This is an archive of past discussions with User:R'n'B. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.
Hi, I made a minor edit on Supreme Court of the United States. I added death in, because it's a fact. If they pass away while on the bench a replacement is chosen. Not sure, why it was reverted?
Hi. Thanks for your message. The sentence already said that the justices have "life tenure", and it's pretty obvious that a dead person could not serve on the Court, so I thought the addition was unnecessary. --R'n'B (call me Russ) 12:37, 18 December 2012 (UTC)
So Wikipedia is not in fact open to the public if Moderators consistantly step on contributors toes.
Well, that's certainly an extreme version of the glass being half empty. You had one edit reverted, therefore the "big bad moderators" won't let you edit anything? For your information, the fact that I am an administrator (there is no such thing as a "moderator" on Wikipedia) has nothing to do with my edit of Supreme Court of the United States. With a few exceptions, any editor can change any other editor's contributions to Wikipedia. Your whole idea of some mysterious group of elitist users who go around reverting new users' contributions is ridiculous.
If you're serious about contributing to Wikipedia, and I hope you are, I encourage you to visit the Teahouse and read some of the new user help information there, ask questions, and learn more about how this community operates, instead of jumping to conclusions. --R'n'B (call me Russ) 23:53, 18 December 2012 (UTC)
Um, well, that's embarrassing -- I didn't do it intentionally, and I usually pay closer attention to my edits than that. Sorry. I'll go back over my edits from that day and see if there were any other errors. --R'n'B (call me Russ) 22:29, 21 December 2012 (UTC)
A tag has been placed on Automatic pistol (disambiguation), requesting that it be speedily deleted from Wikipedia. This has been done for the following reason:
Under the criteria for speedy deletion, articles that do not meet basic Wikipedia criteria may be deleted at any time.
If you think that the page was nominated in error, contest the nomination by clicking on the button labelled "Click here to contest this speedy deletion" in the speedy deletion tag. Doing so will take you to the talk page where you can explain why you believe the page should not be deleted. You can also visit the page's talk page directly to give your reasons, but be aware that once a page is tagged for speedy deletion, it may be removed without delay. Please do not remove the speedy deletion tag yourself, but do not hesitate to add information that is consistent with Wikipedia's policies and guidelines. If the page is deleted, you can contact one of these administrators to request that the administrator userfy the page or email a copy to you. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 176.205.221.224 (talk) 17:35, 27 December 2012 (UTC)
Akanland ???
Dear RussBot,
Are you sure you want Akanland mentioned in Wikipedia as a "country bordering the Atlantic Ocean"? It is not a country but a product of the fantasy of Ghanaians who want to promote their tribe at the expense of other Ghanaian tribes. Accepting Akanland as a country makes Wikipedia a vehicle of interethnic conflict. DrMennoWolters (talk) 20:01, 31 December 2012 (UTC)
That's an interesting comment. What gives you the idea that RussBot, which is an automated program, has any particular point of view on this question at all? --R'n'B (call me Russ) 20:16, 31 December 2012 (UTC)
Dear Mr. Russ Bott - It would appear that you undid virtually all of the updates I had performed to this article "Bonnie Jill Laflin" in December 2012. Such undo was effected without having any talk with me, which would of course violate the spirit of ' if not in in violation of Wikipedia policies. You deleted 95% of my contribution without creating a talk page. That is not appreciated.
I respectfully request you explain to / discuss with me the reasons for doing so.
Please do not force me to revert to the article as it was on December 29, 2012. You have added several new items which can be of use to the article, most of which can be weaved in with ease, , however, in doing so you have removed all previous citations and the article is now devoid of ANY citations. The article should have citations. ChristopherDBoyle (talk) 08:53, 6 January 2013 (UTC)
Dear ChristopherDBoyle: I have no idea what you are talking about. The only edit that User:RussBot made to the article Bonnie Jill Laflin was this one: changing the link [[American]] to [[United States|American]]. That's all. It didn't remove anything at all from the article. Whatever gave you the idea that it did???
