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Please help page Miracle (Paula Seling and Ovi song)
Hello, I saw that you help to add a cover for Paula and Seling song page in 2010, Playing with fire, please cand you put this single official cover to this page Miracle (Paula Seling and Ovi song), and if you can, help edit the page, describing the composition, critical reception.
Thanks a lot, I speak in the name of Paula manager, means a lot for us. Miracle Official Image 2A02:2F0E:D25F:FFFF:0:0:4F74:D76D (talk) — Preceding undated comment added 20:52, 3 March 2014 (UTC)
Incorrect correction for "institution"
I noticed an incorrect spelling correction to Fort Worth, Texas. diff. The bot changed "instiution" to "istitution" when I believe it should have become "institution". :)
Thanks for a great bot! --Hebisddave (talk) 17:54, 9 January 2008 (UTC)
Character names
One possible problem with the bot - names could be considered "mispellings" of the words that the bot "fixes". For example, on one of the recent pages, it edited an octopus-creature's name from "Octogon" to "Octagon". I have no idea how to program it to do so, but you should be able to solve this problem by having the bot avoid capitalized words.Not even Mr. Lister's Koromon survived intact. 01:33, 13 January 2008 (UTC)
- Hi KrytenKoro, sorry about that miscorrection. The problem with your suggestion is that you frequently get capitalised words that are misspelled too, so I can't just ignore capitalised words in general. However, I will add an exception for 'Octogon' to prevent it from happening again. Cheers, CmdrObot (talk) 21:20, 13 January 2008 (UTC)
List of corrections?
Is there a publicly viewable list of the corrections that CmdrObot makes? I've run across some indefinite article mix-ups that irritate me ("an ewe"—though be careful of the Ewe, "an unique", "an unicorn", "an European", and so on), but I don't know whether to suggest them here as I've just done or whether this bot is already taking care of it and will get around to them sooner or later. —Bkell (talk) 06:18, 15 January 2008 (UTC)
- Oh, ha, if I would just take the time to look in the archives I see there's a link to User:CmdrObot/SpellList.py. This seems to have only spelling corrections, though, unless I just don't understand how it works. —Bkell (talk) 06:22, 15 January 2008 (UTC)
- Hi Brian, thanks for your interest. The bot uses several different strategies for attempting to correct articles. The first one is to perform a word-by-word search and replace on the article using the misspellings in SpellList.py. Another one is to use a list of regular expressions to handle some of the trickier cases that span multiple words or may be correct depending on the surrounding context. Finally, the bot uses a number of ad-hoc routines to deal with things such as 'broken' links (eg ones like http://http://foo.com, or http:////foo.com); external links being used instead of wikilinks; some specific uses of greengrocers' apostrophes and so on. The bot's handling of a/an mismatches is one of these ad-hoc routines.
- The routine assumes that 'a' followed by a word beginning with a vowel is incorrect, as is 'an' followed by a word beginning with a consonant. Obviously there are numerous exceptions to this--in English 'eu' words and 'h' words are common examples, as are acronyms such as 'MRI' and 'XML'. Just to make life a little more exciting, 'a' and 'an' play a different role in French, Spanish and German. I get the bot to check against a list of a few hundred of these common exceptions before trying to make any changes, and this keeps the false-positives down to a tolerable level.
- Thanks for making me explain this, BTW, because as a result of doing so, I've realised there's a mistake in the bot. It correctly ignores things like 'an XML', but I forgot to handle the converse: it doesn't try to correct 'a XML'. I guess that gives me something to work on this evening :). Cheers, CmdrObot (talk) 14:00, 15 January 2008 (UTC)
Feature request: Alphabetizing 'see also' sections and 'disambiguation' pages
It would be useful if your bot could automatically alphabetize 'see also' sections and disambiguation pages. Disambiguation pages would be a little more complicated on account of the subheadings - each subheading should probably be in the proper alphabetical order and each item under each subheading should also. Do you think this is doable? ----Seans Potato Business 14:38, 15 January 2008 (UTC)
An LLC?
Recently the bot made a correction on Articles of Organization. It changed "a LLC" to "an LLC". Although "An El El See" sounds better when spoken, I believe it is still "A LLC" since "L" is not a vowel. -- Emana (Talk) 20:39, 22 January 2008 (UTC)
- Hi Emana, thanks for your comment. If you look at the A and an article though, you can see that current English usage is to use "an" when the following noun begins with a vowel sound. Cheers, CmdrObot (talk) 21:40, 22 January 2008 (UTC)
- But I don't think the "Y" rule should apply in this case where the bot changed it from "an unanimous"→to "a unanimous". After all it's not ynanimous is it? But for clarity I rewrote the sentence. 08:43, 29 February 2008 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 66.39.171.19 (talk)
"A NES" versus "An NES"
Regarding this edit, it is well-supported that the acronym can be pronounced "en-ee-es", "ness", "nezz", and even perhaps "Nintendo"; there is certainly no consensus on the issue. The same situation arises with SNES (where it is even mentioned and sourced); my solution for that article was to avoid using the indefinite article completely in connection with the abbreviation. Anomie⚔ 01:31, 25 January 2008 (UTC)
An urinalysis
See [1]. It doesn't sound right to me, so I'll change it back. Not sure if the bot requires a tweak or if this was an isolated incident (or if I've just been saying it wrong these many years). --Joelmills (talk) 03:51, 25 January 2008 (UTC)
'An RAAF'
This bot is replacing mentions of 'a RAAF' [Royal Australian Air Force] to 'an RAAF' (as one example: [2]. This is not grammatically correct - can you please stop it doing this? Thanks, --Nick Dowling (talk) 02:50, 26 January 2008 (UTC)
- Hi Nick. Could you tell me how this isn't correct? If you look at A and an it talks about how an and a are used in English. The acronym is pronounced 'Or aye aye eff' right?
- Cheers, CmdrObot (talk) 02:57, 26 January 2008 (UTC)
- The acronym is normally pronounced 'r double aye eff' or 'raff'. I've read an awful lot of Australian military history and have never seen a reference to 'an RAAF' thing. --Nick Dowling (talk) 05:22, 26 January 2008 (UTC)
- Hi Nick, since it's usually written 'a RAAF', I'll defer to convention and get my bot to leave it alone. You've got to admit that it doesn't quite sound right though. In computer networking, there's a set of standards documents called RFCs (Requests For Comment), and one of those documents will be referred to as 'an RFC', rather than 'a RFC' because in the latter there's an awkward stop between the 'A' and the 'R', whereas 'An R' rolls off the tongue more easily. Anyhow, thanks for the feedback, and please let me know if the bot causes you any other problems. Cheers, CmdrObot (talk) 19:38, 26 January 2008 (UTC)
- As Nick said, it's usually an acronym pronounced "raff", though often an initialism pronounced "are-double-ay-eff".
- So, in conversation you hear both "it's a raff base" and "that's an are-double-ay-eff plane". (ay as in hay)
- However, as Nick said, when written, I have only ever seen "a RAAF".
(I can't explain why, and now I've read the above, I will forever be uneasy about it!!)Pdfpdf (talk) 00:49, 2 February 2008 (UTC)- Rereading the above, I can see that the explanation is "a Royal". Pdfpdf (talk) 01:06, 2 February 2008 (UTC)
correcting refs
Regarding a recent edit to Grey-capped Warbler, CmdrObot corrected a sentence which was possibly misspelled (sp: an unique→a unique). While this may be correct (I always thought that an was used for words starting with vowels, interesting that I am wrong, must read about that) the correction was to a reference and the article cited had the error in the title, which was copy-pasted direct. I think our cites should match the cited work accurately, could CmdrObot flag changes to references sections for people who follow the articles to check the changes maybe? I'm guessing most mistakes in citations are editor errors here rather than in the initial cited work, and that this isn't massively important, but I thought I'd mention it. Sabine's Sunbird talk 01:34, 29 January 2008 (UTC)
- Hi Sabine, thanks for the feedback. You're completely right, I should be leaving references alone. I've added an exception to my bot so it won't try to miscorrect that title again. Your suggestion of flagging reference sections is an interesting one. I'll add it to my to do list :) Cheers, CmdrObot (talk) 01:44, 29 January 2008 (UTC)
peer review
I was wondering if you could take some time out of your schedule to head over to the Heroes (TV series) talkpage and give us an honest peer review. The page has gone through some major changes in the last few months, and it would be fantastic if a prominent editor/contributor like yourself, could head over and give us at the Heroes Wikiproject some sound opinion and ideas on improvements for the page. We have all worked very hard at improving the page, and we need great outside, reliable and trustworthy users to come over and help us improve. I you are interested in joining the peer review discussion with other prominent users/contributors, much like yourself, please follow the link. Thank you very much for your help and your continued effort to improve Wikipedia and its quality! Wikipedia:Peer review/Heroes (TV series)/archive2--Chrisisinchrist (talk) 05:58, 27 January 2008 (UTC)
an, again
Surely replacing "a Sc D" by "an Sc D" as the bot did on George G. Hall is wrong. --Bduke (talk) 02:30, 31 January 2008 (UTC)
The article for usurper is "a", not "an".
