User talk:Anomalocaris

"avoid multiline table" cleanups

A bunch of your edits are just masking a cewbot bug. In some specfic (but not yet identified) situation, the talkpage banners get relocated partway down the page, which obviously makes a mess of lots of things. Please don't compound/hide that by making a subsequent edit that merely masks one symptom of it. See for example:

• Talk:Boric acid (edit | subject | history | links | watch | logs)

and the bug report at User talk:Kanashimi/Archive 1#Very strange change to project banner. DMacks (talk) 10:36, 9 January 2024 (UTC)

Thanks

No response is needed, just a thanks for helping me on my page Draft:Josei Tennō, all help is welcome :) Camillz (talk) 21:56, 25 January 2024 (UTC)

Silesian School of Iconography

Dear Wikipedians! I have a dream to create an article about the Silesian School of Iconography because I started it 11 years ago, and now I have some time since my children are on vacation, allowing me to devote myself to my passion. I once encountered this community and can't believe they aren't present on Wikipedia. I'm not very skilled with all the tools, so please: help me. I have a few more days to create great articles, but I also want to include them in Wikimedia Commons, where I'll upload all available works of the Silesian School of Iconography. I created the category "Silesian School of Iconography," but it seems something is not quite right. Help me make such a category. I'm also writing articles about some members of this school, but I can't gather all the materials. Perhaps I'll create basic drafts for further development, which I believe is also valuable. Please, take a look at the links (note! some are drafts and I'll be modifying them), but most importantly, I care about the Silesian School of Iconography. If you can, please improve these texts. 1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft:Silesian_School_of_Iconography 2) https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Monika_Jerominek 3) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Like_the_dewfall/Jolanta_%C5%9Awi%C4%85tkiewicz 4) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Like_the_dewfall/Dariusz_Klejnowski-R%C3%B3%C5%BCycki I also have issues regarding licenses and copyrights, as some images have been blocked. In the meantime, I'm sending images available on the website of the Silesian School of Iconography here under the "WORKS" section at the bottom of the page, and I don't know how to manage this. Please help me with that as well. Like the dewfall (talk) 00:08, 26 July 2024 (UTC)

Thanks and question

Thanks for whatever you did on catalytic reforming. What is the motivation for adding quotation marks for <ref name=abc> <ref name="abc">? Thanks, --Smokefoot (talk) 21:02, 4 September 2024 (UTC)

Smokefoot: WP:REFNAME, taking its content from Template:Refname rules, says,

Quotation marks are preferred but optional if the only characters used are letters A–Z, a–z, digits 0–9, and the symbols !$%&()*,-.:;<@[]^_`{|}~.

I believe the original primary reason the quotation marks are preferred where they are optional is that the Wikimedia software processes things slightly faster with the quotation marks. But from my perspective, it's preferred because it's easier for editors to deal with ref names if they are all done the same way, in quotation marks. Let's say, for example, that an article has a reference to a 2020 study by Jones, coded as <ref name=Jones/>. Now let's say in addition to citing the 2020 Jones study, we want to cite a 2022 Jones study. So the editor inserting the reference to the 2022 study first wants to rename the existing Jones reference to "Jones 2020", before inserting a new reference to "Jones 2022". Since the new name is going to need quotes, it's easiest if the existing names already have quotes. —Anomalocaris (talk) 21:45, 4 September 2024 (UTC)

editing sandbox

Hi there,
You made a recent edit on my sandbox. Firstly, thanks for making the tables compliant with correct formatting. I guess I got lazy with closing bold quotation symbols as I was making lots of tables to see which actually looked best - they potentially will never see an actual published article.
Just wondering why and how you came across a sandbox of all places to edit? Especially considering they may never be published. Do you run scripts or something to alert. Genuinely interested as to how this all came about.
Again, thanks for the edit - it will be useful in case I bring those tables across to published articles so that they are in a complete state. Also, you don't happen to have any experience with creating templates do you? Eccy89 (talk) 14:22, 19 September 2024 (UTC)

Eccy89: For the past several years, I have edited a lot of Wikipedia articles to fix Lint errors. Before I worked on it, your page User:Eccy89/sandbox2 showed up with at least one fostered content error. In a table, everything has to be in a cell, so, if there is something in the markup between the table start and the table end that is displayable but isn't in a table cell, it is considered fostered content, and it displays above the table. Fostered content is sometimes caused by careless markup like this:

{|
This one-celled table is missing a pipe character in column one that would turn the rest of this line into a table cell
|}

And sometimes it's caused by forgetting to close an otherwise valid table:

{|
|Here's a table that has only one cell
|-
This is supposed to be after the table but somebody forgot the closing |}, so we're still in the table and this is fostered content

Once I started editing your page, I saw the problem with the <small>...</small> tags, and I kept going from there. I consider it worth spending time fixing lint errors in sandboxes because it helps create awareness about good and bad markup. Sorry, I don't know much about creating templates. I can create a template that's just a block to include in an article, but I don't know how to write templates that take parameters. —Anomalocaris (talk) 19:28, 19 September 2024 (UTC)

Eccy89: contact me on my talk page for help with finding or creating a template. Explain what you would like it to do. – Jonesey95 (talk) 01:17, 20 September 2024 (UTC)

After going into the linked page above, i am surprised that there ONLY FIVE pages with the fostered content type of lint errors. I thought it would be much much higher. Although I'm not sure what my error was. I saw you changed my bgcolor=... to style="background-color:#..." and obviously the small as you stated. I didn't know that small couldn't cross two lines. Interesting. Eccy89 (talk) 10:09, 20 September 2024 (UTC)

Eccy89: The reason there were only 5 pages with fostered content is that Wikipedians like me are constantly fixing lint errors. —Anomalocaris (talk) 16:17, 20 September 2024 (UTC)

Outstanding work! A thanks-less task really. Mind you, I and see many others have thanked you, so maybe not that thank-less after all :-) – Eccy89 (talk) 22:37, 20 September 2024 (UTC)

A Barnstar for you

		The Random Acts of Kindness Barnstar
		I award you this awesome Barnstar for fixing up the tables on my profile. Awesome help. Cheers, Lightningthief77  ☎ 23:55, 1 October 2024 (UTC)

Wikilinks in web link

Hello, I noticed you just took away some wikilinks that I had included in a web link. I assume that you meant well, and were enforcing some kind of policy.

In any event, I really would like our readers to be able to find out, by visiting our articles, who Peter Schreier and Walter Olbertz are. Can you advise what would be a format by which I could do this? Thank you for your help.

Sincerely, Opus33 (talk) 05:46, 13 October 2024 (UTC)

Oops, never mind, somebody has fixed it already, answering my question. Opus33 (talk) 18:27, 13 October 2024 (UTC)

Opus33: Links in links do not work. If you have a Wikilink inside an external link, the external link stops working when it comes to the Wikilink. You can see this in the version of Abendlied unterm gestirnten Himmel from before I edited it. Since my edit, Michael Bednarek fixed it another way, so the external link intentionally ends before the first Wikilink. I completed the task by removing the stray closing bracket (]). (I began this message before your "never mind" and decided to post it anyway.)—Anomalocaris (talk) 18:36, 13 October 2024 (UTC)

Thanks, this was very helpful. Opus33 (talk) 19:59, 13 October 2024 (UTC)

Draft : House of Hasib

I have corrected the citation problems as requested by you. Can you please verify and let me know what else to improve ? Fuzayl1 (talk) 06:33, 16 October 2024 (UTC)

Fuzayl1: I haven't looked up the references in the book, of course, but the page numbers are in as needed. I reformatted them slightly and combined identical references. I expect other editors will make suggestions on further improvements. —Anomalocaris (talk) 07:13, 16 October 2024 (UTC)

Thank You Fuzayl1 (talk) 12:07, 16 October 2024 (UTC)

I'm aware.

It was a copy and paste response because a set of Takashi Miike articles are all giving false disambiguation links but only if 5 apostrophes are used. Once those apostrophes are turned to 3 though it goes back to linking to, Pages that link to "Over Your Dead Body (film)". The only thing I can think is that somehow 5 apostrophes interacts with Takashi Miike template on each of these articles.

I'm going to change the redirect Kuime page to redirect strictly to the Film, placing a note in its talk page, and place a link at the top for those looking for the Japanese book. After which I will self revert my edits so those other articles can have their proper font back. RCSCott91 (talk) 21:33, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

@Anomalocaris The disambiguous links have been resolved and I reverted the changes. I apologize for alarming you.