By the way, do you see how useful it is to include links in talk page messages, as I did in the previous paragraph? --R'n'B (call me Russ) 11:52, 6 January 2013 (UTC)
My apologies, it is the edit next to yours. While you were kind enough to respond he or she (only an IP address is shown) has not. In your opinion, how long should I wait for a response before reverting the Article to its former status? ChristopherDBoyle (talk) 03:38, 7 January 2013 (UTC)
Under the circumstances - an unexplained edit by an IP address with virtually no prior editing history - I should say you have waited long enough already. --R'n'B (call me Russ) 11:39, 7 January 2013 (UTC)\
Well, I cleaned up the most obvious problems, but I'm not sure how all these different aspects of air traffic control are related to each other; it really needs attention from someone who is more familiar with the subject. Maybe WikiProject Aviation. --R'n'B (call me Russ) 11:58, 14 January 2013 (UTC)
Ramone
I intended to but I'm not very efficient. Thanks for helping.
Thank you for your courtesy notice. The purpose I created {{Black-surname}} is to untangle the mess with different derivations of the surname "Schwarz". Please notice, these are not different spellings; these are historically different surnames, produced via different mutlilanguage transliterations and corruptions. In particular, Swartz and Swarz are different. Unfortunately there are no sufficiently notable peolple with the lattter name on wikipedia. But this may change. Anyway, I am open to discuss other reasons. - Altenmann >t03:19, 18 January 2013 (UTC)
Hi Russ (Is this how to contact you as you kindly suggested?)
I was looking through a rather local biological journal (Ir Nat. J.) adding notes as I thought proper. I came upon: "Euthyneura myrtilli" Macquart. a fly (Diptera). When I started to enter it I found that "Euthyneura" already exsisted in Wikipedia, but as a slug no less. Now I don't think two different animals should be labelled under the same name, it's against the rules of nomenclature (I think). So I tried to note this. Now until I have sorted things out (there is a fault somewhere probably!) I think it best to delete Euthyneura myrtitti in the Ir Nat. J. completely! Can you do this for me please. I will research the matter and see what to do. Until then Euthyneura myrtilli best be deleted!!! Will be grateful for your help.Osborne 17:57, 29 January 2013 (UTC)
We don't have an article called Euthyneura myrtilli, so there is nothing to delete. We do have an article Euthyneura about the clade of slugs, and Euthyneura (insect) about the insect genus, which mentions Euthyneura myrtilli as one of six species. This arrangement assumes that the slug grouping is the WP:PRIMARYTOPIC; that is, if a reader is searching for "Euthyneura", it is "much more likely" that they are going to be looking for slugs than for dance flies. Frankly, I have no idea whether this assumption is correct or not. If it is, then the current set-up would be fine as it is. --R'n'B (call me Russ) 18:54, 29 January 2013 (UTC)
It needs JaGa to decide whether he is going to expand the monthly list on the Toolserver, since that's where the actual contest takes place. Presumably that can't happen until March, at the earliest, now. --R'n'B (call me Russ) 20:57, 31 January 2013 (UTC)
⁕ is not remotely appropriate for a disambiguation page. No one who is searching for information about either flowers or the Red Hot Chili Peppers could be expected to use this as a search term; and if someone did, they should not reasonably be surprised if the search fails to bring them to that topic. In fact, nothing in the Red Hot Chili Peppers article even hints at any relationship this symbol might have to the band; is that based on WP:OR?