This was incorrectly changed in article Dragon Dance (novel).
Changes inside quotes?
Three questions: Your bot changed "U.K." to "UK"
- I was wondering why? (i.e. What's wrong with U.K.?)
- Of more interest to me: In this case, the "U.K." was inside a piece of quoted text, and hence, presumably, should have been left alone? (i.e. What's your POV for this sort of circumstance?)
- What about text inside <!-- -->?
Thanks, Pdfpdf (talk) 01:00, 2 February 2008 (UTC)
- Hi PDF, yes I probably should have left stuff inside quoted text alone. Could you tell me what article the bot edited so I can add it to my exception list? I added the U.K.→UK rule to my bot after this exchange with another user. Cheers, CmdrObot (talk) 16:22, 2 February 2008 (UTC)
- You definitely need to check that you are not altering quotations, as you did in spectral evidence. This should be addressed not through an exception list, but by checking whether the material is within quotation marks, for this will occur in hundreds of articles, and your changes may go uncorrected. - Nunh-huh 22:22, 3 February 2008 (UTC)
- I'm not certain what the programming difficulty is; it seems that double quotation marks are not part of Wiki markup, and so it should be possible to simply count quotation marks from the beginning of an article and know if you are in quoted text or not (odd number of quotation marks = you're in quoted text). And of course you'd have to allow for <blockquote></blockquote> as well. Not that I'd be surprised if I'm overlooking something. But I do think it's far, far better to leave errors uncorrected than to introduce new ones by "correcting" accurate quotations. - Nunh-huh 00:03, 4 February 2008 (UTC)
Sorry CmdrObot, but I'm afraid I am of a similar opinion to Nunh-huh. (i.e. it's far, far better to leave errors uncorrected than to introduce new ones)
Also, what about text inside <!-- -->?
And I thought of another situation: Citations. (e.g. If a citation says "U.K.", is that the same as a quotation, and should not be changed?)
Cheers, Pdfpdf (talk) 11:22, 4 February 2008 (UTC)
- Trust me, it's not simple to handle the general case, it really isn't. However, I have made some modifications to the bot that should cover some of the common cases. The bot now ignores
- Text inside a <blockquote> tag
- Text inside one of the 25 or so templates used explicitly for quoting (eg Template:cquote)
- Plain text with no wiki markup inside double quotes.
- Running this over a couple of thousand articles from a database dump, I see that the bot now ignores a few quoted corrections that it should have before, but also incorrectly misses a few things that it should have corrected. I can live with that tradeoff for now--it's not like wikipedia lacks for things that need to be corrected. Cheers, CmdrObot (talk) 19:45, 6 February 2008 (UTC)
RSTS
Hi... Your bot changed "a RSTS/E user..." to "an RSTS/E user...". But "RSTS" is pronounced as if it were a word, not letter by letter, so the previous text was correct. Could you add this to your exceptions? Thanks. Paul Koning (talk) 22:30, 6 February 2008 (UTC)
a MK -> an MK
Hello! I noticed in this edit that you changed "a MK 14 Mod 3 warshot torpedo" to "an MK 14 Mod 3 warshot torpedo". MK is an abbreviation for "mark", and generally if the above phrase were being read out loud you'd say "mark" instead of "em-kay", so "a MK 14" is preferable. TomTheHand (talk) 21:08, 11 February 2008 (UTC)
a/an AAA
Hi,
On this edit the bot replaced "a AAA" with "an AAA." Since "AAA" is pronounced "Triple-A", the preceeding "a" is correct. I thought I'd point this out so it could be fixed. -NatureBoyMD (talk) 21:55, 11 February 2008 (UTC)
SAS
In the SAS System and SAS Institute articles. SAS is historically pronounced "sass", so "a SAS" is correct, not "an SAS". Cheers, Metamusing (talk) 16:31, 22 February 2008 (UTC)
Change only clear cases? - bot suggestion
How about continuing to change articles before acronyms if the same article would be used when the acronym was treated as a word. When a different article would be used if the acronym was treated as a word, perhaps generate a list to be manually checked before automatically changed. This might increase the ratio of work saved to work generated for other editors. Thanks and Cheers, Metamusing (talk) 16:40, 22 February 2008 (UTC)
- Hi Meta. I'm not quite sure what you mean by 'treated as a word'. Do you mean check the acronym as if it were all lower case letters first?
- I think it might not be worth doing; the reason I've got a number of complaints so far is that this is my first sweep over wikipedia with the bot with acronym-checking code, so I've had to build up its exception list to 'teach' it all the cases I should leave alone. That sweep is almost finished now (and I've a big long exception list, most of it populated by things I could figure out for myself, but also with help from other editors like you for the things I didn't know). Also, after the sweep is done, I'll go back to my ordinary spell checking rather than focussing on a/an, so the number of time I come across a/an, let alone get it wrong, will go down quite substantially.
- Right, as if it were lower case letters. Thank you for your consideration. I'm glad you're trying to figure out for yourself if corrections are appropriate. Cheers, Metamusing (talk) 20:10, 23 February 2008 (UTC)
It would be better not to interfere with correct historical usage
The bot changed "an universal dictionary ..." in a quoted (and correct) title dating from 1704, to "a universal ...." (Lexicon technicum). (This one has been changed back along with other revisions.) It really would be better not to do that! Terry0051 (talk) 14:43, 23 February 2008 (UTC)
Correcting capitlisation
Would you be willing/able to have your bot adjust capitalisation of certain phrases? A common problem that seems to be sweeping Wikipedia at the moment is inappropriate capitlisation of the full-form of phrases that also have frequently-used acronyms. Take for example, suppressor of cytokine signaling proteins (SOCS); people assume that because SOCS is written in capitals, the first letter of each word of the full-form is also written in uppercase. Perhaps you could create a subpage for people to add to a list of suitable phrases for automatic de-capitalisation? I know certain items wouldn't qualify, since they might be likely to occur in capitlised-form in legitimate situations, but there are many cases such as the example above that would be apt. Should I start compiling a list? Thanks, ----Seans Potato Business 01:07, 24 February 2008 (UTC)
- Sean, that sounds like a good idea. My bot can handle that no problem. I've created a page where you can add phrases. If you could sign each item you add, that would be good. Cheers, CmdrObot (talk) 12:58, 24 February 2008 (UTC)
- Thanks a lot; this is really helpful. Regarding the list; should I put extra line breaks in so that the entries don't get bunched up? I added "death inducing signalling complex", because people seem to forget to use the hyphen. ----Seans Potato Business 23:29, 24 February 2008 (UTC)
Fuze is the usual English language spelling for ordnance igniters
Somebody keeps running a robot to change all occurrences of Fuze to Fuse in Shell (projectile). Fuze is the customary English language spelling for ammunition igniters. Fuses are something in an electrical layout.Rcbutcher (talk) 11:14, 1 March 2008 (UTC)
Analog vs Analogue
The bot just changed it in the Microsoft SideWinder article. According to the Oxford English Dictionary analog is the US variant of analogue and it is correct. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 87.205.248.87 (talk) 12:13, 1 March 2008 (UTC)
an MW
In Control of the National Grid (UK), "a MW" was changed to "an MW". SI units would be pronounced in full, so it should be "a MW" --ascorbic (talk) 21:48, 1 March 2008 (UTC)
Incorrect Correction
On List of Meerkat Manor meerkats, the bot replaced all instances of Commandoes with Commandos, however the groups name in the series is Commandoes. :) Collectonian (talk) 01:03, 3 March 2008 (UTC)
Revert of reference "title" on Orion (spacecraft) page
I've reverted CmdrObot's "correction" of "Nasa" to "NASA". While I agree that "NASA" is correct, "Nasa" is how it is in the title of the BBC News article that the reference cites and should therefore read that way.
However, given how the "Brits" don't seem to know how to spell acronyms in the English language properly, I would be perfectly happy to see "BBC" replaced with "Bbc" in all articles...