I was trying to make those changes quickly to find out which page or article was causing it. I'm going to leave a note at Takashi Miike template talk page, hopefully someone smarter than me can find out why the presence of a redirect page going to a disambiguation page where one of the articles linked on that disambiguation page has that template: it causes all other articles with that same template to link to the disambiguation page. RCSCott91 (talk) 22:44, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

This was about Black Society trilogy, which I edited to restore two apostrophes for opening bold italics. Now I edited Over Your Dead Body (film) to fix the hatnote. —Anomalocaris (talk) 23:41, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

Thank you. I just made that same edit for the "Over Your Dead Body (novel)" article. RCSCott91 (talk) 02:02, 22 October 2024 (UTC)

Draft: False or misleading statements by Bob Dylan

Anomalocaris:

Thank you for the page tweaks.

Is the page being reviewed by someone else for whether it gets published?

Hoping it "sees the light of day."

Thanks again.

--Mark (M.mk) M.mk (talk) 15:45, 31 October 2024 (UTC)

M.mk: If you want a review of Draft: False or misleading statements by Bob Dylan, insert at the top {{subst:submit}}, which will turn into {{AfC submission}} or a slight variation thereof. —Anomalocaris (talk) 18:24, 31 October 2024 (UTC)

Anomalocaris:

Thank you.

"insert at the top" -- I don't know what is exactly meant by this. I tried adding it to the URL and also to the search field and get nothing.

I must have to put it somewhere else. But where?

--Mark M.mk (talk) 23:51, 31 October 2024 (UTC)

M.mk: Edit the draft. Edit in regular mode not visual mode. Insert at the top {{subst:submit}}. Save the draft. —Anomalocaris (talk) 04:29, 1 November 2024 (UTC)

Thank you. M.mk (talk) 15:11, 1 November 2024 (UTC)

A cup of tea for you!

thank you for your contributions!! :) xRozuRozu (t • c) 03:14, 7 November 2024 (UTC)

Usurpation

Please, stop your decades-long campaign to delete |url-status=usurped from citations. This is one of the worst things I have read all week. I have spent years repairing usurped domains. Detailed at WP:JUDI. The flag has a purpose, it exists for a reason. Try: https://bcsportshalloffame.com/ .. it is a usurped domain. Every instance on wikipedia needs to have |url-status=usurped .. there are over 700 domains like that. And that's just for Asian gambling sites. It doesn't include all the other usurped domains. If you don't understand how the system works, ask for help, but don't undo things you don't understand. -- GreenC 02:40, 15 November 2024 (UTC)

GreenC: I replied at Help talk:Citation Style 1/Archive 96#clean up usurped / unfit / deviated. —Anomalocaris (talk) 19:30, 15 November 2024 (UTC)

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Linter fix: minor error

I know I have many of these minor errors in my past, but if you have any systematic way of finding incomplete fixes like this one from 2022 (opening font tag replaced without replacing the closing font tag), that would be helpful. – Jonesey95 (talk) 18:13, 26 November 2024 (UTC)

Jonesey95: Thank you for pointing out my incomplete fix of Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Mountains/Archive 7 on 07:57, 23 March 2022 (UTC), which I have fixed properly now. I don't know a systematic way of finding such errors. —Anomalocaris (talk) 19:04, 26 November 2024 (UTC)

Thanks. They'll turn up in the stripped/missing tag lists. We'll get to them eventually. – Jonesey95 (talk) 19:06, 26 November 2024 (UTC)

Disambiguation link notification for December 9

An automated process has detected that when you recently edited Cambodian Americans, you added a link pointing to the disambiguation page New York.

