User talk:Anomie

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Consider editing the reason for closure

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In closing my topic at the Pump, you wrote:

No, we will not allow this. Wikipedia is not a place to advocate for language change. WP:SNOW close.
5 July 2025 01:38 (UTC)

I kindly ask you to change the advocacy part, as it is a misunderstanding of the intentions I had. Maybe change it to something mentioning unconstrained/misguided pedantry, or that it's unnecessary, or use something from AndyTheGrump's comment, or maybe just erase it and leave the message as "No, we will not allow this. WP:SNOW close." I leave it at your own discretion.

I did not intend to advocate for language change, or to use WP as a "soapbox" to achieve that, to make everyone start saying "it's I", "that's she" and " 'twas they who done it". That'd be foolish and impossible, after all; a quixotic plan (or agenda) to espouse anywhere, which one ought to know if one has some knowledge on linguistics (which I do, though merely informally, out of curiosity).

Truly, the only "hidden intention" I had had, if any, was that the issue was a pet peeve of mine; I thought it not appropriate in formal (encyclopedic) texts, so I wanted to rid Wikipedia of it for the sake of strictly following perceived formal-language "rules" (it wasn't for my own sake, of course — I'm not that selfish); I had been misguided, indeed, as the community has shown me, and I thank them for their guidance.

This unfortunate comment may have made you (as well as the user "15224", as seen here) wary and led you two to think that I had such hidden agenda or intention behind my proposal. You can see on my later reply under that thread that I state otherwise and clarify why. I mentioned that "people need to be accustomed to it through exposure" and "it can reduce that feeling of unnaturalness " only as perceived "good reasons" for carrying out such changes, as though they'd help people get used to such pedantic and fake formal constructions. Those were never the objectives of my proposed changes.
Bytekast[ TLK : CON : LOG ] 14:08, 5 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I'm going to leave the close as it is. Whether you claim it was your intention or not, advocating for language change is what I see there and what I see being rejected by the community. Anomie⚔ 14:12, 5 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I can understand why, sir. As you wish. But keep in mind that that's an unfair judgment. You are also inaccurately seeing what they rejected: if you read the whole discussion from start to finish, as I did, you'll see that most replies from the community concern pedantry, formality, the (un)necessity of the changes, and that they're unnatural or against the Manual of Style (not WP:Soapbox); only User:fifteen thousand two hundred twenty four's reply raises the issue of likely advocacy, to which I promptly and honestly clarified otherwise. I only hope that you can see this, even if you do not change the closure reason in the end. Bytekast[ TLK : CON : LOG ] 14:29, 5 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I wanted to rid Wikipedia of it for the sake of strictly following perceived formal-language "rules". That is advocacy. And what is more, it is advocacy for a ridiculous proposition, since English doesn't follow this supposed 'rule'. It never has done. Which means that it isn't a rule of the English language at all. It is the rule of an imaginary language that misguided pedants have invented. Fiction. AndyTheGrump (talk) 14:47, 5 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Oh! I see, so that's what both of you were meaning. I was confused about the definition of advocacy here. Thought it was something worse.

So we can say I was advocating against that common usage of to be in the Wiki... It's still not for language change though, but that's needlessly precise, so don't mind it, @Anomie.

Note, @Andy, that it's not the rule of an imaginary language in my head, but of most European languages (German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, ...), in which they say not even "it is I", but "it am i" (like in English's "who am I?", not "who is me?"). There you go. It's beautiful and sensible. However, yes, just because almost all Eurolangs have genders, and many have case declension, doesn't mean English also needs to.
Bytekast[ TLK : CON : LOG ] 15:33, 5 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

User:Anomie/User Admin adminstats broken?