- -)
Beachgrinch (talk) 01:31, 3 March 2008 (UTC)
Error
The bot is adding article deletion tags to images [3] [4]. Icestorm815 • Talk 20:57, 5 March 2008 (UTC)
- Hi Icestorm. The bot isn't adding deletion tags, I'm doing that by hand myself as I run across nonsense/non-noteable images while using my bot. So far maybe 10 images I've nominated for speedy deletion in the last day have been removed. Do you think the images you mentioned were incorrectly tagged? Cheers, CmdrObot (talk) 21:40, 5 March 2008 (UTC)
- Well, I'm not the greatest with images, but I know for a fact that {{db-bio}} is strictly for articles. Images released into the public domain have to be deleted through a deletion discussion. Hope that helps! Icestorm815 • Talk 21:48, 5 March 2008 (UTC)
Incorrect change to joint ITU-T | ISO/IEC standards references
Your bot is incorrectly deleting the space after the vertical bar in the references to joint standards in the External links section of the X.400 page (and I guess perhaps elsewhere as well). Can you make it revert this incorrect change? Or should I manually revert all its changes? 213.123.172.26 (talk) 05:26, 22 March 2008 (UTC)
Dubious change to an indefinite article before an acronym
Your bot is making a dubious assumption about how a reader reads an acronym, pronouncing each letter individually. Unless you are familiar with the subject matter you don't know how the acronym is conventionally spoken. Often an acronym is spoken either as if it was a single word sometimes with implied vowels added to make it pronouncable, or as the full set of words it abbreviates. In either of these latter cases the changes your bot is making to the indefinite article are incorrect.
For example, NASA can be read as a word spoken 'nassah', as letters spoken 'en ay ess ay', or as 'national aeronautical and space administration'.
I think it would be much safer to assume that subject matter editors know what is appropriate rather than have a bot that thinks it knows better.
213.123.172.26 (talk) 05:55, 22 March 2008 (UTC)
Doroshenko
Now, this couldn't possibly be correct :) I think some algorithm tweaking is in order...—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); 22:06, 2 April 2008 (UTC)
- Ah! Tricky. As it happens I had an exception in my bot for "Ukraine" and "Ukrainian" (which use 'a' rather than 'an'), but I didn't have one for the misspelt 'Ukrainan'! I have added a spelling correction rule to my bot for 'Ukrainan' in case this happens again though. Cheers, CmdrObot (talk) 22:12, 2 April 2008 (UTC)
Correction to Mutants (collection)
Hi - Your bot changed Solvant→Solvent [5] in the article Mutants (collection). I've double checked both of the sources listed in the article and they both list the spelling as "Solvant". Since it is a title to a short story, I suspect the author was trying to make a pun and it may not be an actual word in English. I'm going to change it back (I won't revert since the other correction is good), but I worry that your bot will attempt to re-correct the word "Solvant". The title is already in quotes. Is there a comment or something that could be added to ensure that the bot will not change it back? Thanks.--Rtrace (talk) 02:37, 3 April 2008 (UTC)
Hi Bot,
You correctly spotted a typo but miscorrected
"which contains an the outline of Open Evangelicalism"
to
"which contains and the outline of Open Evangelicalism"
it should read
"which contains an outline of Open Evangelicalism"
I still think you are clever.
Regards
Springnuts (talk) 06:57, 4 April 2008 (UTC)
Keep ENCHANTED DREAMZ page up
Can you please help keep the enchanted dreamz page up, edit it so that i can stay. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Arrowcargo (talk • contribs) 14:41, 4 April 2008 (UTC)
Rate on quality scale
Hi, I am working on Taiwanese opera and trying to expand it.I saw you are also interested about this topic.I would like to ask you to watch that article and rate on the scope of Wikiproject Taiwan or give me some opinions or comments on this article. ThanksQwaszxfish 04:39, 8 April 2008 (UTC)
A u* vs. an u*
CmdrObot recently made such a subtitution in Quest for the Well of Souls, converting "A Ulik" to "An Ulik". This is generally an unsafe substitution, as a leading "u" may be pronounced like "yoo" instead of like "oo", and in the former case, the "a" article rather than the "an" article is appropriate. --Mr Wednesday (talk) 08:00, 9 April 2008 (UTC)
Micheal Luck
CmdrObot recently changed the spelling of Micheal Luck on his page to Michael. Can this page go on an exclusion list? Regards, Mattlore (talk) 22:02, 13 May 2008 (UTC)
Other people named "Micheal"
Cmdrbot is erroneously correcting the spelling of some other people who are named Micheal, not Michael, including Micheal Williams and Micheal R. Williams. Please don't do this as a universal correction. --Orlady (talk) 22:23, 13 May 2008 (UTC)
- I've also undone your bot's corrections in Micheal Nakamura and Micheal Spurlock. I can't tell if Micheal Baldwin needs to be reverted, as the referencing is sparse, but the only cited sources also spell the name "Micheal." I expect that there are plenty more people who truly spell the name that way... --Orlady (talk) 22:35, 13 May 2008 (UTC)
- Similarly on the page Interstate 70 in Utah the bot substituted Mathew to Matthew. According to the source cited, Mathew is correct for this person. Considering that "alternate" spellings of names seem to be more and more common with each new year, perhaps the bot should not try to correct names, unless unless many spelling errors are present and it is safe to assume the editors are not good spellers.Dave (talk) 02:54, 15 May 2008 (UTC)
Mike Hudema
The correct spelling of Mike Hudema's first name is in fact with the E before the A, so please add that to your exclusions list. Sarcasticidealist (talk) 07:54, 16 May 2008 (UTC)
Incorrect correction on Cumbria
The bot changed "Cumbria is one of the countrys least ethnically diverse counties" to "Cumbria is one of the countries least ethnically diverse counties" when it should have been changed to "Cumbria is one of the country's least ethnically diverse counties" --Kayedj (talk) 11:12, 16 May 2008 (UTC)
Alexander Anderson (poet)
Your bot 12:41, 17 May 2008 CmdrObot (Talk | contribs) m (3,819 bytes) (sp: mens→men's) (undo) changed "mens divinor" in the Alexander Anderson (poet) article to "men's divinor". But the original was correct. It's Latin. I think it means "a mind more divine", or something like that, although the phrase doesn't appear to be in common use now. Perhaps it should have been italicised. SamuelTheGhost (talk) 13:29, 17 May 2008 (UTC)
- Sam, thanks for that. I try to watch out for Latin phrases like that (most recently I saw one in Catullus 68 for example), but I guess sometimes one must slip through the net. I've now added the Anderson one to my exception list. Cheers, CmdrObot (talk) 13:51, 17 May 2008 (UTC)
Gentlemen's and Ladies
Why in Skiff Championships Regatta did you change Gentlemens to Gentlemen's but did not change Ladies to Ladies' ? If you bot isn't clever enough to sort out the context, ought it to leave well alone to avoid creating such inconsistencies? David Biddulph (talk) 08:22, 18 May 2008 (UTC)
- Hi David. Thanks for the pointer, but don't you think you're being a bit on the harsh side? The bot did that substitution because 'gentlemens' is always incorrect for one reason or other, but 'ladies' is usually correct. While you could well argue that I should have noticed the inconsistency being introduced before approving the edit, you could equally well argue that the change that was made was at least a step in the right direction. Cheers, CmdrObot (talk) 18:48, 18 May 2008 (UTC)
Preformed v performed
Just wanted to let you know the bot correction of "preformed" on the degranulation page was inaccurate - preformed, in that case, meant formed beforehand and wasn't a typo. I don't know if this may come up on other pages, but you may need to keep a look out. ~ Ciar ~ (Talk to me!) 19:40, 25 May 2008 (UTC)
- D'oh! Sorry about that. I have been keeping an eye out for that usage, but obviously not a close enough one. I've added the degranulation case to my bot's exception list so it won't happen again. Thanks, CmdrObot (talk) 19:45, 25 May 2008 (UTC)
- Hi Smith, thanks for pointing that one out. I've also added it to my exception list (along with exceptions for 'preformed' in 86 other articles there already). For what it's worth, I totally agree that preformed->performed is not the sort of substitution that can safely be done automatically, but I don't do any fully automatic editing with this bot. Every change it does has to be manually approved, it's just that occasionally I slip up when reading the diffs and an incorrect edit gets through. Anyhow, thanks again. CmdrObot (talk) 13:23, 26 May 2008 (UTC)
Bot Code?
