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Thank you for your work on my test on Template:Infobox settlement/sandbox (and your hard work elsewhere). If we can get this to work, and we can get consensus at the talk page, then we could add almost 1/2 million good descriptions at once!

A few things: is it possible to add an override (i.e. if someone manually adds a "short description" template or magic word, it overrides the automatic one from the infobox?). And is it possible to start the description with a capital ("Village" instead of "village")? For the second I think there is an easy magic word, for the first some real magic may be needed :-) Fram (talk) 14:36, 13 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

• The second one, I have been thinking about that - not sure - the last instance seems to override, so the short description would need to be below the infobox settlement. For the second one there is indeed a magic word - though I think it should be added to {{short description}} instead Galobtter (pingó mió) 14:41, 13 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

  I rather like this concept. I tested the use of several short descriptions in an article some time ago, and in every case the last one was the one that displayed. They were all in the body text, so I don't know if this also applies to a template in another template like an infobox. My tests did not use the API call, just css, so no guarantee that they would apply to an external call. · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 04:16, 14 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Pretty sure it works that way. I mean, that is the only sensible way to handle duplicate magic words..IIRC with {{DISPLAYTITLE}} the last one takes effect Galobtter (pingó mió) 05:49, 14 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I've been looking over your contributions.

I'm impressed.

I wasn't too happy at first with your nomination of the portals for deletion. But, they are in a serious state of neglect, and fixing them will be quite a project. I can see why you thought it best to get rid of them. On the bright side, the discussion has brought supporters and others of talent out of the woodwork, and that has been amazing, and completely makes up for any initial dissatisfaction I may have had. I'll be mining that discussion for contacts from both sides of the debate for months. Plenty of interesting people I want to meet. Including you.

Hi. I'm The Transhumanist.

My interest in portals is peripheral. I worked on them years ago, but saw that developing and maintaining them as Main page correlates for subjects manually was a major time sink, and abandoned all the ones I created, leaving them as static resource pages. So, why am I concerned about Portals? Because they are one of Wikipedia's navigation systems, each a sister project to each other. When one gets attacked, it puts the others in potential danger (see domino effect). Look at Joe's comments in your RfC.

If outlines ever disappeared from Wikipedia, so would I.

Who knows who has major future plans for the portals, or who are struggling to keep them alive because they see potential that others do not? But, the RfC is reminiscent of the disregard or lack of respect RfC'ers and deletion nominators showed me when I was trying to establish the outline system. See:

• Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)/Archive 64#"Outlines"
• Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Archive193#Shadow Wikipedia
• Wikipedia talk:Outlines#Failed
• Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Contents/Outlines
• Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)/Archive 78#RfC: Elimination of outline articles

Oh, that was stressful, which I'm sure many of the portal supporters are feeling now. For me, it's deja vu. Outlines have come a long way since then, but they still have a long ways to go. My goal is 10,000 of them, but at 100 per year, that would take 100 years. So, I've switched over to programming in order to build tools to automate their construction and maintenance. Though, this won't happen overnight.

But, more importantly than being a sister system, the portals have topic lists that I would like to harvest for the outline system. Computer programs can't make those very well (yet), but I am in the process of building scripts to convert the data formats. Those won't do me much good if the pages I wish to convert disappear. Even those portal topic pages that simply transclude navigation templates, serve to identify those templates as topic lists, saving me from having to differentiate them from all the other templates in template space. Yes, I'm building scripts to convert template topic formats too.

Many of the support areas of Wikipedia are suffering from lack of volunteer labor, and it doesn't look like the needed volunteers will become available, ever. That means, we either trim away what we can't develop and maintain, or we automate. I prefer the latter. Due to technology, all the support systems of Wikipedia have an incredible amount of potential. It is impossible to know which ones will inspire future talent and leapfrog the others. And so, I get concerned when people want to make them disappear. In the meantime, each has their own strengths and weaknesses. Yes, the portals are in need of work. But it doesn't have to be human work.

But, enough about portals. Let's move on to other more interesting things: Tech.

I noticed you are technically oriented, and that your common.js is packed. You're a technophile! And perhaps a Wikipediholic. Pleased to meet you.

Many of the cool tricks and techniques for using Wikipedia have been collected by the TOTD department. My favorite is the one that hangs a totd template at the bottom of the page, like this: ^[1]

I saw that you modified a script. How well do you know JavaScript?

