User talk:Kilvin77
Lang Templates for Chinese
[edit]Remsense (talk · contribs), I couldn't find a spot on your talk page, but mine is wide open! Could you explain the edits you made on postal romanization so that I can understand and specifically what you meant by needing to use |script-title=? Thanks! Kilvin the Futz-y Enterovirus (talk) 02:01, 15 March 2024 (UTC)
- Right! So, the reason is that the same language can be written with different scripts, so our Citation Style (aka CS1 etc.) parameter
|title=is taken as using the Latin script, as well as|trans-title=, which is to provide an English translation of a title in another language. I recommend keeping that page in your pocket, the CS1 documentation is great—but to summarize, you just have to put the native script in the|script-title=parameter like: |last=Qiu |first=Xigui |publisher=The Commercial Press |year=2013 |edition=2nd |location=Beijing |language=zh |script-title=zh:文字学概要 |trans-title=Chinese Writing- where the
zh:prefix indicates that Chinese characters are being used. Welcome to Wikipedia, by the way, let me know if you have any other questions! Remsense诉 02:14, 15 March 2024 (UTC)
Questions for Shushugah
[edit]Hello @Shushugah! I don't believe I've asked you anything yet despite the fact you were assigned as my mentor back when I created my account. Honestly, I've ended up with so many questions but most of the time I just dig through MOS and various WP: articles until I get an answer.
Also, I sorta figured you were a busy person, and I didn't want to waste your time. And please let me know if I shouldn't have pinged you on my talk page.
My question at the moment, however, is: On the Municipality of the District of Lunenburg page, how can I fix the table in the Ethnicity section so that there isn't a huge gap until it reaches the table?
I would like to try to fix it myself so that I can learn, but I could not figure it out (consulted WP:AUTOWIDEN, WP:ADTABLE).
Secondly, I still am not really sure how my edit summaries should look. I feel that they're important, but I'm worried I'm either saying too much, not specifying the right details, or have strange (non-Wikipedian) syntax. For example, wp:normal editing process says, "Making multiple changes in a single edit, particularly when edits stretch across different sections, should be avoided" but others have said to change as much as possible in just one edit because it clogs up the history / recent changes.
Do you have any general guidance on that matter? Could you take a look at my edit summaries and possibly give me some feedback? (Should I have split up some of my edits? Do I have too many minor edits?) Thank you in advance! — Kilvin the Futz-y Enterovirus (talk) 10:58, 30 December 2024 (UTC)
- @Kilvin the Futz-y Enterovirus this is an advanced question and I am perplexed what best solution is. There are three different floating items, the ethnicity table, demographics table and infobox, with not a lot of text in between. Asking at WP:VPT will yield more helpful advice from others. I would also question how vital and informative the tables are in this case. The data doesn't seem to significantly deviate over the years and could be rewritten in prose form, which would be my non-technical suggestion. Regarding edit summaries, everyone does them differently. I personally like to be more verbose and include wiki links in them, so that people can easily find out what I did, without needing to look at the changes directly (unless they want to). As to how important it is to separate multiple types of changes, I'd say it depends on how controversial they are, and how many other editors are editing that article. On a high traffic article, it's wise to make smaller/single section edits. On a new article you just created? Go wild. ~ 🦝 Shushugah (he/him • talk) 23:04, 30 December 2024 (UTC)
Clarifying MOS:DOCTCAPS
[edit]I'm not so active on Wikipedia as I've been in the past, but I wanted to give you some encouragement after I read your topic at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Capital letters. As the encyclopedia for everything and as people are not always editing in good faith, capitalization is complicated and in some cases it has proven impossible to gain a consensus on what we should do. This has brought me great frustration and is part of why I'm not as active anymore. You are clearly a smart person thinking hard about what you're trying to do (and it looks like you come down on issues in ways I agree with, but that's not the important part). I suggest that you be bold and try to do the right things and deal with problems as they come up. I've not found success in making our MoS as consistent as I feel it should be, but in my editing I do my best. So, I offer encouragement and caution. Keep up the good work and if there's any way I can help, let me know. SchreiberBike | ⌨ 11:00, 18 July 2025 (UTC)
- Hi @SchreiberBike, thanks for writing!
- Haha, when I first read your message, it seemed to me that part of what you were saying was "Capitalization doesn't have satisfying resolutions. Also consider thinking a little bigger – beyond capitalization." But then I checked your user page and realized you were a lot more capitalize-y than I had realized. And, sorry to hear that you're not so active anymore. Yeah, I've observed a lot of stuff on Wikipedia and have seen the Life Cycle of Wikipedians where folks inevitably get jaded. I don't want to get to that point myself, but I think my WikiWanderlust will help me out with that. There are topics (e.g., current events) that I find quite important in the real world, but I don't have much interest in their enWP articles.