When you created the disambiguation page, your edit summary referred to WP:Articles for deletion/Flower punctuation mark; I read that discussion, and I did not see anything that even remotely suggested that a disambiguation page was either necessary or appropriate. In fact, the discussion strongly suggested to me that the only appropriate topic for the "⁕" symbol would be Star (glyph). So, what's your substantiation? --R'n'B (call me Russ) 17:21, 1 February 2013 (UTC)
My solution is vulnerable to a critic, but there is no guideline about titles which are “not remotely appropriate for a disambiguation page”. There is a guideline about redirects to inappropriate targets (pp. 2 and 5), though. ⁕ looks similar to a star glyph, but it is not hyponymous/synonymous to a star glyph, just like ж and 卅 look similar to ∗ but all three are semantically unrelated. BTW, Unicode Code Charts recommend to approximate U+2055 with U+274B❋HEAVY EIGHT TEARDROP-SPOKED PROPELLER ASTERISK, which has a smooth, rounded shape – not a star glyph. Incnis Mrsi (talk) 19:21, 1 February 2013 (UTC)
I think your statement that "there is no guideline about titles which are 'not remotely appropriate for a disambiguation page'" is mistaken -- there are comprehensive guidelines on disambiguation at WP:Disambiguation. The introduction of this page explains, "Disambiguation is required whenever, for a given word or phrase on which a reader might search, there is more than one existing Wikipedia article to which that word or phrase might be expected to lead." [Emphasis mine.] My interpretation is that no one could reasonably expect the title "⁕" to lead to an article about flowers, or to an article about the Red Hot Chili Peppers; therefore, disambiguation is not required. (Also, note the section of the guidelines on what not to include on disambiguation pages.) --R'n'B (call me Russ) 20:19, 1 February 2013 (UTC)
Problem solved. I moved the disambiguation page to ⁕ (disambiguation), on the off chance that someone does search for it in order to find a meaning attributed to it, restored the redirect to Star (glyph) as the primary topic of the symbol, and dropped a hatnote on that page. Cheers! bd2412T20:31, 1 February 2013 (UTC)
A peace-keeper who does not get arguments… Star (glyph) as the primary topic of the symbol – who did say him such thing?! Will anybody of two users present any argument for that? Incnis Mrsi (talk) 21:24, 1 February 2013 (UTC)
Compare the letters of the alphabet (A, B, C, etc.), punctuation marks (?, !, @), and other symbols. They lead to articles about the symbol itself, not its meanings or associations. 卐 is associated with Nazism, but redirects to Swastika, not Nazism. This is clearly a broadly based understanding in the encyclopedia. bd2412T21:41, 1 February 2013 (UTC)
Yet another list request.
Hatnote dab links are a bitch. Can you generate a list of pages with (unintentional) disambig links occurring within, say, the first 100 characters of text? bd2412T04:28, 30 January 2013 (UTC)
I'll have to give this some thought. As I've mentioned before, trying to figure out where in the text a link appears is much more complex than just determining whether a link is present or not. --R'n'B (call me Russ) 15:57, 30 January 2013 (UTC)
How about links appearing within x number of characters (say, 20 or 50) of the phrase, "other uses" (and "other people", "other places", maybe "see also")? bd2412T16:09, 30 January 2013 (UTC)
Well, as of yesterday when I started the script, there were 351,394 articles containing links to disambiguation pages. Even if only 1% of those fall within the first 100 characters, it's a considerable list. However, as I've mentioned before, it's not the size of the list that is the issue so much as the processing time involved in loading and checking the text of each individual page to see where the disambiguation links are. If the bot can retrieve one page per second, that's four days to retrieve 351,394 pages. And, as you probably have experienced yourself, Wikipedia doesn't always load a page within one second of a request. --R'n'B (call me Russ) 20:52, 6 February 2013 (UTC)
Of course, now that I've written the above, it occurs to me that I probably didn't use the most efficient way of loading the page text, so maybe I can cut down the time significantly, although that would mean redoing all the work done so far. --R'n'B (call me Russ) 20:57, 6 February 2013 (UTC)
Turns out to be about 6,200. Not all are in hatnotes (in fact it seems fairly few are), but so far they seem to be easy fixes. bd2412T18:27, 7 February 2013 (UTC)
You probably meant Bath salts (disambiguation). I'm not sure how it helps to have a redirect with "disambiguation" in the title that doesn't take the reader to a disambiguation page, but I suppose it doesn't do any harm, so I'll defer to your views. --R'n'B (call me Russ) 15:41, 12 February 2013 (UTC)
This change, was not really correct. Don't know if a bot should be changing links to be directed to a dab page. What I believe the correct link to be is totally different. Vegaswikian (talk) 18:43, 21 March 2013 (UTC)