(Opt-out instructions.) --DPL bot (talk) 07:51, 9 December 2024 (UTC)

Draft Gian Maria Aliberti Gerbotto

My dear, thank you very much for your help for my first draft... now can you help me to finally published it? because I have no idea, I don't know how to do... Can you do it for me? pleeeeease. Thea20071 (talk) 13:11, 4 January 2025 (UTC)

Thea20071: I edited Draft:Gian Maria Aliberti Gerbotto on 4 December 2024. In that edit, I inserted a comment saying, "Please see {{MedalTableTop}} for usage instructions. I inserted the required missing |medals= parameter, not necessarily the right way, and there are several parameters used here that don't belong." Please follow that advice. I also lot of |title=... in cite templates. I thought this would make it really obvious that these references need titles. As it happens, on 5 January 2025, Citation bot edited the article and stripped out my inserted |title=.... But the need is still there. Every reference needs a title. Click the link and copy as much info as you can from the web page, including author, date, and title. If the link no longer goes to a valid web page, then find an archive URL at http://archive.org/, or find a link to a working reference, or remove the bad link altogether. These are some things that you should do to improve the quality of the article. —Anomalocaris (talk) 01:53, 5 January 2025 (UTC)

perfect. thanks very much. I will do it... see you soon. Thea20071 (talk) 13:44, 10 January 2025 (UTC)

My dear, I followed your suggestions doing my best, as best I could, also keeping in mind that these are the first times I've moved to Wikipedia.

I proceeded to remove all "Title" links to external internet sites that no longer exist, replacing them with new and functioning links. but I was unable to remove the red annotations "{{cite web}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)" made by the correction of the bot into edit source, I think. Can you please delete them? I'm not capable of it.

A thousand thanks.

Then, having made these corrections, I think my draft is ready for publication, right? And can you please give me a hand in this regard, since I have no idea how to then transform a draft into a public article on Wikipedia? I thank you again for the invaluable help you are giving me in this first project of mine.

Afterwards I promise that I will try to learn better and then proceed independently without disturbing you too much. Thea20071 (talk) 13:25, 11 January 2025 (UTC)

Thea20071: I edited the draft again, improving a few references with author, title, date, publisher, newspaper, access-date. Also, period and comma go before, not after, <ref>...</ref>. These changes can be a model for the work you should do on this draft. Again, references with cite templates need titles. I edit Wikipedia pages, and I give advice, but I do not have a role in approving drafts to become articles. Cheers! —Anomalocaris (talk) 06:08, 12 January 2025 (UTC)

Disambiguation link notification for January 26

An automated process has detected that when you recently edited Eddie Canales, you added a link pointing to the disambiguation page CBC.

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Draft:Ljubica Adžović

@Anomalocaris, thanks a lot for taking the time to improve my draft page. I added each book's page rages as you noted. Cheers Bagnacan (talk) 22:14, 2 February 2025 (UTC)

Cleveland-Cliffs

@Anomalocaris Thanks for repairing the faulty citation in the Cleveland-Cliffs article. I added the new content to make the paragraph more relevant to the article. The way it existed just popped in out of the blue, with little context. I rewrote it to reflect that Gonclaves was speaking at a press conference on the purchase of US Steel. He did say (and I left it in) those remarks that Japan was evil and worse than China. His reference to “not learning anything since 1945” was that Japan had not learned “…anything since 1945. You did not learn how good we are, how gracious we are, how magnanimous we are, how forgiving we are." Which I condensed to “American benevolence.” The “crusty” comments of the CEO need to relate to the context of the article in an encyclopedic way, not just showing up like a tabloid headline. If you have some suggestions on how that might be accomplished, I’d be grateful for them. Hamish barebones (talk) 19:59, 4 February 2025 (UTC)

Hamish barebones: I don't have any ideas about this. If you are satisfied that there's nothing in the commented out paragraph that you want to put back in, I suggest removing the commented out paragraph. —Anomalocaris (talk) 21:18, 4 February 2025 (UTC)

Anomalocaris: Thanks for all your help on this. I'm not certain what you mean by a "commented out" paragraph. A little more help please. Thanks in advance. Hamish barebones (talk) 19:31, 12 February 2025 (UTC)

Hamish barebones: HTML is the underlying markup of the World Wide Web, including Wikipedia. In HTML, comments are entered using <!-- ... -->. Comments are information for someone looking at the markup, that don't affect the display. For example, the markup

