McBot is busy removing a useless template and doing a couple of other things, editing at a very high rate (at one point I noted nearly 100/minute ;-). There are a lot of them; at one time yesterday there were 94000+ remaining, after it had already done at least 20K. All good, but it floods the daily dump update; I had to fix it after Conrad.Bot clobbered it on a previous occasion.
The simple version is: the dump for today is posted, but does not reflect most of the McBot edits. They (and other 'bot) edits will be integrated into the dump over the next several days.
The gory details (if you care ;-): the process effectively prioritizes the updates it is doing, and limits the total number of updates in each run. That way it doesn't try to load 100K pages from the servers in one pass. It runs 3 times a day, and the run at ~09:00 UTC is posted. The priorities are:
The priorities are not a strict sequence, it always does all templates, and then some from each step. Under normal conditions, it completes all of the updates in each step anyway. At the moment, the fourth group is not being completed. The cache of revision id for each page id is refreshed from the servers at least once in every 7 days (21 runs). Robert Ullmann 11:07, 1 January 2009 (UTC)
Ah, should also note that all deletions needed are done on each run; however it won't do more than 5000 because it just reads the last 5K from the deletion log. This would only be a problem if more than 5000 entries were deleted in 8 hours. (Not very likely.) Robert Ullmann 19:24, 1 January 2009 (UTC)
These have been added recently, and I'd like to migrate the font specifications to the style sheet MediaWiki:Common.css, standardize the class names, etc:
{{Cham}} – add fallback font-family: sans-serif{{Copt}} – add fallback font-family: sans-serif{{Geor}} – change class name from script-Geor to Geor{{Latf}} – change class name from LA to Latf; add fallback font-family: sans-serif{{Thaa}} – change class name from Mahal DV to Thaa{{Tale}} – add fallback font-family: sans-serifAny comments or objections? —Michael Z. 2009-01-02 22:14 z
{{term}}, {{t}}, {{infl}}, {{form of}}, etc. I have started WT:SCRIPTS to document these templates, but it is not a help page for general readers of the dictionary. —Michael Z. 2009-01-12 06:19 zCurrently, the Tibetan font declaration is identical to the generic Unicode one, which is problematic since none of the Unicode fonts support Tibetan. IE (and most other browsers) ignores these fonts (so there's no problem with Tibetan failing to show up even if the fonts are installed), but the declaration in the Common.css should still be changed to something that makes more sense, like
.Tibt { font-family:Jomolhari,'Tibetan Machine Uni','Microsoft Himalaya',sans-serif; }
-- Prince Kassad 14:57, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
I am trying to add two new named parameters (ns - no singular, np - no plural) to hu-decl which is the main layout declension template for Hungarian nouns. Sometimes nouns do not have plurals, occasionally singulars. The current template generates both. I tried the following in {{hu-decl-test}} (my test template) but did not work:
The other test template that goes with this is {{hu-decl-ok-test}}. The hu-decl template is the layout template for several other templates. It seems a better idea to put the ns and np parameters here rather than in the subtemplates. They are already complex and I would have to modify several templates instead of one. Could someone please help? Thanks. --Panda10 21:25, 4 January 2009 (UTC)
{{grc-test}} is a modified version of {{hu-decl-k-back}}, and shows a singular only version of the inflection of kutya. It doesn't work perfectly for the nominative and essive-formal, because of the PAGENAME calls, but I imagine you'll get the idea nonetheless. -Atelaes λάλει ἐμοί 00:19, 5 January 2009 (UTC)It looks like MediaWiki now escapes ampersands in certain messages, which breaks the display of those messages if they use HTML entity references or numeric character references; I just fixed MediaWiki:Previousrevision and MediaWiki:Nextrevision, but I don't know if any other messages are affected. Does anyone know more about this? —RuakhTALK 23:55, 4 January 2009 (UTC)
Can someone please tell me what's wrong with this template that causes the following errors to occur? 1, 2, 3. Thanks.—msh210℠ 22:24, 8 January 2009 (UTC)
Hm, thanks. is there a way to allow a template to accept a parameter value that includes or the like?—msh210℠ 22:36, 8 January 2009 (UTC)