The link was pointing to a dab page before the bot edited it; and in almost all cases, links to dab pages in a hatnote like this are intentional, so per WP:D#HOWTODAB the bot's edit would be correct. However, in this case, I think you're right that the link was wrong in the first place. --R'n'B (call me Russ) 18:58, 21 March 2013 (UTC)
The reason for the edit is that Category:People from Breslau is a {{category redirect}}. Did you look at the category page before complaining? The bot did not make it a redirect; in fact, it has been a redirect ever since it was first created in 2007. The bot simply follows the redirect instructions. --R'n'B (call me Russ) 10:08, 22 March 2013 (UTC)
OK, I see now that you are simply implementing an existing policy. Could you help me with directions on where I can suggest a change of this policy? Thanks. Lklundin (talk) 12:52, 22 March 2013 (UTC)
Greetings, my friend. What's the prospectus on the Daily Disambig? It's been out for over a week now. Cheers! bd2412T12:33, 23 March 2013 (UTC)
The Toolserver is going through one of its periodic fits. :-( There's no ETA on when things may get back to normal. It could be today, or it could be another week or two. Unfortunately, it is entirely out of my control (or anyone else's, as far as I can tell). --R'n'B (call me Russ) 12:41, 23 March 2013 (UTC)
Sounds like everything is "normal" then. I don't suppose there's any way to generate those figures without going through the toolserver, is there? Cheers again! bd2412T12:50, 23 March 2013 (UTC)
Yes. It will take around 4 hours to finish, and I won't be around at the end, so I won't be able to delete the known false positives as I have done the last couple of times. --R'n'B (call me Russ) 13:06, 29 March 2013 (UTC)
I think the E.J. Wells page should be removed or turned in to a redirect. The name is wrong per WP:INITS, and with only two people we don't really need a disambig page, the hatnote at E. J. Wells is sufficient. I would just do it but I'm not familiar with these things and I see you've been in there before. Please discuss at Talk:E.J. Wells.Kendall-K1 (talk) 17:33, 25 March 2013 (UTC)
"DAB" is short for "disambiguation". Disambiguation is the process of resolving the ambiguity that arises from article titles that might refer to more than one topic in the encyclopedia. For example, "Mercury" might be a planet, a god, a car, or a metal, among other things. --R'n'B (call me Russ) 09:39, 5 April 2013 (UTC)
Thank you and thank you for being so kind about this answer. This was one of the questions I asked on my page, but you forgot to answer. "DAB" as acronym for "disambiguation" must be specific to Wikipedia and the special administrators at this particular site. That is, it is currently not listed in the first two pages that come up in a Google Chrome search. Thank you, again, RnB call me Russ.Taram 5 April 2013
c_meindl (talk·contribs) 10:45, 6 February 2014 Taking a WikiPedia class and had to join a WikiProject. I am interested in supplementing song stubs and articles!
[[User:<Pushandturn>|<Pushandturn>]] ([[User talk:<Pushandturn>|talk]] · [[Special:Contribs/<Pushandturn>|contribs]]) 00:57, 1 May 2019 (UTC) optional: Im a longtime U2 fan and I went to the U2 360 tour and love sharing their music!
RnB, call me Russ: I have one more question about a different page and set of pages that I hoped you could answer, especially as a decorated editor and administrator. At three other pages that I know of (one in which I was once quite involved), a user named who refers to herself/himself has spend time removing practically everything on the pages (including references) and then making outlandish claims about that which is left. In the last week s/he has gone to the pages frequently and after removing vast amounts of information from the page s/he then posts in correct and /or inaccurate statements describing the individual. Another person came along and re-edited the page that the so-called Wikipedia editor had ravaged. So, the page had accurate, bare-bone facts in the biography. This editor who is a concern came back almost immediately and removed all of that information and proceeded to say that there was nothing to say the individual is notable. The latest edit this so-called Wikipedia guru did was to remove a reference to a statement and remove the statement saying that it was not substantiated. When somebody returns information this character immediately returns to empty the page again. This so-called editor ravaged a page and then nominated the page for deletion after ravaging it. Another page had its contents deleted, but s/he has not gone so far as to recommend the page for deletion creating a talk page.
It seems to me that this so-called editor is acting inappropriately by constantly removing information (including citations) with the comment that there are no sources. It seems inappropriate to remove information and only then nominate the page for deletion because there is nothing there. It feels a little like stalking, but I doubt that is really happening.
What can I do about this knowledge rape by this so-called editor? Is there a way to protect a page so this person is prevented from constantly deleting information from it? Was it wrong to delete all the information and only then nominate a page for deletion? (Would returning the information to the page and then nominating it for deletion protect the page while it is discussed?)