I recently created a user script I'm hoping you will take a look at. It's one of the conversion programs I mentioned above, designed to help build outlines and other lists. But, I've turned it into a generally useful search results enhancer as well. It's called SearchSuite. Let me know what you think of it. Any and all feedback is welcome.

I noticed you are not registered to use AWB. AWB is a Windows program. Are you on a Mac or Linux? If so, JWB is a pretty good alternative. AWB is one of the most powerful tools available to Wikipedia editors. It's a list-maker, auto-page-loader, and semi-automated stream editor with extensive search/replace support, including regex. It also has a list comparer and WP database scanner. And more. You will probably love it. I used its prepend feature to post the 1500 deletion discussion notices.

While over at Fram's talk page, I spotted your post about Short descriptions, and sent PBSouthwood a heads up. He and I are hoping those will be able to be utilized via scripts for developing outlines. Create half a million of them? I'd like to know how you foresee doing that. Very cool.

I look forward to your replies. And if you have any questions related to Wikipedia, please feel free to ask.    — The Transhumanist   13:27, 14 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Update on outline automation

Here's an update I wrote for someone, which explains things in a bit more detail...

I'm learning JavaScript, so I can automate outline construction and maintenance.

The goal: full automation. That's hard. Within easier reach are interactive tools that can assist editors and increase their productivity: semi-automation.

One approach I've been working on is magical vision for editors who work on outlines. No, not special glasses, but changing how Wikipedia is presented on the screen so that anything that has built-in outline structure, they see as outline material. Shown in wikiformat, without going into an editor first, right there on the screen. From where they can copy and paste it into a wiki editor.

Outline material abounds on Wikipedia all over the place. It's just not noticed as such by most, because it is formatted differently. As you know, outlines are trees, and trees have branches. Those branches can themselves be outlines (i.e., have more branches), or they can be straight lists.

Straight lists are outline material?

A single outline can include many straight lists.

One of the places to find straight lists on Wikipedia are search results. No branches. Just a list of destinations. But cluttered with lots of extraneous data.

So, I started experimenting with reformatting search results, to convert them to a form that is easy to copy/paste.

By the time I was done, it wasn't just useful for outline developers. It was generally useful.

It's a user script called SearchSuite.

It's got several features that modify search results, and each is given a menu item that serves as its on/off switch. Each can work on the output of the others (that was a pain), and the script remembers the setting of each switch between searches. Once you turn a feature on, it stays on. Until you turn it off.

One of the features is sort. Another strips out details, giving you a single-spaced list (showing a lot more results on the screen, which is much faster to browse). Another toggles the sister project results. And another toggles those sometimes annoying redirect/category-based results. The outline developer's feature wikifies the entries, though sort is quite useful to them as well.

Further comments...

So, that's the conversion script for search results. What other areas are slated for conversion?

Well, I'm done writing the conversion scripts for Special:Allpages with prefix, Wikipedia Books, and Categories. I'm about half done with the ones on CatTree, and nav templates (navigation footers and sidebars). Those last two are proving much harder, and are only partially operational.

I've not yet started on All pages, indices, infoboxes, portal topic lists (so many formats), what links here, tables, embedded lists, or article prose content.

Where is this heading?

Somewhere along the way, I'll put them (except article prose) on a switch (the same switch). I think I can do that without combining them into the same script, but they'll all be bundled together in some way at some point (to allow for a single install).

Then, outline developers can click the menu item to instantly see whatever outline material is on whatever page they are on, in a form they can easily transfer. Some will do it the other way around: leave them on, and turn them off when they want to see wikipedia in the normal view. (Right now, they are not on a switch, so I see the outline view all the time).

And as I did with SearchSuite, I'll add other functionality as well, for general users.

Does any of this make sense?

I figure that as I learn more about programming, I'll progress to higher levels of automation.

I've looked for other programmers to get involved, to no avail. So I'm pretty much on my own on this project.