{{rfcarchive-pre}} and {{rfcarchive-post}}, turn {{rfcarchive}} into basically just {{rfcarchive-pre}}{{{1}}}{{rfcarchive-post}}, and use {{rfcarchive-pre}} and {{rfcarchive-post}} directly in situations where {{rfcarchive}} would be a pain … personally I wouldn't worry about it if I were the one doing the archive, but since I'm not, you can totally be my guest to be as precise as you like. :-) —RuakhTALK 05:08, 9 January 2009 (UTC)This is a very simple template, but it does need to do one thing that I don't know how to set up. It needs to check the values of {{{g}}} (or {{{1}}}) and {{{g2}}} (or {{{2}}}) to see whether they are valid for gender / number. Can someone help? I could certainly set up something using #switch, but I seem to recall there's a bit of code out there that I could simply call from this template, and have that pre-written code do the work. The problem is that I don't know where the code is or how to call it. --EncycloPetey 04:59, 12 January 2009 (UTC)
{{ca|attention}}. Also, you mentioned something about number, but I'm not seeing any number stuff in the template. -Atelaes λάλει ἐμοί 07:04, 12 January 2009 (UTC)When a page is deleted, we now get some text telling us that the {{delete}} template may be deleted. I don't believe this to be true. SemperBlotto 15:27, 16 January 2009 (UTC)
There are certain situations where one might want to use an image in a translation, mainly when the language is written in a script which is completely unsupported by Unicode. Currently, though, Template:t does not allow images to be used and breaks, even when I use an imagemap as a workaround (see water). Would it be possible to add some kind of parameter to Template:t to allow for images? -- Prince Kassad 21:52, 16 January 2009 (UTC)
{{t}}. The template is only useful for languages with FL wikts (presently 167), and mostly pointless for the other 7000+ languages. ({{tø}} was only created to give Tbot something to do with {t} templates added for non-existant FL wikts, as a slight improvement over just converting them to ordinary links.) Robert Ullmann 13:57, 17 January 2009 (UTC)
We should be generating HTML/XHTML lang tags for a number of bits where we have the information, to allow the browser font selection and CSS styling to work as designed. Please read the two sections above. Nbarth makes a good point, in that trying to convert languages to script (ala {{lang2sc}}) is mostly pointless, as it is the language that is wanted. We only want the script in a limited number of cases (e.g. Hant v Hans), and to add classes (for IE; without the customary IE brokenness there would not be much point ...)
Just to explain what this looks like; we want a bit of text in Japanese to look like:
<span lang="ja" xml:lang="ja" class="Jpan">言葉</span>
The class being only for our CSS and for IE<8, other browsers can style on the lang "psuedo-class".
Nbarth also points out that writing |lang=ja|sc=Jpan is annoying. Especially when the "Jpan" script selection isn't really the point: the browser setup works on the lang attribute.
Somewhere above, we proposed passing lang= and face= to the various script templates. The templates can then do the right thing. The language is the code, the face is one of so the template can apply the desired HTML tag for the script (some scripts we want bold, some not; likewise for italic). head tells the template this is a headword (from {infl} or whatever) possibly made larger (Han, Arabic). term says this use is by {term}, to be italic in some cases.
(The script templates should use b for bold, and i for italic, not "em" and "strong", to be consistent with the WM s/w generated code for double and triple apostrophes.)
In standard use, the script codes are not used in most language tags, for example "zh-Hant" is used, but "fr-Latn" is not, "Latn" is the (supressed) default for "fr". Script codes by themselves are meaningless: lang="Hant" is not allowed (ignored), as it isn't a language tag. This is why the script templates need the lang= from caller, although they can sometimes default reasonably ({{Kore}} defaults to language "ko"). So the templates will suppress the script for a set of languages, default the language when reasonable, and in the case of Latn, suppress the script in all languages except a specific list: lang="sr-Latn" makes sense and is used.
What is then needed is a bit of magic, a script template that can be used by default. Other templates that take lang= and sc= can then do something like:
{{ {{{sc|Xyzy}}}|lang={{{lang|}}}| (content) }}
Nbarth suggested {{Xyzy}}; I had been thinking {{xyzzy}} (;-) we can name it whatever. This bit of magic must be very concise, it will get used a lot; hundreds of thousand of times. It provides a small set of script templates for common languages, and otherwise Does the Right Thing.
The set of languages with scripts supplied by the magic is:
| code | script template |
|---|---|
| ar | Arab |
| fa | fa-Arab |
| hy | Armn |
| be, bg, mk, ru, uk | Cyrl |
| sa, hi | Deva |
| el | Grek |
| grc | polytonic |
| he, yi, arc | Hebr |
| ja | Jpan |
| ko | Kore |
| ta | Taml |
| te | Telu |
| th | Thai |
(Yes right now you are thinking, but what about ? This list must be very short to work; other languages will simply have to specify the script. Of course we can revise this list, but making it more than a small bit longer is unworkable.) Are we still using {{polytonic}} for Ancient Greek, or it is now the same template/class?