Is the bot code available? I'd like to use it on one of my wikis, if that'd be OK by you. If not, please let me know either on this talk page or via e-mail. Regards, -- Joe Beaudoin Jr. Mail Me 23:31, 25 May 2008 (UTC)
Noticed what you just did with some broken URLs on Seul Choix Point Light. This one has some too. Thanks. 7&6=thirteen (talk) 20:21, 29 May 2008 (UTC) Stan
Amazon links
Hi! A suggestion: instead of remedying Amazon links, wouldn't it be better to gather the ISBN-10 code from the Amazon page (or from the URL itself, if identifiable), then remove the link and add the ISBN magic word after the (now unlinked) text, between parenthesis? After all, this way people can have a fair choice of sources for the books they're interested enough in to actually click the link. Beside, those (like me) who do prefer Amazon, can always install the User:Lunchboxhero/monobook.js script, which is referred to whenever one opens the ISBN-linked page. -- alexgieg (talk) 01:27, 30 May 2008 (UTC)
- Hi Alex, that's not a half bad idea. It also has the advantage of increasing the 'semanticness' of the markup. I'll have a look at implementing this when I get some free time. Cheers, CmdrObot (talk) 15:15, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
- I added a Reference link that goes directly to the online reader page for a book to show a specific set of passages, but the "Compact Amazon URL" fixer on this bot killed it, taking you to a "book temporarily not found" page. Why would it bother "compacting" a concealed URL? I could see it being useful for a visible link.
Originally, the concealed URL looked like this: ( http://www.amazon.com/gp/sitbv3/reader?asin=0944350615&pageID=S056&checkSum=z1wxDsHIaRHYdbhXC5gAGCcVzzkkU0TrFrY7NWo1ges=# )
It was changed to this: ( http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0944350615&pageID=S056&checkSum=z1wxDsHIaRHYdbhXC5gAGCcVzzkkU0TrFrY7NWo1ges=# )
To Clarify for debug, it took out the bold portions shown here: (http://www.amazon.com/gp /sitbv3/reader?asin= (and added a "/")0944350615&pageID=S056&checkSum=z1wxDsHIaRHYdbhXC5gAGCcVzzkkU0TrFrY7NWo1ges=#
Also, not every book has an ISBN number, but I'm finding that most books DO have an OCLC number. It's a shame that more booksellers don't use that system so there could be a page similar to the ISBN page. I agree with the concept though.. Adding amazon links for sales should be discouraged, but in my case, it made the reference readable online. M.Scott (talk) 14:36, 30 July 2008 (UTC)
Typographic examples mangled -- incorrectly modifies Spacing/Punctuation
Plenken and Klempen had their examples re-formatted into Wikipedia's preferred format, thereby rendering them useless (now fixed). SmackBot had the same problem with French spacing's Unicode example, which Rich Farmbrough put a temporary fix in for (~2008.03.31).
I'd rather not exclude CmdrObot from these articles.
Is it possible, perhaps, for CmdrObot to NOT make stylistic tweaks to articles in the Typography category? Also, perhaps Punctuation and Spacing. Which, I just noticed, Plenken and Klempen should also be tagged as...
cheers, Saltation (talk) 17:21, 31 May 2008 (UTC)
- Hi Saltation. Firstly, my apologies for messing up those articles on you. It must be annoying to repeatedly have to fix up this kind of edit. I like your idea of turning off unicode conversion and mucking about with spaces before/after punctuation for articles in specific categories, and I'll have a go at adding this to my bot shortly. In the meantime, I've updated my list of 'entities that are dangerous to automatically convert to UTF-8' to include everything from  -  and  . Do you think this will help? Cheers, CmdrObot (talk) 15:32, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
- Hi CmdrObot. Firstly: pish. "Truth emerges more readily from error than from confusion." (Sir Francis Bacon) A minor oversight, easily corrected, made by someone genuinely striving to improve a much much larger result, is a price I'd pay a hundred times over without complaint. This is one very peculiar very specific subset of normal usage, and there's no way any normal person could be expected to know of it. With an active community and effortless regression, we are all your million eyes finding specific/exception(al) instances where your bot's general case can be improved by not being applied.
- Secondly, bugfix-wise: interim workaround-wise: I'd suggest #8192-#8205, #8232-#8233, #8239, #8287-#8288, and #8291. Possibly also #8289-#8290? (#8287-#8291 couldn't hurt, in any case)
- cheers and thanks. Saltation (talk) 23:10, 5 June 2008 (UTC)
- Speaking of obscure character-encoding oversights, use Flock to go to [6], scroll down to 8238, and feel a disbelieving hilarity spread a smile across your face.
- And on the topic of Typography and Spaces, have a read of that French spacing article, and after a period of "how geeky is this?" gradually realise that a lot of what you now regard as normal is merely the result of early-days quick-hack computer design and a particular subgroup's fashion sense.
- In particular, look at the example of traditional spacing, and consider that, using this format, the standard newspaper font was 6-point, yet fully readable...
- Saltation (talk) 23:10, 5 June 2008 (UTC)
Need spellcheck help
Hi. When you have time, could you please run a spell check on Hoysala Empire and Western Chalukya Empire. Both are my FA's and I have recently added significant number of citations to improve the articles. Later, after a week. please also run spell check on Chalukya dynasty, another FA of mine, which I am currently improving. Thanks, Dineshkannambadi (talk) 18:49, 3 June 2008 (UTC)
U.K.
In the article on UKZ, the bot incorrectly changed "U.K." (here, a reference to a specific band who use that form of punctuation and not to the country) to "UK". Bondegezou (talk) 08:49, 10 June 2008 (UTC)
Query
I need help renaming about 200 articles. Doing this by hand would take me all day.
Can your bot rename articles, or be adapted to do so?
If so, please contact me.
Thank you.
The Transhumanist 22:31, 16 June 2008 (UTC)
Incorrect change UK/US English
Hey, your bot changed "encyclopaedic" to "encyclopedic" on an image page I happened to be watching. Please don't do this per WP:ENGVAR. Especially bot "correction" of local differences in spelling is awful. Thanks, User:Krator (t c) 17:01, 22 June 2008 (UTC)
Children's Press
As far as I can tell, the misspelling is intentional.[7] ✤ JonHarder talk 19:07, 8 July 2008 (UTC)
Expection Handling
In this case, Expection is correct (Expect + Exception). bot deny added for the time being. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Robbak (talk • contribs) 05:21, 10 July 2008 (UTC)
AfD nomination of Millennium Items
An article that you have been involved in editing, Millennium Items, has been listed for deletion. If you are interested in the deletion discussion, please participate by adding your comments at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Millennium Items. Thank you. Do you want to opt out of receiving this notice? ZeroGiga (talk) 04:18, 16 July 2008 (UTC)
AN
Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard#CmdrObot_is_working_for_Amazon.21 Enigma message 07:29, 27 July 2008 (UTC)
Template errors
[8], [9], [10], [11]. --- RockMFR 23:52, 30 July 2008 (UTC)
- Oops. Thanks for that. I didn't realise the argument was an article title. I've modified my bot so it won't try to edit the contents of any electiontable template in future. Cheers, CmdrObot (talk) 23:57, 30 July 2008 (UTC)
- I think a more general fix might be better. Could you not edit the page if the same capitalization error exists in the page title? --- RockMFR 00:05, 31 July 2008 (UTC)
Feature suggestion
Hi, perhaps you could help me. Several pages contain an appearance of the word "comples" (see [12]), which I'm guessing are all misspellings of "complex". Your bot is the only one I know of that corrects spelling errors. If you see no reason not to and can find the time, I would greatly appreciate your adding this one to the list of common and not so common typos. Thank you. 24.20.131.232 (talk) 05:40, 11 September 2008 (UTC)
- (Added to the list of spellings the bot checks for)
- comples could also be a misspelling of compiles. ----Seans Potato Business 21:36, 23 September 2008 (UTC)
Incorrection of quoted text
On 11 September this bot "corrected" some spelling in a quoted text passage at History of Norwalk, Connecticut. Unfortunately the original quoted text spelt "indians" with a lower case i and "allso" with two l's. I think it is misleading historical revisionism to correct the spellings of such quoted words and recommend that it not be done again. It may also be good to leave all quoted text alone elsewhere. The cited article uses a colon to indent the text, other articles may use any of the various Template:Quote templates. 67.86.73.252 (talk) 00:32, 12 September 2008 (UTC)
- (Quite correct, I should have left it alone. The exception list has been updated to reflect this. The bot already ignores content inside any of the various quote templates or blockquote tags. I hadn't considered ignoring indented text, and on reflection I think shouldn't do this. Indentation can be used for all manner of things other than quoting.)
CapsList
I was wondering whether this list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:CmdrObot/CapsList had been implemented already or whether you were waiting for it to reach a certain size. No-one seems to know that it exists. :( ----Seans Potato Business 21:38, 23 September 2008 (UTC)
- Hi Sean, yes it is implemented. I think the bot has corrected a few articles with these phrases in it too, although not very many--I simply haven't been doing as much work with the bot of late, and the phrases haven't shown up very much in the articles I've looked at.