- I do actually have two things I was wondering about.
(1) Do you have any tips for using the search feature for things not in articlespace? It's frustrated me a bit. And there are times where I know I've seen/read something (templates, essays, etc.), but it's hard to find it again.
(2) I see that you've adopted some typos, and I found myself really wanting to have automated editing the other day when I was fixing pages in Category:Marriage template errors. - There was this one error that would produce an ugly error text visible in the article:
(m. 1900; her death is deprecated; use "died" instead. 1914) as opposed to (m. 1900; died 1914), and to fix it, you would just need to go in and change the last parameter fromend=her deathtoend=died. I did a few manual fixes on articles that seemed higher traffic (because I think that ugly error text is embarrassing and unprofessional), but I don't even really care about the template enough to do more like that. And I observed some weird template behavior that made me feel like it could be written slightly better, which made me think that some of the errors might go away with tweaks to the template. - But right now, I'm just wondering, are there any tools available to me (probably not given my low edit count) to allow fixing errors beyond manually one-by-one? – Kilvin • 👾 19:08, 18 July 2025 (UTC)
- Oh and while I never wanted to make capitalization my bread and butter, I want to even less now... just saw the latest Signpost issue which had an article that showed that an AN/I thread related to capitalization was the biggest thread by length and by number of comments. Goodness! I have no desire to step in that. – Kilvin • 👾 22:41, 18 July 2025 (UTC)
- Here's some ideas I've come up with. There may be more later.There are several tricks for search: Help:Searching shows most of them. One I didn't learn for a long time was that to find out how a template works you can search for "template:name of template", like
Template:Philosophy sidebarorTemplate:-.If you put"her death is deprecated; use "died" instead"in a search box, you won't get anything helpful, but if you remove the quote marks around died you find 892 places where that phrase shows up in article text.To find things that aren't in article text (often called Mainspace) just below that text it says "Search in:" and to the right there's a down arrow. If you click on that arrow, you get choices. If I know something is going to be outside of the main encyclopedia clickAll, then unclick(Article)and you're closer. Lots of other options too.For automated typo fixing I use Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser. There it says"As a general rule, only users with more than 250 non-automated mainspace edits or 500 total mainspace edits will be registered"
and you're pretty close to that. It has a learning curve, but it's very useful. I could send you some sample scripts. Others use JavaScript Wiki Browser, but I'm not familiar with that. I'm very careful to only use automated tools only when I've done many manually, so I know what things will look like and I still find surprises.I'm not totally jaded, but I'm a little jaded. I hope you have a good time on Wikipedia and get good things done. I feel good about what I've done. And I'm happy to answer more questions. SchreiberBike | ⌨ 23:23, 18 July 2025 (UTC)
- Here's some ideas I've come up with. There may be more later.There are several tricks for search: Help:Searching shows most of them. One I didn't learn for a long time was that to find out how a template works you can search for "template:name of template", like
Username
[edit]Kilvin, are you aware of the implications of 88 in a name? If you are unaware, follow the link. It makes an Enterovirus look quite positive in comparison. Sincerely, SchreiberBike | ⌨ 11:36, 2 August 2025 (UTC)
- Oh.... crap. That is not good. Wow! I am so unsmart. How did I not see that. Thank you very much for coming here. Time to go brainstorm again. Maybe they should have rejected my request, oh well. Edit: By the way, how did you know I had changed it? Was it cause you were watching my talk page and it moved? – Kilvin • 👾 02:55, 4 August 2025 (UTC)
- Yep. My settings put a page on my watchlist any time I edit it. I usually remove a bunch of them every couple of months. SchreiberBike | ⌨ 11:27, 4 August 2025 (UTC)
- Well I am very grateful that you did. On the username matter, would it be overly disruptive to go back and change past signatures? Username policy says:
while these can be changed manually, it is not recommended unless a contributor wishes to remove as much information as possible about their former name for privacy reasons.
– Kilvin77 • 👾 22:06, 4 August 2025 (UTC)- I'd recommend removing anything with 88 in it, but only change the Enterovirus if that's important to you. SchreiberBike | ⌨ 22:31, 4 August 2025 (UTC)
- Well I am very grateful that you did. On the username matter, would it be overly disruptive to go back and change past signatures? Username policy says:
- Yep. My settings put a page on my watchlist any time I edit it. I usually remove a bunch of them every couple of months. SchreiberBike | ⌨ 11:27, 4 August 2025 (UTC)