Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Wiki Syntax/archive01

message: Every page says that "Fix those 5 problems with bad syntax". I'd rather use good or appropriate one :-) - Skysmith 07:56, 10 Nov 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Bad syntax

message: I love the Please return the favour by clicking here to fix someone else's Wiki Syntax innovation, which seems to work well. Mind, I'd like to see your Data Protection registration for the Thank You to Contributors list ... I have a sneaking suspicion that the names will be dragooned into later projects, having shown themselves susceptible to this sort of appeal ;) --Tagishsimon (talk)
*Maybe we need to start a Wedipedia:Do Not Call list? --pjf 02:38, 11 Nov 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Good marketing, dude

message: It would also be good to replaces all those double hyphens in the Wikipedia articles with proper dashes. I'm not sure where to suggest this or how to start, but this seems a good place. Shantavira 10:52, 11 Nov 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Dashes

message: I have come across something whilst working on the double-quotes sections. I have seen the unclosed This article incorporates text from the public domain 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica. I think it's better to replace that line with  which results in This article incorporates text from the public domain 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica. and also lists the article in the 1911 Britannica category. I have taken it upon myself to add the info to each of the remaining double-quotes pages. --Martin TB 12:05, 11 Nov 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: 1911 Britannica

message: When I edited Varda, Greece for unclosed bold text, I found an unclosed  block that narrowed the rest of the page, and character entities without the final semicolons, which are also found on many pages for Japanese towns. Can these be searched for? Susvolans 12:00, 15 Nov 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Hi.  This was the subject of a bot request by me.  See the discussion at Wikipedia:Bot_requests#Simple_regex_bot.3F_2, which led to this offline report about the ² malformed entity: User:Topbanana/Reports/This article contains a malformed HTML entity.  I don't know if you want to go fix this by hand, I would think its something a bot would be suited for.  Hope this helps.  --ChrisRuvolo 10:55, 18 Nov 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Good stuff - That works out really well, because I've now added something to report on unclosed or unopened div tags (these problems will be listed in the upcoming third batch). So between this and Topbanana's reports, this should catch both of these types of problems. All the best, Nickj 21:49, 22 Nov 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Cool.  You should note that this iteration of the report only shows malformed sup2 entities.  lt, gt, amp, nbsp, mdash, sup1, sup3, and numeric entities (eg. Α) should also be checked (I expect those to be the most common).  Checking for a missing leading ampersand might also be useful.  Hope this has been helpful.  Thanks.  --ChrisRuvolo 22:38, 24 Nov 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Some more things to check 

message: I've noticed a lot of changes recently closing italicization marks () that I use for endline comments in pseudocode. I actually left them unclosed on purpose, letting the end-of-line close them — should I avoid doing this? Deco 20:36, 15 Nov 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree that using a single  at the beginning of a line or paragraph to italicise the whole of it, which a lot of the double quote issues are, is not entirely obviously wrong. Susvolans 09:26, 16 Nov 2004 (UTC)

text: But Wilmot N. Hess contained a line like that and it was wrong. Susvolans 11:05, 17 Nov 2004 (UTC)

text: The problem with this is when someone later appends text which shouldn't be italicised - it's main problem for filmographies - names of films on separate lines with someone later adding year, comment, link etc to the same line, without closing the italicisation. JohnyDog 15:45, 17 Nov 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: But in end-line comments, the comment always extends to the end of the line. Any added text would be part of the comment, and so should be italicized. This doesn't apply here. Deco 18:33, 17 Nov 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes, unfortunately we cannot automatically distinguish between cases where it's left on purpose and where not (afaik that is). Any ideas how to solve this ? - JohnyDog 20:21, 17 Nov 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: I suppose not; in the case of standard wikicode, it suffices to exclude unclosed  marks which are immediately followed by //. But you already got most of them anyway. Deco 03:36, 18 Nov 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Wikicode comments 