Toyota HZ
Please be aware that Toyota have an engine called the 1HZ (and others called the 2HZ, 3HZ, etc). Converting it to 1 Hz is wrong. Cheers. Stepho-wrs (talk) 23:53, 23 September 2008 (UTC)
- Hi Steve. Thanks for that. I've noticed several Toyota HZs that I left alone and added to my bot's exception list. Could you point me at the article with the one I missed so I can put it on the exception list. Cheers, CmdrObot (talk) 23:56, 23 September 2008 (UTC)
- The article in question was Toyota Land Cruiser. This could potentially affect any Toyota vehicle with a diesel engine. Perhaps you could use a filter that excludes anything with 'Toyota' in the title. Cheers. Stepho-wrs (talk) 01:28, 24 September 2008 (UTC)
- Thanks Steve. I've updated the exception list. Your idea of watching for Toyota is a good one, unfortunately my bot doesn't have the necessary machinery for handling something like that at the moment. I'll have a look and see what I can do though. Cheers, CmdrObot (talk) 23:54, 24 September 2008 (UTC)
Error Fixing "Ghz"
The bot changed 1.6Ghz to 1.6 GHz. See the revision history for Pascack_Valley_High_School. shirulashem (talk) 12:02, 24 September 2008 (UTC)
- Yes, and that's the correct capitalisation and spacing. The SI unit Hertz uses the symbol Hz, and the prefix G represents 1 billion. The SI documents also say that a non-breaking space should be used between the digits and the symbol, thus 1.6 GHz. Cheers, CmdrObot (talk) 23:51, 24 September 2008 (UTC)
- Ahhh. Interesting. I only saw the revision by using the "last" tab, and it showed 1.6& nbsp;GHz (without the space after the &"), and I didn't realize that & nbsp; (without the space) is a space! My apologies. Thanks for your hard work. shirulashem (talk) 11:35, 25 September 2008 (UTC)
Error Fixing "skilfully"
The bot changed 'skilfully' to 'skillfully'. See revision history for Edmund Herring. This is wrong; the former is the correct English spelling (See Wiktionary entry) Please don't do this per WP:ENGVAR. Hawkeye7 (talk) 02:56, 2 October 2008 (UTC)
- Just to confirm, the OED gives skillful as "chiefly U.S." David Underdown (talk) 08:55, 2 October 2008 (UTC)
- Yes, my dictionary says "skillful (US)" as well. Hawkeye7 (talk) 13:36, 2 October 2008 (UTC)
Incorrect Edit
The bot condensed an external link to Amazon.com on Henry and Mudge, therefore altering the destination page. See here. smooth0707 (talk) 18:49, 24 October 2008 (UTC)
- Ah! Thanks for that Smooth. It's an interesting little bug in my bot. In some situations (where the search term is plain ASCII, or can be translated to ISO-Latin-1) I could get away with removing the encoding term. It's not, as you've noticed, safe in the general case, so I've remove it for now. Cheers, CmdrObot (talk) 00:47, 25 October 2008 (UTC)
Administrate -> Administer
How 'bout adding "administrate" (and administrated and administrating) to the list of things your 'bot fixes? Use of this made-up word and its tenses seems to be a common error across a lot of pages. --Jhfrontz (talk) 06:30, 16 December 2008 (UTC)
- Hi again,
- Personally, I agree with you, "administrate" feels like a longer and over-complicated way of saying "administer." However, I did a bit of digging, and according to Bartleby it's a perfectly valid word and has been around since the 17th century. Since Wikipedia's style guide seems to be silent on the issue, I think it would be better to leave this one alone for the time being.
some words for your bot
Hi, I've been patrolling certain words for some time that could do with being botted. Would your bot be interested in taking them on?
- Webiste - website
- Janaury - January
- Febraury - February
- possesion - possession
- posession - possession
- ablity - ability
- avalaible - available
- sucess - success
I don't think any of them generate many false positives. I've probably patrolled them all quite recently, but new ones come up every month. WereSpielChequers 18:44, 12 January 2009 (UTC)
- Hi Spiel, thanks for the suggestions. It turns out my bot checks for some of them already, but there were a few that weren't on the list and I've added them now.
- Cheers, CmdrObot (talk) 12:48, 13 January 2009 (UTC)
- Thanks, I don't know if you've got epesode - episode? Also what proportion of false positives can you handle , or can you screen them out? For example bieng isn't always a typo for being and thrity isn't always a typo for thirty but "thrity - thirty ignoring all articles containing Umrigar" would be great to bot. WereSpielChequers 14:05, 15 January 2009 (UTC)
- I didn't have epesode. Consider it added. As regards false positives, I'm happy to add words with occasional false positives, just as long as I don't start seeing hundreds of the damn things all over the place. I regard it as a matter of throughput: if I find I'm spending a lot of time adding article exceptions for a specific false positive, and I can't find any easy way to filter out most of them (eg don't try to correct 'roman' to 'Roman' if it's followed by 'à clé'), then I tend to remove the rule because it takes time away from fixing other less problematic misspellings.
- Cheers, Cmdrjameson (talk) 16:43, 16 January 2009 (UTC)
- Hi Commander, would your bot be interested in any of the following:
- retrive - retrieve
- retreive - retrieve
- waining - waning
- comunity - community
- Also can it handle something as complex as "discuss throw" - "discus throw' (there are a couple of false positives there)? WereSpielChequers 23:19, 2 February 2009 (UTC)
- Hi Commander, would your bot be interested in any of the following:
Discrete nouns versus mass nouns
I request an addition to your bot that corrects useage between mass nouns and discrete nouns. Thus CORRECT: "amount of sand" CORRECT: "number of sand grains" INCORRECT: "amount of people" CORRECT: "number of people"
Because it would be extensive work to compile a dictionary of of mass nouns versus discrete nouns. I suggest limiting autocorrection to a few standout incorrect useages such as "amount of people". —Preceding unsigned comment added by 173.73.185.148 (talk) 20:54, 16 June 2009 (UTC)
Completed proofreading
You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{Talkback}} or {{Tb}} template.
Spell check please
Hi. When you find time, could you please run spell check on two articles I wrote.
- Kannada literature in the Kingdom of Mysore (in FAC)
- Chalukya dynasty (FA)
Regards, Dineshkannambadi (talk) 22:12, 13 February 2009 (UTC)
Named reference quotation marks
I've come across a nasty one. Normal usage for named refs uses the familiar tags <ref name="Bloggins">,<ref/> and <ref name="Bloggins" />. Very frequently editors will omit the double quotation " marks around the name. Occasionally they will substitute single ' or paired-single '' quotation marks. Could your bot correct these? LeadSongDog come howl 20:03, 25 March 2009 (UTC)
Thanks
Thanks for compacting the Amazon reference URLs in the Jessica McClure post. Tighter, more compact, better. Mcwebeditor (talk) 18:06, 17 April 2009 (UTC)
Decimal time
Please add an exception for "decads" in Decimal time#Decimal times in fiction. Because this is fictional and matches Asimov's spelling of "centads", it should not be changed to "decades". — Joe Kress (talk) 19:54, 23 May 2009 (UTC)
Apposite
Apposite is a valid word. Please change the directory to accommodate it. See w:apposite. Thanks! —Preceding unsigned comment added by 119.11.18.217 (talk) 17:03, 30 May 2009 (UTC)
Famly Clothing, not Family Clothing
A recent edit was made to Warped Tour 2009 changing a stage from "Famly Clothing" to "Family Clothing" but in this case the former is actually correct as seen at http://www.famlyweb.com. Not sure much could be done since this is probably the only case where "Famly" would be correct over "Family" but figured I would leave the note anyway. DX927 (talk) 22:58, 19 June 2009 (UTC)
- Thanks for catching that. I've added an exception for that article to my bot's exception list, so it shouldn't happen again. Cheers, 23:01, 19 June 2009 (UTC)
Incorrect "corrections" in Ambigram
The bot is changing links to pictures to inline pictures. In general, this seems like an incorrect change, but it's particularly bad here, as you'll see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ambigram&diff=297448541&oldid=297150440
And I would expect similar reason elsewhere for the two cases here.
- A closeup of a portion of a page is shown in the article, and the image of the full page (which appears in no article) is provided as a link. Both have value, but the article has only thecloseup.
- There are many referenced ambigrams which editors think are worth mentioning, but the article would be unreadable if they were all included inline. People objected to mentioned ambigrams that couldn't be seen. The solution was to link to where the ambigrams could be seen and, in one case, that means a link to an image which appears in no article.
I would recommend looking at whether changing a link like this to an inline image is ever a good idea. If you think it is, then please add Ambigram to the exclusion list (or I can add the robot exclusion tag). An alternative is to note such cases and add a note to the Talk page.