I hope you've found this interesting. Sincerely,    — The Transhumanist   13:27, 14 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

You need to notify every WikiProject linked from the talk page of every portal (via the project banners at the top of those talk pages) of this discussion since you're trying to get every portal deleted. Yes, that's a lot of projects, but you must make sure that every project is aware of them. I only found out what you were doing because someone else left a notice on the WT:JA page. Please make sure you notify every project affected by this discussion. ···日本穣 · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe · Join WP Japan! 07:10, 16 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

• There isn't any requirement to notify WikiProjects. I think a notice on every portal page is enough, though you or anyone else can notify all the wikiprojects. Galobtter (pingó mió) 07:35, 16 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • No, there isn't a requirement but it is an accepted practice that can be taken into account by the closing admin. If this were some small nomination then yeah it might be overlooked or forgiven, but this one in particular has large scale effects throughout Wikipedia. Projects use portal pages as a way to draw in possible new members, they are connected. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 14:24, 16 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
    • I wouldn't say most projects really care about the portal - the ones I know of I wouldn't think so at-least. It is accepted practice when it clearly relates to one or a few projects; I wouldn't think the same for these sort of wider RfC's. There isn't a notice for far more important ACTRIAl on every wikiproject just because each wikiproject's pages will be subject to autoconfirmed..same with wikidata in infoboxes RfC et al. People who do care about portals probably have at-least one portal page watchlisted. I wouldn't consider it to have large scale effects on Wikipedia. This is a widely advertised RfC (apparently now it is on every article bot alerts, so it is receiving as much notice as the average deletion discussion to each wikiproject, which seems appropiate to me, for the level of importance to each project). Not that it matters anyhow, since the discussion is certainly a No consensus one, with only the closing statement to be written Galobtter (pingó mió) 14:37, 16 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

• A question: Did you check archives from Wikipedia:Voting and Wikipedia:Survey (disambiguation) concerning P:WP and Portals in general? I did this for de:WP. The resuls can be seen in de:Kategorie:Wikipedia:Entwicklungsgeschichte von Redaktionen Portalen und Wikipediaprojekten. We shortly had a nomination to delete a portal and found that it is impossible. Greets --Ｔｏｍ (talk) 15:08, 20 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

  If you mean did I check past discussions, I did do a quick look through - one rfc was on deprecating featured portals, apart from that I don't think anything major was there in the past few years at-least. Galobtter (pingó mió) 15:11, 20 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

No I mean the early times of the project. The old RFC's (or similar consensus) are still valid if I am not wrong. Best --Ｔｏｍ (talk) 15:16, 20 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Not really. They would be; any consensuses that are there should be at Wikipedia:Portal_guidelines. I see this interesting discussion from 7 years ago.. Galobtter (pingó mió) 15:19, 20 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose. There is no expiration date for consensus. Disussions may have been a lot - we have the same in de:WP. Completed Polls are IHMO still valid. --Ｔｏｍ (talk) 15:24, 20 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Indeed there is no expiration date; just saying I'd expect any consensuses to make it into the guideline. Galobtter (pingó mió) 15:26, 20 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

OK ==> no expiration date for consensus. You can see that Portal:Contents is a central point of wikipedia? All the other little Portals grew up later. Sorrowfully many were not supported very well. Nevertheless[1] ... I hope you understood this historically grown project has it's surprising sites ;-) Best --Ｔｏｍ (talk) 15:33, 20 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Module:Plain text has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the module's entry on the Templates for discussion page. {{3x|p}}ery (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 17:24, 16 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Hello,

There will be some changes to the way wikitext is parsed during the next few weeks. It will affect all namespaces. You can see a list of pages that may display incorrectly at Special:LintErrors. Since most of the easy problems have already been solved at the English Wikipedia, I am specifically contacting tech-savvy editors such as yourself with this one-time message, in the hope that you will be able to investigate the remaining high-priority pages during the next month.

There are approximately 10,000 articles (and many more non-article pages) with high-priority errors. The most important ones are the articles with misnested tags and table problems. Some of these involve templates, such as infoboxes, or the way the template is used in the article. In some cases, the "error" is a minor, unimportant difference in the visual appearance. In other cases, the results are undesirable. You can see a before-and-after comparison of any article by adding ?action=parsermigration-edit to the end of a link, like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Foss?action=parsermigration-edit (which shows a difference in how {{infobox ship}} is parsed).

If you are interested in helping with this project, please see Wikipedia:Linter. There are also some basic instructions (and links to even more information) at https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-ambassadors/2018-April/001836.html You can also leave a note at WT:Linter if you have questions.

Thank you for all the good things you do for the English Wikipedia. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:18, 19 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]