message: I think your algorithm is finding false positives in those situations where a user chooses to itemize arguments or details.  For example, at Bee learning and communication, someone wrote "The primary lines of evidence used by the odor plume advocates are 1) clinical experiments with odorless sugar sources which show that worker bees are unable to recruit to those sources and 2) logical difficulties of a small-scale dance..."  Wrp103 followed your instructions and changed those to "(1)..." and "(2)...".  This may be a small point, but it is stylistically incorrect.  Surrounding the number on both sides indicates a footnote, not a segmented argument.
I imagine that this is a rare problem.  In many situations, the segmented arguments can be displayed as either a bulleted or numbered list.  However, there are some articles where that layout just does not make sense.  Please do not arbitrarily close the parentheses unless it really is a grammatical mistake.  Thanks.  Rossami (talk) 12:18, 19 Nov 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Thank you for the feedback, and point taken: I've updated the directions for closing parentheses to clarify that this type of use is grammatically OK, and to encourage people to err on the side of caution if in doubt. All the best, Nickj 05:49, 20 Nov 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  inappropriate closing of ")" 

message: It appears that the string ]]) is causing the software to pick up an unclosed "(". For instance, the string and John (who was a pilot) gained fame will complain of an unclosed opening parenthesis. grendel|khan 07:14, 2004 Nov 20 (UTC)
* No worries, I'll certainly look into it, but can I please get the names of one or more example articles which are exhibiting this problem? All the best, Nickj 10:24, 20 Nov 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  False positives 

message: Will the next run search the Category: and Template: namespaces? Susvolans 13:17, 22 Nov 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Category pages are just like normal article pages, except that below the normal  text is an autogenerated list of subcategories and articles in the category.  It would be useful to check for syntax errors in normal text as much as anywhere else.  The only code changes I'm aware of would be that you would have to put an extra : in front of the link when making up the Wiki Syntax pages.  If it's not a big coding job, Nickj, please include them. JesseW 02:24, 25 Nov 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Categories and templates 

message: The third batch has commenced, using the database dump from yesterday. Currently there are only redirect problems listed, namely:
* 1 page of redirects that appear to have non-standard redirect syntax.
* 14 pages of redirects that appear to either be double-redirects, or redirects to non-existent pages.
These two categories are new to this run. Lists for the other categories are being generated now, and will be added once they're finished - if all goes smoothly, it should take around 34 hours for this happen. All the best, Nickj 06:06, 28 Nov 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Third batch commencing 

message: In response to Nick's call: I will produce a more extensive list of html errors with my Wikipedia to TomeRaider conversion script, with some documentation, and think about the feasibility of a stripped down version of the script for validation purposes only.
It would be nice if a tool and docu set could easibly be applied to other Wikipedias as well. Compare the bot for finding interwiki links, which runs on many Wikipedias now. 
Is there a method/procedure to flag warnings as 'false positives', so that they do not reappear in consecutive runs? Erik Zachte 10:27, 1 Dec 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Hi Erik, That sounds great - the first list of your HTML table attribute problems was completed within 5 days, and was almost all done by Diberri. Also, I agree it would be good to have tools that apply to other Wiki's - TB's scripts are readily available, whilst the scripts I'm using are still in flux (combines about 3 projects into one), so they're definitely not ready for general release yet. For false positives, we don't currently have a systematic way of flagging these. To date I've been lucky in that the problems that are being detected are either a) real, and can be fixed in the article b) not real, but are arguably incorrect anyway, and can be surrounded with nowiki tags to prevent future detection c) are due to bugs in the software, in which case the software is fixed, or d) are due to parentheses, which I think I'll not check in future runs. All the best, -- Nickj 05:09, 10 Dec 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Unified Validation Project 

message: The square bracket pages often included the section name as part of the URL, so that when you clicked on the link, it would position you to the section with the problem.  Since starting on the parens section, I noticed that this doesn't do that.  It was a great help, and if you could add that to this section, it would make life easier. ;^) wrp103 (Bill Pringle)  - Talk 05:12, 22 Dec 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: I know what you mean ... the sections markers were added for the third & fourth runs - the trouble is that the parentheses lists were generated as a one-off between the second and third runs, before the Wiki Syntax Project knew about section markers, so I just don't have section information for those lists, otherwise I would add it :( Sorry. -- All the best, Nickj (t) 05:53, 22 Dec 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: URLs with Section specified?