Also, a potential bot feature. If the bot makes a change and a person undoes it, the bot should not make the change again. This is the second time CmdrObot has made this change. Similarly, if you were to add a note to the Talk page, you should not do so repeatedly.
Thanks. RoyLeban (talk) 18:16, 20 June 2009 (UTC)
- Roy, my sincere apologies for that unwanted behaviour on my bot's part. Curiously, when I first implemented the wikipedia URL->wikilinks code, I knew that [[Image:...]] links expand to inline images, and special cased the code leave them alone. Much later, I was also aware of the mediawiki addition of File: as a synonym for Image:, but somehow I never connected the two.
- Anyhow, long story short, I've fixed the bot, and it shouldn't make that mistake again. Cheers, CmdrObot (talk) 11:56, 24 June 2009 (UTC)
- Hi again Roy. To follow up on my previous comment, while looking at the bot code, I just recalled that it is in fact possible to make wikilinks out of Image/File URLs that have a label: you just have to use the same trick as is used with Category links, namely prefix them with a colon. So "See full page here" and "See full page here" both link to the correct image.
- I've updated the bot to do the correct transformation. Cheers, CmdrObot (talk) 12:24, 24 June 2009 (UTC)
- No problem. Your work in cleaning things up is appreciated and occasional glitches are the price we pay. At least it wasn't done on 10,000 pages :-) Your wikilink change looks good (and correct). I am not going to make that change on the Ambigram page to give your bot a chance to do it sometime. Sound good? RoyLeban (talk) 00:52, 26 June 2009 (UTC)
Proposed deletion of Moto (programming language)
A proposed deletion template has been added to the article Moto (programming language), suggesting that it be deleted according to the proposed deletion process because of the following concern:
- Not notable
All contributions are appreciated, but this article may not satisfy Wikipedia's criteria for inclusion, and the deletion notice should explain why (see also "What Wikipedia is not" and Wikipedia's deletion policy). You may prevent the proposed deletion by removing the {{dated prod}}
notice, but please explain why you disagree with the proposed deletion in your edit summary or on its talk page.
Please consider improving the article to address the issues raised because, even though removing the deletion notice will prevent deletion through the proposed deletion process, the article may still be deleted if it matches any of the speedy deletion criteria or it can be sent to Articles for Deletion, where it may be deleted if consensus to delete is reached. Cybercobra (talk) 08:25, 26 June 2009 (UTC)
Bashar Al-Assad
I'm just writing to let you know that on June 6, your bot added a space into a filename and therefore broke the link. I fixed it last night. -- Soap Talk/Contributions 11:30, 3 July 2009 (UTC)
RTE before 12/7/2009 did not stand for Raidió Teilifís Éireann
There was no such thing as Raidió Teilifís Éireann before 12 July 2009, and any reference to the Irish state broadcaster before that date should say Radio Telefís Éireann. The current batch edits are, in the vast majority of cases, inappropriate. Kevin McE (talk) 08:04, 24 July 2009 (UTC)
- Hmm. OK, I guess I'll need to (at least partially) revert some of these then. I've also changed RTE to RTÉ in a lot of places, and those can stay.
- So let me get this clear: {{cite}}s of specific publications/programs should use the name RTÉ had at the time of publication as the author field, right?
- How about things like "Joe Blogs, a popular RTÉ presenter"? Should they use the new name or the old one? I'd guess new in those cases.
- How about "Foo, a 1960s RTÉ current affairs program," or "Bar, the producer of the 1983 children's program on RTÉ"? new or old? I'm unsure with these two.
- Finally how about "RTÉ's first colour broadcast"? In this case I'd guess new would do, because both new and old names refer to the same entity.
- It's shades of Sophie Wilson and BBC BASIC all over again, except with the saving grace of less difficulty with pronouns!
- Anyhow, thanks for the nitpicking. Cheers, CmdrObot (talk) 18:57, 24 July 2009 (UTC)
- The fada (accent) on the E was always correct, and where the text states RTE, and the fuller name is piped, I guess it doesn't really matter. The situation that I think would be indefensible would be "Foo, a 1960s Raidió Teilifís Éireann current affairs program: there was no entity by that name at that date (in English Language anyway). Shamus O'Flaherty (Joe Bloggs' Irish cousin) might be a Raidió Teilifís Éireann presenter, but he joined Radio Telefís Éireann in 2003: again, initials in either case obviate the need to be worried about what the piped link says. I might have overstated it by saying that the "vast majority" of bot edits were inappropriate: sorry for that. Kevin McE (talk) 19:18, 24 July 2009 (UTC)
- I'm from Ireland myself, so I'm well familiar with the síneadh fada and all that goes along with it. Sadly, my Irish is sufficiently rusty that it took me a while to figure out why the name change was taking place. Anyhow, thanks for the suggestions, I've gone back over my edits, and fixed up 98 of them. Not the majority, but certainly not covering myself with glory either :) Thanks again, CmdrObot (talk) 22:20, 24 July 2009 (UTC)
Cheers for the help on MHz.
I totally should have caught that myself. Thanks. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seokjeok)Tarkaan (talk) 05:43, 19 September 2009 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Merge and delete
Hi. Your bot corrected a grammatical error in WP:Merge and delete. However, it is within an excerpt from WP:Text of Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License, with the error present in the original. Thanks. Flatscan (talk) 04:31, 22 February 2010 (UTC)
Thank you
Thanks for the Wikipedia URL→wikilink on the Francesco Maria Appendini page, I also learnt something new. Sir Floyd (talk) 23:51, 25 February 2010 (UTC)
Amazon compacting
I noticed the bot compacting amazon.com links on Doctor Who DVD releases and I'm just wondering about the amazon.co.uk links. Couldn't the bot companct those as well? -- WOSlinker (talk) 19:49, 7 March 2010 (UTC)
- Hi WOS. Absolutely, the amazon regular expression does in fact match any of the Amazon country URLs, but the script I'm using got confused by some nesting of templates or tags or quoting or something else on the page, and conservatively decided not to touch things it didn't understand in case it broke them. I'll have a look at it and see if I can figure out what's going on.
The article Ex parte or in camera has been proposed for deletion because of the following concern:
- see talk page
While all contributions to Wikipedia are appreciated, content or articles may be deleted for any of several reasons.
You may prevent the proposed deletion by removing the {{dated prod}}
notice, but please explain why in your edit summary or on the article's talk page.
Please consider improving the article to address the issues raised. Removing {{dated prod}}
will stop the proposed deletion process, but other deletion processes exist. The speedy deletion process can result in deletion without discussion, and articles for deletion allows discussion to reach consensus for deletion. Nilotpal42 (talk) 12:07, 8 March 2010 (UTC)
Eire→Éire
While this is grammatically correct, the É was not used by the UK government, nor was it used during the war to mark Irish territory, ships, etc. ClemMcGann (talk) 09:52, 14 March 2010 (UTC)
- Thanks Clem, I didn't know that. Could you point me at any articles you've reverted so I can add them to the bot as exceptions? Cheers CmdrObot (talk) 19:58, 14 March 2010 (UTC)
- I only reverted the Irish Oak. ClemMcGann (talk) 02:24, 15 March 2010 (UTC)
All transliterations of Choy Li Fut and others should redirect only to Cai Li Fo
This is a great page here which gives credit to many of the branches of Choy Li Fut - a style of martial arts.The only reason why anyone would want to change the name of this page is for political reasons. Lets keep politics and passions out of this wiki page and concentrate on the content. I believe that the page should be left as Cai Li Fo. I will add both Mandarin and Cantonese to the top description. Okay, let me explain the linguistic problems. First Chinese as a spoken language is tonal not phonetic like most western languages such as our English. There are basically 4 tones in Mandarin, 7 in Cantonese. The system of writing Chinese words into English is called Pinyin. For example "choy" can be written as "Choi" or "Tsoi", etc. That is because it is difficult to write tones and refined sounds into letters. To try and standardize the English writing of Chinese words and to take into consideration pronunciation, pinyin standards such as Gwoyeu Romatzyh of 1928, Latinxua Sin Wenz of 1931,Wade-Giles (1859; modified 1892), zhuyin, etc.. were created over history to address these problems. Each of them had differing standards. The official 2009 national standarized pinyin of China is called Hanyu Pinyin. There are 107+ known spoken dialects in China. In Cantonese alone, you have dialects such as Toi-san, Sam-yup, Sei-yup, Gok-gong, Hakka, etc.. Each will pronounce "Choy Li Fut" slightly different, thus the transliteration to English, depending on what pinyin you used, and when it was used, will create differences in the English spelling. An example would be the word "Chi". If you use the Chinese Postal Romanization, you can write it as Chi, ch'i, and hsi (pinyin ji, qi, and xi) are represented as either tsi, tsi, and si or ki, ki, and hi depending on historic pronunciation, etc. The official Chinese Hanyu Pinyin of 2009 romanized spelling of Chi is Qi, whether you like it or not, whether you are from the South or North. So arguing whether Choy Li Fut should be written as Choi Lei Fut or Tsoi Lee Fot, is ridiculous and wasting time. If you wish to conform to the most popular Southern Cantonese standard for the name, the "Choy Li Fut" would be the one. Another problem. To make Choy Li Fut a widely known martial arts in China, and to standardize it's name. You have to use Mandarin. To unify the country as a whole and remove the dialect issues. The government of China made Mandarin the official language of China. Since Hong Kong is now part of China again, Mandarin is now the official language in Hong Kong even though people still speak their dialects. Even with written and spoken Mandarin, Taiwan uses the older written language while mainland China uses a simplified version. Most people born and educated before WWII in China and Japan can read the old style of writing as well as the newer simplified form. To deal with this issue, I will mention both names at the top of the article. To deal with transliterations of the romanized spellings, when a wiki user types in any transliteration of Choy li Fut, Cai Li Fo, Choi Lei Fut, whatever, etc. the wiki has been set up to auto-magically send them to this page. The Xqbot is causing problems with all the transliterations of Choy Li Fut. All the various Pinyin spellings of Choy Li Fut should point to Cai Li Fo as the official name and page. Huo Xin (talk) 21:04, 22 April 2010 (UTC)
skilfully ==> skillfully
Your bot made this "correction" at the article The Adventure of the Stockbroker's Clerk. "Correcting" Commonwealth spellings to American spellings is not only utterly needless, but against WP policy. Please make sure that your bot doesn't do these things in future. Kelisi (talk) 09:30, 11 June 2010 (UTC)
- Hi Kelisi, thanks for noticing that. I'm well aware of US/UK spelling variants, and that particular substitution made it onto my bot's list by accident. If you look at the revision history, you'll see that my bot made that mistaken change back in August 2008, and I removed the substitution from my bot a long time ago. Cheers, Cmdrjameson (talk) 19:16, 11 June 2010 (UTC)
[[13]]
(sp (3): a Opel→an Opel, a uniformisation→an uniformisation, internation→international)
a/an should (as I am sure you are aware) go by vowel sound, not just the presence of a vowel.