Taram, this is all very abstract, and without knowing which articles are involved it is impossible for me to form any opinion. In terms of process, if you think an article has been nominated for deletion inappropriately, you should raise your concerns on the Articles for Deletion page about that article. If you think that a particular editor is engaged in inappropriate actions on multiple pages, you should certainly raise that issue on WP:ANI. --R'n'B (call me Russ) 13:57, 7 April 2013 (UTC)
Pardon my intrusion, but I think it is no coincidence that you started Andrew Helm and Roberta Brown, and they both got the same treatment. I am not saying there has been WP:stalking, as I have no proof of intent. WP: duck. Whether this behavior was untoward I leave to those in authority, of which I have none. 7&6=thirteen (☎)17:26, 7 April 2013 (UTC)
Double Redirects
I work on the TF2 wiki, and we were trying to set up a bot to deal with double-redirects. The bot is written in python, and I would greatly appreciate either the double-redirect code, or some pointers as to how to right said code. Thanks! Jbzdarkid (talk) 18:55, 6 April 2013 (UTC)
Hi, Jbzdarkid. The bot you linked to uses a framework called "wikitools," which I'm not familiar with. The double-redirect bots that I know here on Wikipedia use the Pywikipediabot framework, and a script called redirect.py. It should be possible to configure this to work on your wiki, if you want to make the effort. (Anyway, there are only two double-redirects on the wiki at the moment; I'm not sure it's worth all the trouble to set up a bot to fix them....) Or, you could use the source code to figure out how to adapt your existing bot to do this. --R'n'B (call me Russ) 18:43, 7 April 2013 (UTC)
There are only two because I patrol that special page, quite heavily. (Also, we don't move pages much.) I'll see if I can adapt it. 96.237.240.118 (talk) 20:20, 7 April 2013 (UTC)
The article will be discussed at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Westin Casuarina (disambiguation) until a consensus is reached, and anyone is welcome to contribute to the discussion. The nomination will explain the policies and guidelines which are of concern. The discussion focuses on high-quality evidence and our policies and guidelines.
Users may edit the article during the discussion, including to improve the article to address concerns raised in the discussion. However, do not remove the article-for-deletion notice from the top of the article. TheGoofyGolfer (talk) 19:18, 13 April 2013 (UTC)
Ten points for fixing the links. I'm AWBing stuff now for the 1700-ish links, but mainly I want to thank you for fixing links like Limerick, Ireland. You are a pro and have my highest commendation. Red Slash16:47, 20 April 2013 (UTC)
I don't understand. Which article(s) are incorrect? I frankly think the decision to split Heer into a disambiguation page was ill-advised, but that was the consensus. --R'n'B (call me Russ) 21:22, 1 May 2013 (UTC)
The disambiguation in this case is not correct. In general if it is, but something went wrong. Why do not you look at the latest articles you've edited? The link to heer is dead. I subsequently corrected, for example, Martin Gareis, and is now OK. The problem seems to be the hyphen between the dates.
Ahh, sorry, today is correct. Yesterday, the link was broken. I do not understand, if you look at Martin Gareis, required I changed the dash between the dates so that was correct. You can see it's different. Glad it is fixed (you have made many changes). :)
Well, I checked Talk:Asia Minor (disambiguation) before editing and didn't see any relevant discussion there; hiding it away on a user's talk page is not really very friendly to the rest of us. Anyway, reading the discussion on RHaworth's page does not change my mind as to Anatolia being the primary topic. I don't have any quarrel with the existence of the disambiguation page as such, which seems to be what you were discussing. However, Asia Minor Slavs and Asia Minor ground squirrel are both partial title matches that don't really belong. No one who is looking for one of these two topics could reasonably expect to find them on a page titled simply "Asia Minor". --R'n'B (call me Russ) 14:05, 8 May 2013 (UTC)
If you think this page should not be deleted for this reason, you may contest the nomination by visiting the page and clicking the button labelled "Click here to contest this speedy deletion". This will give you the opportunity to explain why you believe the page should not be deleted. However, be aware that once a page is tagged for speedy deletion, it may be removed without delay. Please do not remove the speedy deletion tag from the page yourself, but do not hesitate to add information in line with Wikipedia's policies and guidelines. Widefox; talk13:02, 25 June 2013 (UTC)
It's been a while since I've asked you to make a list of something, so this will make up for lost time. I have been finding a lot of "Foo of Bar" or "Foo in Bar" pages categorized as disambiguation pages that are either dabconcepts or should be primary topic pages. For example, Military of China should not be a disambig because China is a primary topic, and the military of China is the People's Liberation Army. Can you make me a list of all disambiguation pages with titles containing the words "of" or "in" (of course, excluding those titled "Foo of Bar (disambiguation)")? Cheers! bd2412T22:25, 4 July 2013 (UTC)
Hello. On the boxing article you recently have edit over and over again about Michael Hunter Jr. I wil liketo tell you that there is no disambiguation.