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Hi Anomie, I am a longtime happy user of your admin userbox. I used to be able to click on my number of actions and get a full adminstats report. Now clicking no longer does anything (neither on your userpage, and Chrome or Safari and logged in or logged out seems to make no difference). It seems that you haven't changed any of the related pages, so has there been some MediaWiki/CSS update breaking this? Or is the problem on my end? —Kusma (talk) 11:47, 18 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, someone must have updated the collapsible JS, wherever that is. The userbox should be working again now. Anomie⚔ 12:25, 18 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Looks like it was probably I3187e8. Anomie⚔ 12:31, 18 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you for making it work again! —Kusma (talk) 13:07, 18 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/MatrixBot

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Can I request general permission to do TfD stuff with the bot? Or do I need to make a request every time? —Matrix(!) ping onewhen replying {u - t? - uselessc} 10:07, 8 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Matrix: It's possible to request permission to do TfD stuff generally, although there would still be the question of whether the existing bots can't handle the workload. Anomie⚔ 12:31, 8 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I mean the backlog Wikipedia:Templates for discussion/Holding cell seems to suggest that more maintainers for this kind of stuff's required - I'm not going to modify this request, if everything goes well I might make a second request for more TfD general stuff. —Matrix(!) ping onewhen replying {u - t? - uselessc} 12:34, 8 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

You may want to update the edit notice

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Hi, since Caesar DePaço's edit notice was modified I've created a new template specifically aimed at editors, {{Talk legal order}}. I think the version that's on Caesar DePaço's talk page could be used to replace the current one, which is more aimed at readers. It also uses a yellow color instead of ambox's side border.

Or maybe a pseudo template could be created or some transclusions done so that the edit notice doesn't have to be updated manually by an admin every time links (e.g., the translation link) change.

Thanks. FaviFake (talk) 00:11, 16 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I've been holding off while people discuss the changes. Anomie⚔ 01:21, 16 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Could I modify the User:AnomieBOT/IPERTable pages?

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Hi, i made this edit but i'm not sure if it'd break something so i temporarily reverted it. I'd like to apply the same exact edit to all these tables in the same way:

Thanks! FaviFake (talk) 13:43, 20 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Wrapping div tags in small tags can sometimes cause errors. Use "font-size:85%" inside the div tag's style declaration. – Jonesey95 (talk) 13:48, 20 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks! FaviFake (talk) 14:08, 20 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
The bot would overwrite it the next time it runs to update the tables. Personally I see little point in the edits you attempted to make. Anomie⚔ 14:06, 20 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I suspected that'd be the case. I'm assuming the page that I'd need to edit would be User:AnomieBOT/source/tasks/PERTableUpdater.pm, but I can't code in perl so I won't change anything. Thx! FaviFake (talk) 14:14, 20 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
If you did try to edit that page, the bot would overwrite it the next time it is restarted. What would need changing would be the corresponding file in the private git repo for the bot. Anomie⚔ 14:19, 20 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
While I didn't see much point in the edit you made, I did see a point in updating it to use {{v}} which brings more semantic HTML formatting and such. So I did that. Anomie⚔ 14:48, 20 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I wasn't aware of that template. Thanks! FaviFake (talk) 15:22, 20 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Re template:Edit COI

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Hey Anomie, hope you're doing well. Miss seeing you around mediawiki development, sorry to hear WMF was a dick to you, but unfortunately not surprised at this point.

As you know, i am proposing changes to {{Edit COI}} at Template_talk:Edit_COI#Proposal_to_improve_Edit_COI_template, to add more metadata in the hopes it will help contributors better prioritize such requests. The hope is that eventually such information will be shown at User:AnomieBOT/COIREQTable. I think you mentioned previously you would be willing to change the bot, but i wanted to ask if you were interested in recieving patches. Happy to make the relavent changes if you are open to recieving contributions. Let me know what you think. Bawolff (talk) 21:34, 21 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

If someone decides there's enough consensus to implement the change, I can handle the bot change easily enough. Thanks for the offer though. Anomie⚔ 02:16, 22 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Relisted as combined RfD

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Hi, I relisted the RfD as a combined one for all 4 redirects (somehow my brain missed that there might also be the opposites of the biological male redirects, also none of them were properly tagged as non-neutral, so added tags to the redirects): Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2025 August 27#Biological woman/man So just a courtesy note if you would like to re-state/re-word your comment at the new listing. Raladic (talk) 07:36, 27 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Snark?