Have a <!-- comment -->nice day

displays as

Have a nice day

Cleveland-Cliffs has a full paragraph commented out this way. If you use the visual editor, you can see the paragraph just below the paragraph that begins "In January 2025, Goncalves called Japan". There's an icon that looks like an exclamation point inside a gray square, indicating an "invisible comment". Double-click on the comment to bring up a dialog box allowing you to edit or remove the comment. If you use the regular editor instead of the visual editor, just search for <!-- at the start of the paragraph. —Anomalocaris (talk) 20:04, 12 February 2025 (UTC)

Please do not edit my user page in future

Thanks again for explaining your reasons for doing so, I think we can agree to disagree. GanzKnusper (talk) 08:32, 4 March 2025 (UTC)

Before GanzKnusper sent that message, at 22:24, 3 March 2025 (UTC), the user had already reverted Zinnober9's two corrections and my one correction to the user page and then removed the userboxes entirely, so there were no lint errors. At 14:34, 12 March 2025 (UTC), the user restored the user boxes the same way I did it, without the lint errors caused by {{plainlist}}. So there was a request not to edit their user page in the future, but the user ended up doing it my way. —Anomalocaris (talk) 00:08, 12 May 2025 (UTC)

Propaganda Due

Hi @Anomalocaris:, thanks for your help. I am trying to save an edit on the section titled "Foundation"...just the last edit... 79.45.126.203 (talk) 19:29, 16 April 2025 (UTC)

Horsley, Northumberland

Hi. You have restored obsolete information with an edit summary I do not fully understand. Horsley is no longer in Bywell ward; it is in the new Stocksfield and Bywell ward. Why do you consider the election result for the former ward from 2017 to be worthy of inclusion? If you want to include a result why not add this year's result for the new ward when it becomes available? Also, you say I didn't remove the table header. I don't know what you mean by that as it is clearly incorrect. Tammbeck^talk 07:29, 24 April 2025 (UTC)

Tammbeck: Thank you for asking me why I reverted your edit of Horsley, Northumberland. I came to this page because it had a Fostered content lint error. For an explanation of this error, see this talk page section #editing sandbox. The fostered content error was because you left in the markup

{| class="wikitable sortable" style="text-align: center"

but deleted the rest of the table. Your edit summary was "Boundary changes". That didn't mean anything to me, so I considered your edit "unexplained blanking", which is grounds for reverting. It turns out you did explain it and I didn't understand the explanation. So, I guess the fix is to redo your edit, but remove the table opening line. I leave it to you. Cheers! —Anomalocaris (talk) 07:44, 24 April 2025 (UTC)

Thank you for you reply. I have done as you suggested.Tammbeck^talk 08:15, 24 April 2025 (UTC)

Tammbeck: Good work. Sorry for misunderstanding your edit summary before. The great thing about Wikipedia is we can just keep editing until we get it right. —Anomalocaris (talk) 08:50, 24 April 2025 (UTC)

Thanks?

Thanks for investing time in (what I assume is) clearing my sandbox from the list of linter errors. That page was actually a temporary save thing of a partial edit as I had to shut down my computer, and the edit later got made as Special:Diff/1289024999, and I wasn't planning to do anything else with that version of my sandbox... Still, thanks! Aaron Liu (talk) 14:24, 11 May 2025 (UTC)

Aaron Liu: Yes, I was fixing lint errors, and the Polygon row was messed up, so I did my best to fix it. Glad to know the page had already served its purpose. Cheers! —Anomalocaris (talk) 20:15, 11 May 2025 (UTC)

Why did remove floor plan?

It was example. 174.128.153.62 (talk) 18:50, 13 May 2025 (UTC)

I removed the "floor plan" from User Talk:174.128.153.62 because it was sandbox-like material at the top of a user talk page, and not part of any legitimate user talk discussion. You can access old versions of the page in the page history, and copy it into a sandbox or a draft page. –Anomalocaris (talk) 00:34, 14 May 2025 (UTC)

Thanks. 174.128.153.62 (talk) 00:52, 28 May 2025 (UTC)

User:Altenmann/sand

Dont edit user subpages without asking. --Altenmann >talk 21:20, 16 May 2025 (UTC)

Altenmann: You have a right to ask other editors not to edit your own subpages, but you don't have the right to ask other editors not to edit anybody's subpages. Even your own subpages are not entirely yours. For example, if they violate WP:BLPPRIVACY, other editors can and should remove material in violation of this policy, even if there's a big sign at the top of the page asking others not to edit.