We have always done boxing pages like that, that first we mention the city the boxing place is in and then the state it is located in.
Would it be possible to denote with an asterisk (or in some other way) pages that are new to the Daily Disambig because they are entirely new disambiguation pages? Cheers! bd2412T12:38, 24 July 2013 (UTC)
Off the top of my head, I can't think of how to do this. The Daily Disambig is derived from the Toolserver list of disambiguation pages with links. If a page is on that list today and wasn't on it yesterday, then it is a "new" page. That can be either because the page didn't exist yesterday; because it did exist but it wasn't a disambiguation page; or because the page didn't have any incoming links yesterday and today it has some. The data available to me don't tell me which of these three cases it is. --R'n'B (call me Russ) 13:37, 24 July 2013 (UTC)
This may be a pain, but is it possible, once the list of "new" pages is generated, for the generating mechanism to look at the page histories and see if they were created within the last day, or made into a disambiguation page in the last day? I ask because the question has come up in this discussion. Cheers again! bd2412T13:53, 24 July 2013 (UTC)
A few thousand blank saves?
Every once in a while I notice a page topping the list of most linked-to disambiguation pages for which virtually all of the incoming links are from a template that has already been fixed. Sometimes I load those links up in AWB and do blank saves of the pages to wean out the false positives. I suspect that if we did the same thing with the top thousand disambiguation pages with links (or the top ten thousand, or twenty thousand), we would sweep away a great deal of bad hits. Can Russbot do this? bd2412T02:32, 29 July 2013 (UTC)
You do know that there is a job queue that automatically cleans out these links after a template is edited, right? It can take three to seven days, but these links generally go away on their own, so I don't think that the "sweep" you have in mind would really do very much. --R'n'B (call me Russ) 09:58, 29 July 2013 (UTC)
I occasionally seem to run across older bunches than that, but maybe that's just large groups of actual fixes needed remaining from a larger set that included template fixes. Sorry to throw unnecessary work at you! bd2412T11:22, 29 July 2013 (UTC)
new Sandbox
I'm working on my sandbox and trying to have more references. I keep getting errors though... Can you help me fix this? Joancdocyogen 00:01, 6 August 2013 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Joancdocyogen (talk • contribs)
Public (disambiguation )
Hey, trying to create a page by the above title HERE, your name popped up. Wondering if you can fill me in, as the page seems to have been deleted in the past. On my end, I was seeking to disambiguate as follows:
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
% Public - as in non private (Ex: IPO, public company)
% Public - pertaining to government (Ex: public policy, public health)
% Public - as in a group of people (Ex: fans, tribal, community)
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
What I envisioned was somewhat the counterpart of private.
But, I wouldn't want to reinvent the wheel if the community has decided against such page....
Thanks,
My name is Mercy11, and I approve this message. 01:33, 8 August 2013 (UTC)
All of those seem to me to be subsenses of the larger sense of "public" embodied in the article, public. Why not just expand that article with sections on "public" as it pertains to business, to government, and to groups of people? bd2412T13:57, 8 August 2013 (UTC)
Hi, Mercy11. I tend to agree with BD2412 on this. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a dictionary. A disambiguation page is supposed to direct readers to specific encyclopedia articles about topics, not just list definitions and/or related terms. In fact, the first two of the three groups you listed are uses of "public" as an adjective, not a noun, but encyclopedia articles are almost always about a topic that is a person, place, thing, or concept, so their titles are almost always nouns. And the third grouping is already covered by the existing article, Public. --R'n'B (call me Russ) 15:11, 8 August 2013 (UTC)
What the f-bomb?
