SMcCandlish

Mini-toolbox

• The Phabricator Workboard for Tech News
• MW Editing team e-meetings, via Google Hangouts (Tuesdays, noon–12:30pm PDT = 20:00 UTC during DST, 19:00 otherwise, but often half an hour earlier).
• MW Tech Advice e-meetings, via IRC at #wikimedia-tech ^connect (Wednesdays, 1–2pm PDT = 16:00–17:00 UTC).

Cite4Wiki

Hi, I've created your repository (mediawiki/tools/Cite4Wiki) but I was unable to find your user in Gerrit to add you to the owner group for your new repository. Can you confirm that you've created a labs/gerrit account? If not, documentation can be found here. Thanks! ^demon (talk) 21:10, 2 January 2013 (UTC)

Your edit on Extension:Labeled Section Transclusion overwritten

Hello. Just a note to explain my update eliminating your edit above. Quite apart from the fact you had correctly spotted the "section=" mis-quote (should have been "either 'begin=' or 'end='"), in addition by coding {{clarify|date=March 2016|reason=There is no "section=" here.}} as you did you inadvertently set up yet another level of failure, as {{Clarify }} generates {{Fix }} which…does not handle strings containing raw double-quote marks.

For the record in future you could have used {{clarify|date=March 2016|reason=There is no "section=" here.}} but in this case I thought it worth cutting out the original discussion as causing more confusion than it was worth. I hope you concur.

AuFCL (talk) 04:28, 12 March 2016 (UTC)

Thumbs up.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  21:12, 13 March 2016 (UTC)

@AuFCL: A belated thought: The {{Fix }} template should be fixed to detect and escape characters it can't handle. Might need a Scribunto module for that, though. I would have to look at how it works on en.Wikipedia to be sure.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  01:40, 16 December 2017 (UTC)

Noticed a comment of yours

Hi SMcCandlish, I was looking into FLOW/Structured Discussions and came across this comment. It struck-a-chord to some degree as I've, over the last coupla' years, been entertaining some musings about possible advantages in splitting article discussions on the Wikipedias into some sort of one formal/one less formal framework. While I can see—as you've put forth—the utility in such as a means to shunt aside distractions on pages dealing with topics that attract vociferous fan culture, I also think there are arguments to be made for some general utility across-the-board as well.

In my case, I came to the idea of having both an article 'editing discussion' page and an article 'topical chat' page (perhaps styled simply as Edit talk and Chat) through a combination of contemplating possible ways one might make en:WikiP culture more attractive to and accommodating of a broader demographic of editors in general and better able to comfortably accommodate a broader and larger sampling of skilled female editors in particular.

As to Chat page advantages to women, my thoughts basically grew from thousands of years of anecdotal observation and commentary backed now by decades of modern research which asserts that, as a class, women like to talk more than men. At least with more frequency in a broad and more general manner. So it seems that having an alternate talk space that allows for conversations to spread out, perhaps gathering some fresh tidbits along the way, might serve as a nice compliment to a more focused targeted talkpage geared towards hunting down agreements and tracking possible issues. Obviously the sort of distinctions I've just drawn aren't necessarily going to be adequately descriptive of any individual female or male but I think it's been pretty well established that such biases tend to arise across large samplings of humans. So, my proposal is basically that we bow-to-the -realities-of-the-situation and provide the ladies with additional space to congregate and chat.

... But, it's not just about the ladies ... In mulling over this stuff I came to recall an anecdote about how some corporate tech industry executive back-in-the-day noticed that, having only been offered a series of small cabaret tables to choose from, most everyone in their corporate lunchroom was sitting in relative isolation during their break. The wily exec proceeded with a successful move to have all the separate little tables replaced by end-to-end blocks of traditional cafeteria benches ... Official cross-department communication and collaboration dramatically, measurably, increased by leaps-n-bounds in just a few months. Presumably spurred by people sitting next to each other and striking up casual conversation over lunch. IIRC, the company was Microsoft.

The point being, I think chat pages may be actively advantageous to hard science and medical pages, etc., etc. as well. A localized place for ideas to spontaneously arise—some of which might eventually develop into proposals on an article's formal Editing talk page—while also providing opportunity to build general rapport and get to know some folks better. Perhaps to facilitate engagement when 'chat' gets initiated on pages with low traffic one might have some sort of section and/or subpage of related Wikiprojects and/or Categories noting 'recent chat activity' for pages within their scope. And/or incorporate some sort of Chat activity listing and highlights at the more centralized Village Pump. Basically, I'm suggesting there may be active benefit to having article localized 'patios' in addition to the existing options to gather-'round-the-village-pump in the 'town square'.

Thanks for your time and attention. I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

--–A Fellow Editor– 15:52, 5 December 2017 (UTC)

The purpose of my post was to point out all the ways in which chat/troll pages are a bad idea, without just coming out and saying they were a bad idea. We already have pages like this: wikiprojects' talk pages. They're just broader than one article. I don't terribly disagree with the idea that having some place to chat about this stuff in an open-ended manner would be used by a lot of people. [However, other studies also show that men actually talk more than women, just for different purposes and in a different style, mostly to impart information or make a show of imparting information, i.e. for utility and with a dominance-display layer, rather than for sharing feelings and maintaining bonds with peers – on average men care less about what women want to talk about and why, and thus think women talk more because men remember talking they don't want to hear or participate in as something annoying, but absorb talking they do themselves and and want to engage in for its utilty as unconscious experience of normalcy. Web forums on most topics are actually dominated by men, who are most often "lecturing at" others.] The en.Wikipedia crowd at least [I have no idea what w:en:WP:NOT#FORUM equivalent other WMF sites have or don't have] will point out that there's an entire world of webforums for people to use for talking about the issues behind whatever topic our article is, and some of them will also point out, as I have, that wikiproject pages are also often used for this purpose and no one really cares, while people do object to it happening (and may even revert it) when it's chatty material with no connection to article improvement is posted on article talk pages. Whatever merits the talk-and-chat-namespaces-split idea might have, I do not think it will fly.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  18:52, 5 December 2017 (UTC)