Is the word in question, a valid word? seems to be, but I don't think your bot is picking up the British English variant カンチョーSennen Goroshi ! 또라이 (talk) 06:58, 11 July 2010 (UTC)
remainded -> remainder
Please don't make this blind change again. The correct word in this case was "remained". Article: Winter of 2009–2010 in Europe Halsteadk (talk) 08:25, 24 September 2010 (UTC)
Wisconsin
Wisconscin, Wiconsin, and Wisonsin are three common typos for the state name Wisconsin. I hand corrected for the first one today. Seems like it would be a good job for an expert bot. Morrem (talk) 22:16, 30 September 2010 (UTC)
Further refinement
Hi,
The bot changed [[War_and_Remembrance#Television_adaptation|War & Remembrance]]
into [[War and Remembrance#Television_adaptation|War & Remembrance]].
Pretty good. Any chance it could also zap that underscore in the secondary heading?
Cheers, Varlaam (talk) 23:06, 21 October 2010 (UTC)
- Hey Varlaam, thanks for the suggestion. I didn't realise it was possible to use spaces rather than underscores for the fragment section of a wikilink; I assumed it mapped it directly onto a URL without any changes. I'll update the bot to do this too.
- Cheers,CmdrObot (talk) 12:44, 23 October 2010 (UTC)
'tv series' in anime infobox
Exactly what is the point of this edit?[14] This is an infobox switch that affects how the infobox appears and which fields are accepted. Fortunately, the switch isn't case sensitive. But if it was, then it would have broken the infobox. —Farix (t | c) 20:23, 23 October 2010 (UTC)
Alternate
Per WP:VNE, where applicable, 'alternative' is preferred. I've noticed the non-preferred use when referring to album and single covers—'Alternate Covers'—especially in infoboxes. Is this something your bot could help with? — Wrapped in Grey (talk) 10:50, 11 November 2010 (UTC)
- Good idea. Yes it could. I'll start it doing the changes now. Cheers, CmdrObot (talk) 21:35, 13 November 2010 (UTC)
- Spell fixing is usually considered a prime example of a task that bots are not supposed to do. Would you please point me to the BRFA that approved your bot to perform that spelling changes? — Carl (CBM · talk) 16:53, 14 November 2010 (UTC)
- Also, I noticed above that the bot account has been used to respond to questions on this page. WP:BOTPOL explicitly says, "is it not appropriate to use the bot account to respond on talk pages." — Carl (CBM · talk) 16:56, 14 November 2010 (UTC)
- Hi Carl. Thanks for your feedback. My 'bot' isn't really a bot as such, but more an assisted editing tool similar to AutoWikiBrowser. Every edit it makes is eyeballed and OKed by me. As you've quite correctly pointed out, bots aren't allowed to make unassisted spelling changes. This makes perfect sense, however as I've said, I manually review each change before I submit it, and the bot policy does allow this use case.
- I haven't got explicit approval for the 'alternate cover'->'alternative cover' change, however I had been using the bot and this account to make miscellaneous spelling changes for years and have gotten the bot reviewed and approved. I don't have a link immediately to hand, but if you like I can look it up for you.
- As for the 'bot responding on talk page' thing, I think that's covered by the fact that it's an assisted editing tool 'backed' by a human. It's much more convenient for me to get feedback on the bot's discussion page, as I see it straight away when I'm editing, and don't have to log in using my ordinary user account to reply, then log back in using the bot account to continue editing. There are explicit links to my 'real' account as well from the bot page, in case there's ever any question about who's driving the bot.
I noticed your bot going through and doing this. "Alternative" is suitable in British English, but in American English "alternate" is fine. This can cause problems if the bot is changing the word use without regards to which grammatical variation is used. Also, I write a lot of articles about alternative rock-related subjects, and using "alternate" helps avoid confusion in many cases. When the bot changes the word usage, it can makes things unclear in the prose. WesleyDodds (talk) 09:44, 20 November 2010 (UTC)
Intentional mispelling
How can I get your Robot to ignore intentional mispelling? It and other robots keep trying to fix "thats" and change it to "that's" despite the fact that it is in the quote parameter of a citation and a direct copy of what the punctuation shy author had written. -- Horkana (talk) 16:07, 14 November 2010 (UTC)
- Sorry about that. I'll add an except to the bot for Killing in the Name. In general, a good way to stop these sorts of misspelling from being 'fixed' is to use the sic template to do this. Eg {{sic|hide=y|thats}}. Cheers, CmdrObot (talk) 17:10, 14 November 2010 (UTC)
- I'd nearly prefer if you didn't exclude Killing in the Name. Perhaps you might just exclude the quote parameter within a citations? I see above a user was asking you to avoid the reflist but seems like too much and if it isn't too inconvenient limiting the exclusion to just the quote parameter seems about right to me. What do you think? (I've added this page to my watchlist and will keep an eye on it for a few days, but if I'm slow to respond please feel free to use {{talkback}} as I prefer to keep converstations where they started.) -- Horkana (talk) 20:01, 14 November 2010 (UTC)
- That sounds like a reasonable approach. I won't be able to do it immediately as I'll need to rework the bot's template parsing code to be able to recognise template parameters. I want to do this anyway for a couple of reasons, so your idea just gives me a little more incentive to actually go and do it. Cheers, CmdrObot (talk) 20:07, 14 November 2010 (UTC)
- I'd nearly prefer if you didn't exclude Killing in the Name. Perhaps you might just exclude the quote parameter within a citations? I see above a user was asking you to avoid the reflist but seems like too much and if it isn't too inconvenient limiting the exclusion to just the quote parameter seems about right to me. What do you think? (I've added this page to my watchlist and will keep an eye on it for a few days, but if I'm slow to respond please feel free to use {{talkback}} as I prefer to keep converstations where they started.) -- Horkana (talk) 20:01, 14 November 2010 (UTC)
Alternate cover→Alternative cover per WP:VNE
Are you aware of this bug in the bot? It also changed the filename of the album cover from 'alternate' to 'alternative', with the obvious consequences. [15] memphisto 10:47, 17 November 2010 (UTC)
- Oh dear. Thanks for catching that. I did in fact make some changes to my bot on Monday evening to prevent it from ever editing the cover parameter in those templates, so it shouldn't happen again. Before the changes I kept an eye out for those kinds of change, but obviously that one slipped through. Sorry! CmdrObot (talk) 23:33, 17 November 2010 (UTC)
Alternate vs. Alternative on music articles
Cmdrobot has been correcting "alternate version" to "alternative version" on music articles, per a guideline which favors British English in general for this variant. However, "alternative" has a specific meaning in popular music (see alternative music), and the bot's last few dozen edits show at least several cases of this correction being made on articles by alternative rock artists. Naturally, this is quite confusing (e.g., on Starlight (song), where "alternative versions" makes it sound like the band has recorded the songs in that particular genre, rather than being a separate take or mix). This grammar fix should be nixed for music articles, or should be corrected by hand. Chubbles (talk) 21:05, 18 November 2010 (UTC)
If I Were a Boy Amazon references
Can you please also compact the references for Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)? Jivesh boodhun (talk) 05:46, 23 December 2010 (UTC)
If I Were a Boy Amazon references
Can you please also compact the references for Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)? Jivesh boodhun (talk) 05:52, 23 December 2010 (UTC)
Stope and stoping are mining terms
Hi, you recently changed "stoping" to "stopping" at Mining in the Upper Harz. "Stope" and "stoping" are mining terms. I have reverted the changes. --Bermicourt (talk) 08:47, 9 June 2011 (UTC)
Herford
In this edit, CmdrObot inserted a space into an image filename. (This is the same problem that was reported above in July 2009.) --Zundark (talk) 08:36, 22 June 2011 (UTC)
- Also in Szabolcs Kókay. --Zundark (talk) 13:26, 22 June 2011 (UTC)
- Argh. My apologies. I've added a rule to the bot never to modify the image photo argument in an 'infobox german location' template, and I've removed the '[a-z]\.[A-Z]' rule because it's too error prone and I don't appear to be good enough at noticing when it messes up. Thanks for the feedback. CmdrObot (talk) 21:19, 22 June 2011 (UTC)
Hyphens
I've been pondering easy rules about hyphens that could be applied robotically. It seems like one might be "'based' should be preceded by a hyhpen where 'based' isn't followed by a preposition (e.g., 'on' or 'in' or 'upon') and isn't the last word in the sentence (e.g., 'The system is ground based.')". Thoughts?