The number of disambiguation pages with links seems to have dropped by about 7,500 overnight (although this is not reflected in the list of pages leaving the count). Any idea what is going on here? bd2412T14:51, 9 August 2013 (UTC)
Bot glitch. I'm trying to clean it up. Although, frankly, I don't understand it because when I tried the same script a second time, it didn't make the same errors. --R'n'B (call me Russ) 15:05, 9 August 2013 (UTC)
Thanks for the update. Too bad that didn't actually happen. I've been complaining in various forums about the upward trend in disambiguation links since July 4. bd2412T15:11, 9 August 2013 (UTC)
Hello R'n'B: RussBot seems to be doing something weird. It feels compelled to amend "[[champagne]]" to "[[Champagne (wine)|champagne]]". This is quite needless, as the article about the wine is called "Champagne" without a qualifier. RussBot did this at the Bad Münster am Stein-Ebernburg article, but I have undone it. Kelisi (talk) 14:45, 20 August 2013 (UTC)
Could you please unprotect Category:X2? You had protected it years ago but that doesn't seem necessary anymore. It is for testing like Category:X1 but is redirecting to the latter while being used as a hard-to-find category itself. Since a single test may simultaneously use two or more categories, both or more are needed as categories and they should be in a parent category that would make finding more easier (I've just created Category:Xn for that purpose). I therefore propose making Category:X2 a category like Category:X1 and not a redirect. If you unprotect it, I can edit accordingly. Nick Levinson (talk) 18:12, 3 August 2013 (UTC)
Also, would you consider adding Category:Xn as a parent? Depending on X2's purpose, having X1 as its parent is valid, but Xn also seems relevant.
I've recreated Category:X3 to serve the same purpose as Category:X1, since I'll simultaneously need at least two categories for testing a template I'm developing. X1's and X3's leads state a purpose and since X2 is different, it should say so.
That seems reasonable, and I've done it. Although, since the category is a redirect and is protected, the only people who will be able to read the notice are admins who seek to edit the page. Also, I guess anyone will be able to read it if they look at the page history and generate a diff. --R'n'B (call me Russ) 10:11, 5 August 2013 (UTC)
Thanks; the new category shows up. It seems odd that the notice doesn't appear, except in the diff, which even admins are unlikely to open and read. Does the notice need to be moved to above the #REDIRECT line or won't that make a difference? I just think, since the X2 category is already populated, the notice should be readable. I suppose I could ask at the help desk or the village pump if visibility can be solved within the circumstances. Nick Levinson (talk) 15:14, 5 August 2013 (UTC)
If you move the notice above the #REDIRECT directive, you would break the redirect. This is an inherent issue with all redirect pages; any text below the redirect directive is generally unviewable except with special efforts. --R'n'B (call me Russ) 16:13, 5 August 2013 (UTC)
May I suggest adding {{Cmbox|text=This category is solely for testing and monitoring for changes in underlying software, including or only for the functionality of category redirects. If you have any questions, please contact admin [[User talk:R'n'B|R'n'B]].}} (edit the text as you see fit) as a solution to placing text on the category hard-redirect page? I proposed the concept at VPT about a week ago and no one replied, so I guess no one found a problem and it should be okay to do. Nick Levinson (talk) 16:24, 15 August 2013 (UTC) (Corrected link & template name: 16:32, 15 August 2013 (UTC)) (Recorrected link: 16:36, 15 August 2013 (UTC)) (Again: 16:40, 15 August 2013 (UTC))
I can do that, but it won't be any more visible that way. Your message on VPT specifically referred to a "soft-redirected category"; but X2 is hard-redirected. I think renaming might be the better solution.
Would moving Category:X2 to Category:Software test of category redirects solve the problem? (Apparently, I can't do the move, but I can propose it, if you wish.) If the new cat title or another is okay, that could still leave a need to refer people with questions to you; to that end, perhaps you could create in your userspace a subpage titled something like /Questions about category redirect software testing (if you edit the new cat title edit the subpage title too), write a small blurb on that subpage, and categorize your new subpage into the new category, so that people who think of deleting the category as unnecessary would at least see an intriguing page title (User:R'n'B/Questions about category redirect software testing) and, hopefully, follow the link. I don't think there's much risk the subpage will be deleted unless you opt for that yourself. Category:X2 should be left as a redirect (and unprotected) although it can redirect to the new category for now; if it's needed as a simultaneous test parallel to X1 and X3, it'll be easier to edit the redirect (and to add a hatnote about where the old X2 moved to) than to recreate cat X2 if deleted, and I might be the one who needs it soon. Nick Levinson (talk) 15:54, 16 August 2013 (UTC) (Edited generally: 16:03, 16 August 2013 (UTC)) (Added on unprotection: 16:07, 16 August 2013 (UTC))