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Your second paragraph in this Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2025 August 27#c-Anomie-20250827121100-Raladic-20250827080400 sounds a bit like a personal attack, so I wanted to check if you just went a bit too far down the snarky road and would like to strike/remove/rephrase that? Raladic (talk) 15:04, 27 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

You seem oversensitive if you think that could be a personal attack. Anomie⚔ 15:13, 27 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
That’s why I wanted to check in if you just went a little too far on the sarcasm side there or what your intent with the rhetorical question ”will I be also seeing you” question was. Raladic (talk) 15:20, 27 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
It wasn't sarcasm either. The intent was to inspire thought (in any reader of the RfD, not just you) by contrasting the suggestion of redirecting biological sex → transphobia with a comparison to the potential Gaza Holocaust → Holocaust trivialization redirect in the WP:VPR discussion, as it seems likely the latter would bring a negative reaction from a reader that supports the former since (at least in US politics) strongly pro-trans viewpoints tend to correlate with pro-Palestinian viewpoints. But I'm probably being too rational about it, politics these days puts emotion before reason which makes such contrasts easy to ignore. Anomie⚔ 16:08, 27 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
There is nothing “strongly pro-trans” about opposing hate speech dog whistle terms.
The fact that you’re suggesting that normalization of anti-trans rhetoric is somehow okay by implying that the simplest notion of pointing out coded hate speech somehow makes someone “strongly pro-trans viewpoint” suggests you might want to re-assess your own assumptions. As you know, hate is disruptive, so is normalization of coded hate speech by victim blaming people that point it out.
The GLAAD media guide (https://glaad.org/reference) is used by reputable journalists around the world, so if a term shows up on its glossary as “don’t use”, that means that there’s a problem either the term. Raladic (talk) 16:23, 27 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
That sort of victim-seeking and black-and-white, with-us-or-against-us battleground mentality is exactly why I try to stay away from that topic area. Please don't continue with it here, thanks. Anomie⚔ 17:08, 27 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you

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I saw that you undid the change that I made to WP:ADMIN. I went back and re-read the changed wording that I introduced, and yeah... that actually made no sense at all. I appreciate you for doing that, and I wanted to leave you a message and thank you. :-) ~Oshwah~(talk) (contribs) 09:17, 12 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

A barnstar for you!

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The Tireless Contributor Barnstar
I have gone through the AnomieBOT codebase and I am really impressed by how well you have managed everything right from the start. The way you have documented even the smallest details and organised the code folders is excellent. I am sure I will spend more time exploring these pages and will definitely learn a lot from them. Thank you for all your efforts in powering so many important Wikipedia processes through AnomieBOT. :) – DreamRimmer ■ 16:25, 15 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks! A few thoughts that might be helpful as you look at the code:
  • The "decorator pattern" thing was kind of dumb.
  • AnomieBOT predates Toolforge, and it used to run on a repurposed desktop machine in my house. Some of the architecture reflects this and doesn't fit all that well with Toolforge, e.g.
    • Having to have things running as one-off jobs with bot-wrapper.sh restarting things instead of running as continuous jobs (because of T361405).
    • Possibly also that bot-instance.pl does its own loop running multiple tasks in one job instead of having a job per task. Although possibly I'd need to request a bunch of increased quotas and run into other problems to be running 44 separate jobs. 😀
    • That I already have a push-to-deploy setup that they only now have something in beta for, and I'm unlikely to ever switch to their thing once they get it out of beta.
  • One thing I really wish I had done is include automated testing. Right now, all testing is manual. Which at least I have a pretty robust setup for, although not all of it is in the uploaded code: I have one extra script that downloads the AnomieBOT_Store table entries for a task from Toolforge to a local database, then runs the task via test.pl and sends it SIGSTOP when 50 edits show up in the directory (and then empties the directory for the next 50).
HTH! Anomie⚔ 18:43, 15 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I really appreciate you taking the time to explain all this, it makes everything much clearer. My own setup has been quite messy, with jobs and files scattered under random names, and I often struggle later to figure out what is what. Seeing how you organised AnomieBOT has given me a lot of ideas, and I plan to work on an automated setup of my own, making sure to structure things properly this time. I think I will be able to save a lot of time by adapting some of your code into Python rather than figuring out everything from scratch. Looking at the edit history, it's impressive how robust and automatic your system was right from the start. Thank you again, this really helps a lot. :) – DreamRimmer ■ 15:08, 16 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]