clauses,[1] with a citation halfway through. Here's a second sentence with the citation at the end.[2]" often failed verification on the second half of sentence 1.
  • Paragraphs with one or two cites at the end of each sentence are rarely wrong. The longer the series of sentences cited to a single source, the more likely an error becomes, though this is not as reliable in producing errors as the previous case.
  • Declarative sentences that assert things such as names or dates are less likely to be wrong.
  • Multiple citations, perhaps surprisingly, don't seem to be correlated with reliability -- that is, picking something to verify that has multiple citations doesn't seem to increase the chances of finding an error.
  • Flowery, unnatural, old-fashioned or highly academic or formal language is a moderately strong indication of possible close paraphrasing, *unless* the rest of the article is like that too, in which case the odds are evenly distributed between the author being a formal writer, a non-native speaker, or a bad writer, depending on what the oddity in the language is.

This all means that in some cases I don't want a random sample; I want to bias the selection toward certain types of spotcheck.

Thanks for working on this -- I can see it being pretty useful once you get it a little further along. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 02:16, 16 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the comments. Yeah, dealing with non-existent titles in a useful way is probably #1 on my to-do list. RoySmith (talk) 02:44, 16 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

DYK for Big Duck

On 19 July 2024, Did you know was updated with a fact from the article Big Duck, which you recently created, substantially expanded, or brought to good article status. The fact was ... that a big duck (pictured) helped promote duck farming on Long Island? The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/Big Duck. You are welcome to check how many pageviews the nominated article or articles got while on the front page (here's how, Big Duck), and the hook may be added to the statistics page after its run on the Main Page has completed. Finally, if you know of an interesting fact from another recently created article, then please feel free to suggest it on the Did you know talk page.

Complex/Rational 00:02, 19 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

DYK for Domestic duck

On 19 July 2024, Did you know was updated with a fact from the article Domestic duck, which you recently created, substantially expanded, or brought to good article status. The fact was ... that a big duck (pictured) helped promote duck farming on Long Island? The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/Big Duck. You are welcome to check how many pageviews the nominated article or articles got while on the front page (here's how, Domestic duck), and the hook may be added to the statistics page after its run on the Main Page has completed. Finally, if you know of an interesting fact from another recently created article, then please feel free to suggest it on the Did you know talk page.

Complex/Rational 00:02, 19 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for the ping

... to the Klingenberg hook change. I am not happy that the time frame was removed because I believe that "divided Europe" meant a different thing in the 1970s Cold War than it would in the 2010s, - why omit that context? -- Gerda Arendt (talk) 17:44, 21 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The goal of a hook is to pique the reader's interest, not tell them every detail. I'd like to keep the shorter version, but if you insist, I'll put it back. RoySmith (talk) 17:48, 21 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Exactly, and I tried to say that but was obviously not understood. Trying harder: the "divided Europe" thingy is more interesting in the context of the 1970s, so would pique the reader's interest more in my humble opinion. We do have readers who know a bit about history, I hope, and should not exclude them. This person recently died, and found interest already, - I just hoped that DYK could add to knowledge about him, not only for those who click but also the large majority who don't. I can't help thinking that the best pique would be his image. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 18:15, 21 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Done. RoySmith (talk) 18:18, 21 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 22 July 2024

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