I will try to remember your request not to edit your own subpages, and if I forget, please forgive me.

Please be aware that I edit at least hundreds of user pages and subpages every year, and the great majority of users appreciate it. In the last month, 10 different users sent me notifications thanking me for edits to their user page or subpage.

Please be aware that there are a large number of editors that patrol and fix pages listed on maintenance and error pages, including the subpages of Category:CS1 errors, the subpages of Category:CS1 maintenance, and the subpages of Lint errors. (These are other lists of pages editors use to find pages needing cleanup.) That's why Zinnober9 edited User:Altenmann/sand, and if you revert, someone else is going to come along and fix it again.

Also, please note that I could have removed the seemingly useless <a> tags altogether, but out of respect for you, I left the tags in, and only fixed the misnesting and unclosedness, in case you had some strange purpose for the <a> markup. (That does not mean that Zinnober9 was wrong to remove the <a> tags. It just means I was more cautious.)

My edit summary was written carefully to inform:

This is a complete mess, but I fixed it in a tiny way: <a><b>...<a><b> → <a><b>...</b></a>. HTML tags must close and nest, except for the few [that] don't close, such as <area>. <a> tags nearly always are of the form <a href="http...">Anchor text</a>, a plain <a> tag doesn't mean anything.

I take pride in writing thoroughly detailed edit summaries that say what I did and why. I wish everybody did.

Cheers! —Anomalocaris (talk) 23:05, 16 May 2025 (UTC)

You are both right and not right. See WP:TPO, WP:USERTALKSTOP. I agree that I should have written about my own user space, sorry.

Regarding tags, I did have a reason to keep them: I copied them from somewhere and I want it in the original way. --Altenmann >talk 23:13, 16 May 2025 (UTC)

Altenmann: WP:USERTALKSTOP says "In general, one should avoid substantially editing another's user and user talk pages, except ..." Fixing lint errors is not considered a substantial edit. Again, I'll try to remember to avoid your user pages, and again, if one of your user pages is listed on a lint error page, other editors are likely to come along to fix it. Cheers! —Anomalocaris (talk) 23:41, 16 May 2025 (UTC)

@Altenmann: Likewise; you are also correct and not correct. You do have the right to ask us individually not to edit your page, but you are also wrong since WP:OWN will NOT protect you in keeping known and problematic issues intact on your pages for reasons of "I want it this way" and other well-meaning editors will be attracted to these errors if left unfixed.

It is fine that you copied something from elsewhere, but it is a bigger problem to copy something with errors and then refuse for that problematic content to be corrected within the policies of Wikipedia. If it's on Wikipedia, it should adhere to Wikipedia policy, and those two policies you mentioned do not block our corrective measures unless there's a valid, concrete reason for these errors to be temporarily kept. If you conducting tests to resolve a known issue and need some time to sandbox it and figure things out, we can respect that while you conduct your tests, but would prefer the errors be deactivated if there's going to be a long period of inactivity (in idea of weeks or months).

The issue that we are interested in resolving on your page are that none of the tags in your copied material have any closing tags, a required, nonnegotiable element of HTML. You are also missing a table opener and table closer causing each table row "tr", cell "td" and header "th" tag to complain they are stripped (in addition to being unclosed) since they have no structure to build from (essentially this is akin to building a house with no roof or walls), and all the paragraph and bolding tags are all complaining that they are not closed, which, in non-table situations would cause these commands to leak outside of expected range and cause additional issues if they intermingled with other syntax.

I'm personally neutral about the <a> tags, since they aren't reporting currently tracked errors, but they are a bit of a GIGO situation since they are unrecognised HTML tags that are displaying as plaintext, which is not ideal.

I respectfully ask that you reconsider and either correct these issues yourself, or permit us to correct them in a way that satisfies you. We can be agreeable on how some errors are corrected IF there's options of solutions, but a good number of editors are trying very hard to keep these syntax errors from repopulating and causing page breaking havoc, and we are especially watchful of table errors since we've eliminated the backlog of all "Table tag to be deleted" and "Fostered table content" table errors last fall. We still have a ~3 million other tracked errors in backlog still to resolve, and do not appreciate people undoing our Wikipedia permitted corrective efforts without a good, concrete reason.

