User:Pascal666

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Wikipedia tools I find useful (and you may too!)[edit]

Other good deeds[edit]

In addition to Wikipedia I also contribute to:

I used to contribute to and now really miss TV Tome.

I participate in a few distributed projects:

From November 2005 to May 2006 I ran the largest node on the Tor network.

If you know of any other projects that could use some bandwidth, please let me know.

Current project[edit]

The problem[edit]

Many templates put <includeonly> tags around categories so that the template itself does not get categorized. When users subst these templates into articles instead of including them the article looks like it is tagged correctly, but since it does not get placed in the category it does not get the attention it needs (such as articles that were speedied years ago and never actually got deleted). Templates also use <noinclude> tags for their own categories, notes, and languages. When users subst these templates the article gets placed into a template category and gets incorrect language links. The most common templates users subst that they should not are stubs (by far), disambig, npov, prod, db, incomplete list, and cleanup.

The solution[edit]

Certain keywords should never be found in the main namespace. These keywords are only found in templates that should never be subst'd. I am currently using database dumps to touchup all articles in the main namespace that contain any of the keywords: {{NAMESPACE}} {{PAGENAME}} {{FULLPAGENAME}} <noinclude> </noinclude> <includeonly> </includeonly> <onlyinclude> </onlyinclude>

If you know of any other keywords that I should be searching for at the same time please let me know.

The problem with the solution[edit]

Since the goal is not to simply remove these tags but to actually replace them and the text around them with the correct template, this is a tedious manual process. A bot would be able to remove to tags, but would not be able to put the correct template in their place. Like all other humans, I make mistakes. If the error is in the edit summary, to my knowledge I have no way to fix it (please let me know if there is a way). I often catch my own errors in the article itself, but I'm sure some slip through. Please let me apologize in advance for any of my errors that you have to fix.

A large thank you to all the stub sorters out there. I am dumping a lot of articles in their laps that previously were labeled stubs but were not actually showing up in the stub categories. I try to categorize them correctly, but I miss a lot.

Please note that I am not actually reading any of the articles, just the text that I am replacing. Please do not ask me why I added a NPOV, prod, cleanup, etc template to an article, when I simply replaced the text of the template with the template itself. Instead please review the article history to find out who originally added the message to the article. When you ask the user why they originally added the message, it would be nice if you also mentioned to them that their message would have gotten attention much faster had they not subst'd it.

The permanent fix[edit]

Subst needs to check if a template contains noinclude or includeonly, and if so refuse to subst it. If you have any idea how to do this, please let me know. Thanks!