message: can you please add a summary of the change instead of just saying "fixed wiki syntax"?   say "[[test] --> test Fix wikilink syntax blah blah blah".  Then we don't have to go to each article to search every small thing you changed to find bad "fixes". - Omegatron 04:55, Mar 12, 2005 (UTC)
Can you please be more specific about what we did that was bad? For example, is there a particular error that we're misdetecting? If so, please let me know. Please realise that we're not perfect, but we're honestly not trying to introduce problems.
With the current batch, there's just two types of errors listed at the moment, namely:
* Redirects that had slightly bad syntax (e.g. "#REDIRECT([[Blah)", instead of "#REDIRECT Blah"; For these the suggested summary is "Fix Redirect Syntax".
* Redirects that were double redirects (e.g. A → B → C, which gets changed to A → C); For these the suggested summary is "Fix Double Redirect".
Which one of these was wrong? They're both fairly straightforward transformations, and hopefully neither should introduce new errors (but for example in the double-redirect case, if it was wrong for A to redirect B, and we then change A to redirect to C, then the source of the error was that A redirected to B, not that we changed A to redirect to C). -- All the best, Nickj (t) 07:42, 12 Mar 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  please use the edit summary 

message: I've hit a wall on Wikipedia:WikiProject Wiki Syntax/square-brackets-001.txt, regarding pages containing several multi-line image descriptions, such as Apollodotus I, Apollodotus II and Apollophanes.  I doubt that squashing these descriptions into a single line would be an acceptable solution.  Would it therefore be alright to consider these pages "fixed", and rip them out accordingly?  Fbriere 20:03, 23 Mar 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: As long as this is corrected before the next run; otherwise, we'll be removing them from the list over and over...  (Especially since they end up appearing twice; I had to get rid of something like 15—20 occurences on 001.)  Fbriere 00:38, 24 Mar 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Long image descriptions -- OK to remove? 

message: This seems to be valid syntax for opening and closing a comment, i.e.

and should probably be ignored, as they're valid and a complete waste of time to "fix".
--Jshadias 23:07, 23 Mar 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: eh, I'll just change them when I come across them. As long as it's uncommon it's not a huge deal. --Jshadias 14:36, 24 Mar 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  &lt;!--&gt; 

message: The following appears on several articles:
:recipient of the Victoria Cross, the highest and most prestigious award for gallantry in the face of the enemy that can be awarded to [[United Kingdom|British] and Commonwealth forces.
Would it be possible to create a bot to take care of these?  (Though I notice Google only shows 20 such articles.  If this is accurate, I guess manual work would still be cheaper...)
: Probably not worth adding a bot for this by a long shot. Getting permission to run and operate a bot is a political process (see Wikipedia:Bots). You need to two levels of permission / non-objection (one from en, one from meta). The burden of proof that the bot is non-harmful is on the author. Many more regulations on bots have been discussed and may be added at some point. For 20 articles, it's (IMHO) really really really not even remotely worth the grief, hassle, and red tape. -- All the best, Nickj (t) 01:26, 24 Mar 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  [[Victoria Cross]] recipients 

message: This is a very cool project, but...
It's commonly accepted in software development that it's a lot cheaper to fix a bug before the product is released than to release it and then have to go back and fix problems.  It seems we would do well to do this sort of syntax checking right on the edit page (make it part of the "Show preview" function) instead of finding them in batch mode later.  --RoySmith 01:02, 26 Mar 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree. The functions that provide the Wiki Syntax checking are in the #Source code section above (just added licensing to indicate that they're under the GPL), and I plan to release a very slightly updated version of those functions soon. I would like the see these incorporated into MediaWiki in some way (e.g. either a "Check Wiki Syntax" link in the "toolbox" section, or as part of "Show preview"), as the GPL licensing would allow this, and I encourage the MediaWiki developers to add this. Even with this though, there are still going to be errors that need to be cleaned up in batch mode, but it would be an improvement. -- All the best, Nickj (t) 04:27, 26 Mar 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  QC instead of ship-and-fix? 

message: The  syntax for templates is deprecated as of 1.5 where  will simply transclude Template:Msg:foo instead of Template:Foo, here's a list of pages from the 2005-03-09 dump that still use the syntax:
* msg001.
* msg002.
* msg003.
* msg004.
* msg005.
* msg006.
* msg007.
* msg008.
:—Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 02:05, 2005 May 15 (UTC)
:In that list there are a lot of user pages, talk pages, and pages that have nowiki around the msg template.  Should we just delete those out of your list or what? --Kenyon 05:08, May 16, 2005 (UTC)
:: Looks like a bot has been written / is being written to resolve these (i.e. it now has an SEP field around it) -- All the best, Nickj (t) 02:55, 3 Jun 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  msg: links 