- This topic was split off from #Correcting capitlisation
Lower Greek
Minor text-case issue here that generated a cite-error. All instances of "Greek" should probably be upper-cased, but I chose a minimal approach here for the sake of a quick fix. -- WikHead (talk) 22:45, 27 November 2011 (UTC)
st. david
St. David School (Richmond, California) an article that you have participated in editing has been nominated for deletion a second time, the first time in 2006 resulted in no consensus and, it can be reviewed here. The current discussion on the removal of the article is located here should you wish leave your comment.LuciferWildCat (talk) 05:17, 22 December 2011 (UTC)
Quotes always use original spelling
In this edit you "corrected" the spelling in an old quotation; the original spelling should have been left alone. ~~``
- Woops. Sorry about that. I've added an entry to my bot's exception list so it won't happen again. Cheers, CmdrObot (talk) 22:26, 4 February 2012 (UTC)
STOP! Bots cannot reliably detect quotes! Your bot messed up [http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Inch&diff=prev&oldid=475226511 AGAIN! You must manually inspect every spelling change to see if it is within a quote. This is your final warning. The next time, I seek to have your bot approval revoked. Jc3s5h (talk) 15:36, 5 February 2012 (UTC)
- Thank you, after quite a while attempting to do this somewhat decently, I'm *painfully* aware that bots can't reliably detect quoted text in wiki markup. There are a couple of rules of thumb, and a few obvious cases, but in general it's not easy. Alas, humans, while better, aren't always great at it either.
- Contrary to what you said, I do inspect, and always have inspected every change my bot makes, but I'm afraid sometimes I do mess up, and I welcome correction on this, even if it's only to prompt me to stop for the night because I'm getting unreliable/paying insufficient attention. Also, if I've made a systematic error that can be readily identified, I go back and fix them up.
- However please stop with the authoritarian tone of voice. I have to say I was really annoyed by your 'final warning', especially since it was for a second 'offence'. I'm a volunteer making a good faith effort and it makes me considerably less inclined to want to continue if I have to field this sort of comment.
- Anyhow, apart from that, thanks for the feedback. I will try to watch out more carefully for quoted text--I'm kinda surprised I was caught by 'mariage' because it's one of those annoying words that shows up now and then where the correct French spelling is incorrect (modern) English spelling. Cheers, CmdrObot (talk) 21:48, 7 February 2012 (UTC)
Prime
Please do not change the HTML entity ″ to ″ because it is too difficult to tell the difference between ″ and ". Jc3s5h (talk) 15:42, 5 February 2012 (UTC)
A person who is not notable who has a Wikipedia entry
The person in question is Diana Raab. She had a book published long ago that sold well enough. Since then, she has self-published books of poetry and memoir. She paid someone to create a Wikipedia entry on her. She won awards given for self-published books. She is a donor to UC Santa Barbara and therefore is allowed to give a memoir workshop. The only thing notable about Raab is that she has bought her way into appearing to be a respected writer when in truth she is a hack who couldn't pass a grammar, punctuation, and spelling test. How do we get this biography of a living person taken down? It's an insult to the good writers out there.
A person is presumed to be notable if he or she has received significant coverage in reliable secondary sources that are independent of the subject. Notability criteria may need to be met for a person to be included in a stand alone list article. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.205.124.164 (talk) 15:54, 7 May 2012 (UTC)
Wikipedia URL→wikilink error
Hey there - Since you asked to be informed - Your bot's attempt at Wikipedia URL→wikilink on the File:George Kenner - artist at Frith Hill PoW Camp 1915-picnik crop contrast 67%resize.jpg page did not work, so I reverted it. - Gothicfilm (talk) 02:45, 1 July 2012 (UTC)
Misspellings again
Your bot "corrected" Automobile to "Automoble" and Emblazoned to "Emblazened". Please check the dictionary of English words contained in this Bot! Paulschn (talk) 19:18, 1 January 2013 (UTC)
The article Phil Rice has been proposed for deletion because it appears to have no references. Under Wikipedia policy, this newly created biography of a living person will be deleted unless it has at least one reference to a reliable source that directly supports material in the article. The nominator also raised the following concern:
- All biographies of living people created after March 18, 2010, must have references.
If you created the article, please don't be offended. Instead, consider improving the article. For help on inserting references, see Referencing for beginners, or ask at the help desk. Once you have provided at least one reliable source, you may remove the {{prod blp}} tag. Please do not remove the tag unless the article is sourced. If you cannot provide such a source within ten days, the article may be deleted, but you can request that it be undeleted when you are ready to add one. I dream of horses If you reply here, please leave me a {{Talkback}} message on my talk page. @ 23:05, 16 June 2013 (UTC)
middle east vs. the Middle East
Please note that I have reverted the capitalization change here. Not every appearance of the words "middle" and "east" in succession refers to the geographic region the Middle East! Please take note of this potential mistake in the future. --Alan W (talk) 05:38, 21 June 2013 (UTC)
Nomination of Tom Crabtree (journalist) for deletion
A nomination is taking place as to discuss whether Tom Crabtree (journalist) should be deleted or not. The discussion will be held at the Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Tom Crabtree (journalist). However, do not remove the AfD message. WisconsinBoyClevelandRocks228844 (talk) 02:34, 30 June 2013 (UTC)
Document titles and news headlines
Hi. I've reverted edits here, here and here where direct quotes, document titles and/or news headlines referred to "Sinn Fein" or "Fianna Fail" and the bot changed them to "Sinn Féin" and Fianna Fáil" [correction at 10.51 UTC: none of the edits involved direct quotes, so my edit summaries were inaccurate]. These should not be changed. I don't know how many other articles you did in the same batch, but it is probable that there are others that need to be undone. There were a couple of book titles, here and here, where the spelling was correctly changed. Regards, Scolaire (talk) 10:37, 20 March 2014 (UTC)
Please be careful
You recently made this change at Somnath Bharti. Why you think an Irish broadcaster has any interest in a fairly minor Indian politician is beyond me. I also notice that this is not the first screwed-up series of Ireland-related changes that you've made recently. If this is a bot then perhaps it needs to be stopped until the issues are fixed. - Sitush (talk) 17:57, 21 March 2014 (UTC)
Fixing mistakes in image names
The bot needs to be more careful in fixing spelling and spacing mistakes in image names because it then links to a redlink image, like [16] and [17]. If the image is a non-free image, it then eventually gets tagged as being orphaned and then deleted from Wikipedia. Please fix this so it will not happen again in the future. Aspects (talk) 23:48, 22 May 2014 (UTC)
Suggestions
teh → the
tteh → the
tthe → the
hhe → he
sshe → she