Time for Man U/Bolton, must go now ... Robert Ullmann 14:48, 17 January 2009 (UTC)
OTRS has gotten a couple of reports that "The Word of the Day RSS feed hasn't been updated since December 23, 2008.", Not sure how to fix this... --Versageek 01:36, 19 January 2009 (UTC)
When I try to open the page ventana I get a page load error. This problem exists a least since one weak. Has someone an idea what happens? Matthias Buchmeier 14:28, 19 January 2009 (UTC)
The categories ase:Etymology and ase:English derivations use {{topic cat}}, which causes them to be included in Category:American Sign Language language, which is properly redlinked, as it exists at Category:American Sign Language. Would it be possible to fiddle with that template (or the responsible subtemplate) so that it treats ase as an exception and categorizes properly?—msh210℠ 20:43, 19 January 2009 (UTC)
{{topic cat parents/default}} if I'm following the code right — but is this something we might want to do for other languages as well? For example, do we want "____ Creole language", or just "____ Creole"? Maybe we should add support for a langdesc= parameter that defaults to language name language? —RuakhTALK 22:01, 19 January 2009 (UTC)Not too active around here any more, but I saw a note about this from msh210. I haven't looked at this code in a while, but I'd probably lean toward doing this in some variation of Template:langname. Currently, I basically call langname and append "language" unconditionally. If there were a template like langname that knew whether or not to include the word "language", that would help here.
That being said, I was never really sold on the idea of using the topic category templates for the etymology and derivation categories. It always seemed to me that there should be something more sophisticated for these cases, but I don't recall whether I had any better ideas on how to approach it. I don't actually recall the details of how langname itself works right now, so that probably doesn't help :) Mike Dillon 23:27, 19 January 2009 (UTC)
I believe I've fixed this. I had to touch both {{topic cat parents/default}} and {{topic cat parents/Etymology}}. I only did it for "ase". Mike Dillon 05:34, 7 February 2009 (UTC)
{{language}} template respond to a parameter that tells it to append the word "language", omitting it for the language codes that already have "Language" in them.{{language}} is currently used since they wouldn't be passing this new parameter, but I'm still not willing to make that change given my recently low level of activity. Seems like something up Robert's alley, but the changes I made should work for this one case. It just sucks to have to change three pieces of markup if anyone wants to add a language to this exclusion list. Nevermind extending it to other cases besides Etymology if they arise. Mike Dillon 05:18, 11 February 2009 (UTC)I've taken some of the code from the iwiki bot that updates the entire wikt in one pass, with a global index, and written something that looks at RC on the various wikts and finds things to add here.
I did this more because I wanted to gather more information about the activity on other wikts, not because I wanted to speed up additions of iwiki links; but it is useful. I've noted over time that when I have reason to go look at FL wikts, often there is very little activity (RC last 100 shows several days' worth); but sometimes quite a bit. This way I get to "see" a lot of it. I've noted that the total NS:0 creation rate (not including bots) for all of the FL wikts put together is about the same as the en.wikt rate. For bots, I don't know yet, but looking at the statistics timelines for number of entries one can draw some conclusions.
The practical effect (assuming I or someone keeps running it ;-) is that when entries are added to other wikts that have an en.wikt entry, the iwiki will be added here in some smallish number of minutes (up to 6 hours if the FL wikt is usually very quiet, thus not looked at frequently). When a new entry is added here, it will add any iwikis it finds, like this. It doesn't do an exhaustive search in this case, so some may be left to be found later in a complete pass. It looks at a few large wikts, plus the wikts for the language(s) in the entry, plus any that have iwikis added by the creator.
It also checks sort order whenever looking at entries; if someone adds an entry to an FL wikt, and then adds the iwiki here, the bot will re-check it and sort it in correctly if needed. So it isn't necessary in almost any case to tell well-meaning editors not to add iwikis. They very often want to add an iwiki to the en.wikt, because the "standard" bot relies on hints like that to get started.
So you'll see more edits by Interwicket, comments welcome of course. Robert Ullmann 12:06, 25 January 2009 (UTC)
I've added code to add the reciprocal iwiki link to the FL entry, pointing back to the English. This is desirable for iwiki bot-like things, but runs into the rather large problem of getting bot flags/permissions/(non-denials :-) from 170 wikts... it operates in a test mode, doing a very limited number, unless bot-flagged (or blocked ...). I would like feedback from wherever. Robert Ullmann 14:22, 26 January 2009 (UTC)
moved from BP
I think it is more logical to 'exploit' the consistencies between language conjugations than rely on users learning to use hard-to-understand templates, for example the Dutch verbs are more or less consistent when split in groups: regular/irregular (some exceptions) with the help of the StringFunction extension we could literally have verb conjugations done within the template instead of using e.g {{templatename|conj1|conj2|conj3|...}} etc. here's a rough sample:
]
there are some errors in this, but with a few tweaks it could be used to get the infinitive from a stem of a regular Dutch verb, it is by no means limited to the infinitive of a verbs stem/infinitive, or even verbs. Plural noun forms are pretty consistent, and it would be a ton more user friendly. There is of course the odd exception where this would not work, of which the errors can easily be negated by adding a param.. (note: since the wiki does not currently have the extension installed it would not work right now) 120.16.131.29 12:39, 25 January 2009 (UTC)
I've created {{diff}} for the display of diff URLs (on discussion pages, naturally). If I missed something, please tweak.—msh210℠ 23:11, 29 January 2009 (UTC)