message: The one left on Wikipedia:WikiProject Wiki Syntax/div-tags-000.txt is Main Page/French, and it looks too hard to do by hand.  So if anybody has a good HTML fixing program to use on that, go ahead.  Or I suppose we could just forget about that page, since it seems to be dead (last edit was Dec 14, 2004). --Kenyon 04:15, May 16, 2005 (UTC)
: I had a go at it, hope it's fixed now, but if it's not I guess we'll know because it'll turn up in the next batch. ;-)   -- All the best, Nickj (t) 02:55, 3 Jun 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  one left on div-tags-000 

message: Is this at all necessary? Moving the links of the entries to a completely different table and also striking them out. I could see just keeping them in the one table and strikinging them out, or maybe moving them to a separate table, but not both. I'd like to join the two tables and keep the strike-outs. Anyone have an opinion on the matter? – Quoth 09:59, 20 May 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I don't feel too strongly about it, but by having a separate table, plus striking out, it makes sure that the uncompleted stuff is quite visible and all grouped together, and by also striking completed pages out it makes it doubly-clear that those things are already done (in case people are just skim-reading). (In other words: Yes, it is redundant, but maybe the redundancy is sometimes helpful). -- All the best, Nickj (t) 02:55, 3 Jun 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Project page "Completed pages" table 

message: Hello,
I've generated another list of double redirects as of the 20050516 database dump at User:triddle/double_redirect/20050516. I did not want to edit the project page since I'm not a member of this project. Perhaps someone else knows the best way to try to integrate my list with this project? Thanks. Triddle 21:18, Jun 23, 2005 (UTC)
: Hi Triddle, Go for it! Please feel free to edit away to add your double redirect list. I'm not precious about what people list (as long as it's relevant, which this clearly is), and I tend to be pretty slack about running the current script that finds the syntax problems and generates the lists (typically I run it once every 2 or 3 months), so any help with producing up-to-date lists is more than welcome. In terms of integrating them, maybe just edit the pages (example) and add the updated lists (if you're happy to do this), and update the main page accordingly. Also, please be sure to add yourself to the "credits - software" section of the page. Add if you're feeling like doing some other extra stuff, two related things that may interest you are the listing of malformatted redirects, and broken redirects (i.e. redirects that point to something which isn't there). (e.g. to illustrate, here's an old example that's already been fixed up). The trick with the malformed ones is just applying a regex to all redirects and listing what doesn't match, and the main trick with the second is that people sometimes include a # in their redirect targets, so everything after the # has to be ignored. All the best, Nickj (t) 02:21, 27 Jun 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  New double redirect cleanup project 

message: Hello,
I've been getting pretty good at analyzing the dump files with perl and getting useful stuff done. I am curious if I could help work with this project? How are you preparing your lists? If you are having problems beating really hard on SQL databases then I might be able to help by having it done through analysis of the dump files. Let me know if you think I can help. Triddle 06:42, Jun 26, 2005 (UTC)
: Absolutely you can help! The current problem finding script is a serious mess, as it integrates three different projects into the one script (suggester.php), so it lacks the clean separation that it really should have (and I tend not to have the time to do anything with it for extended periods, including add the separation that it really requires). It's also got quite slow (probably as a result of doing too much at once, plus I think I've maxed out the memory on the box I'm using, so it's starting to thrash to disk), taking now around 7 or 8 days to do a complete run. The current code is in PHP, but a cleaner and quicker reimplementation (in any language, such as perl) would be a very good thing. You can get the current source code here.  This includes the source code for preparing the lists (in output_malformed_pages.php). All the best, Nickj (t) 02:21, 27 Jun 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Working together? 

message: What was the script used to generate the vast lists of edit links for this project?  It's needed desperately at WikiProject Disambiguation. --Smack (talk) 00:03, 24 July 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Smack - read this page. JesseW 16:22, 24 July 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks.  I didn't figure to look there :) --Smack (talk) 02:55, 25 July 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: You want either of the output_*.php files from the ZIP file. They both generate a series of text files that can then be copied and pasted straight into the Wikipedia as lists of things that need doing. (I never got around to writing a bot to upload the files without human intervention). If you're suggesting disambiguations then probably the most similar file will be output_malformed_pages.php - you probably want the "outputToFile" function, and the global defines, and then delete the rest of the file, and then go from there to add the stuff that's specific to disambiguations. Hope that helps. All the best -- Nickj (t) 06:49, 30 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  The edit suggestor bot