How can we resolve this issue so that we are all happy with the outcome?

Best wishes, Zinnober9 (talk) 00:30, 17 May 2025 (UTC)

Altenmann: When I said in the summary of my edit of User:Altenmann/sand "This is a complete mess" I wasn't exaggerating. See: lint errors: User:Altenmann/sand. Multiple unclosed formatting tags is a high priority lint error. There are only 2 such errors in all of English Wikipedia, and they are both on User:Altenmann/sand. As Zinnober9 says, "If you [are] conducting tests to resolve a known issue and need some time to sandbox it and figure things out, we can respect that while you conduct your tests, but would prefer the errors be deactivated if there's going to be a long period of inactivity...." Will you please fix your sandbox to remove the lint errors in the next few days? —Anomalocaris (talk) 04:26, 18 May 2025 (UTC)

G13 draft articles

Hello, Anomalocaris,

I'm not sure why, but you seem to be going to draft articles that are due to expire and be eligible for CSD G13 speedy deletion in a day or two and making minor edits on them. For the vast majority of these drafts, the new editors created an account, then created a draft the same day and then left Wikipedia to never return. So, making a minor formatting correction six months later, preventing the draft's deletion, won't even be noticed by these editors who are not interested in becoming regular editors here.

I think it's great if you want to work to improve a new editor's draft to get it in shape to submit to AFC for review and, hopefully, it will get into main space. But if you are just adding punctuation or doing some cosmetic change like moving a header, I don't really see the point of spending your time doing these changes to an abandoned draft. You might check on the page history of a draft or sandbox and see if it is being actively edited.

But you have been editing here for much longer than I have so at the same time, I want to let you know that I appreciate all of your contributions. I just am not sure if this is the best use of your valuable time. Thank you. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 06:20, 18 May 2025 (UTC)

I see from the discussion above this one that you, and presumably other editors, are fixing lint errors or some other common mistakes that appear on a list somewhere on the project. I understand how that might take you into Draftland so I guess I'll ask that if a draft hasn't been edited in 6+ months or longer, just let the mistake go unfixed because the draft is headed towards G13 deletion any day now. Thanks. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 06:26, 18 May 2025 (UTC)

Liz: Yes, I emptied out draft pages with empty headings. For a long time, I have known about WP:OLDDRAFT, but I've never known exactly how it works, and hoped that there was some intelligence that would see that trivial edits such as fixing lint errors would not reset the calendar. I've never known. There ought to be a way to flag an edit as general wiki cleanup but not draft-contributing, so the deletion calendar doesn't reset. Do you know anything about this? —Anomalocaris (talk) 07:34, 18 May 2025 (UTC)

An edit is an edit is an edit. It doesn't matter whether it is a productive change or just putting in a blank space. I don't know any way to tag edits like you suggest. I'll just say that today we are deleting drafts/sandboxes whose last edit was November 18, 2024 so that gives you an idea of what we are working with with G13s. You can find the lists we work with today at G13s for May 18th. If you find a draft whose last edit was in November or December, maybe pass on changing it. I'd give different advice if the pattern is for editors returning to work on drafts they created but that's just not what I see in my work with Draftspace. They create an account, they create a draft and then they disappear, at least 95% of the time.

Also, you really shouldn't be editing in archives like you did in Wikipedia:Requests for undeletion/Archive 395. You aren't going to get blocked over this but we emphasize to new editors not to edit in talk page archives so experienced editors shouldn't set a bad example.

Liz: Wikipedia's linter crew keeps lint errors in the Draft namespace under continual control, except for Missing end tags, which for some reason are difficult to keep up with. When I work on those, I work on the most recently edited, so the oldest ones will probably never get fixed and just scroll into G13 deletion.

For 8 years, Wikipedia's linter crew has been editing archives to fix lint errors. If you poke around, you'll find lots of archive pages that have been edited to fix lint errors. Most of that work is complete, except for replacing obsolete <font> tags. Empty headers is a new lint error and we are going to fix those wherever they are. It's also good to edit archive pages to fix links, such as a link to a talk page discussion pursuant to that discussion is archived. This is just routine maintenance. Cheers! —Anomalocaris (talk) 08:21, 19 May 2025 (UTC)