User talk:Mike Dillon

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I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wiktionarian! By the way, you can sign your name on Talk (discussion) and vote pages using four tildes, like this: ~~~~, which automatically produces your name and the current date. If you have any questions, see the help pages, add a question to one of the discussion rooms or ask me on my Talk page. Again, welcome! --EncycloPetey 03:18, 28 July 2007 (UTC) (Better a late welcome than none)

I see you've already found Medellia. You might also be intesrested in the help to be found on Wiktionary:About Ancient Greek and Wiktionary:About Latin. These are the offical style pages for these languages, though some of the information is a bit dated, and there is a lot that has yet to be written up. --EncycloPetey 01:25, 29 July 2007 (UTC)

WT:BP

Thank you for starting the Beer Parlour conversation. But until you have consensus (i.e. more than just my comments) you may wish to limit yourself to a small example for illustrative purposes. --Connel MacKenzie 22:14, 29 July 2007 (UTC)

sortkeys and stuff

So I am about to move πάν to παν ((modern) Greek correct spelling). You guys use circumflex for the Ancient Greek form of the word, right? Only thing is, there is this DEFAULTSORT stuff in there and I'm not sure what to do with it. So in lieu of me doing something stupid, can you clue me in? Thanks much, ArielGlenn 02:15, 30 July 2007 (UTC)

Moved and done. Hey it looks like maybe πᾶν is neuter of πᾶς so maybe you wanna keep it... anyways, thanks for the quick heads up! ArielGlenn 03:01, 30 July 2007 (UTC)

Ancient Greek edits

Sorry for not getting back to you sooner - busy weekend. We don't necessarily have a formalized format for non-lemma Classical noun and adjective forms, but it seems that I'm the only one around here who makes pages for, say, feminine plural datives. At any rate, for ἁγνόν, I removed gender from the citation line because it's an adjective. I also noted the additional inflected forms. For adjectives, I use gender, number, and case in Template:inflection of, while only number and case for nouns. Accordingly, I use the appropriate gender template in the citation line of nouns. Hopefully that made sense.

You've been doing excellent work around here, from my vantage point, and I'm always thrilled to see someone with knowledge of Latin and AG. There aren't many of us.

And now, to digress, go bears! I would like to refer to Greek 10 as the bane of my freshman year, but to be honest it wasn't Greek 10 so much as Greek 10 on top of Italian and two Latin classes. How did you enjoy linguistics? My roommate is a ling major and is trying to convince me to minor in it. And on a completely unrelated note, I noticed you made a few changes to Hawaiian entries. You wouldn't happen to know any Hawaiian/Pidgin, would you? I've been meaning to get work done in Hawaiian basically since I joined Wikt, but can't really muster up the guts to take on yet another language by myself! (I also didn't realize Pidgin had an Ethnologue code, so thank you for that.) Medellia 16:41, 30 July 2007 (UTC)

Thank you for the input on Linguistics. Were I to add it, I'm sure I would focus on historical or comparative linguistics - as classicists are wont to do.

As I mentioned, it didn't even occur to me to start presenting information on Pidgin. (As far as terminology is concerned, that would be my personal preferred nomenclature. I've only heard "Hawaiian Creole" in mainland academic contexts.) You are spot on regarding da kine. Thanks again! Medellia 05:02, 2 August 2007 (UTC)

{{PAGENAME}}

Just FYI, {{PAGENAME}} should be subst'd whenever possible, as in {{Belgium}} and {{blend}}. —Ruakh_TALK 14:10, 13 August 2007 (UTC)

We don't usually worry about that in templates. Thanks for getting rid of a number of the uses of {{temp|templates}] Robert Ullmann 14:14, 13 August 2007 (UTC)

Interesting; why is that? It seems like it's even worse in templates, because it's more misleading: it looks like it's referring to the name of the page that's including the template. —Ruakh_TALK 17:45, 13 August 2007 (UTC)

{{poker slang}}

Hey, thanks for all the context template tweaks ;-) Compare the poker slang template (which I tweaked a bit more) with {{Internet slang}}. Both (all) forms work. I hadn't thought of doing what you did with the poker template, it is one more call but not much more than a redirect. All just interesting. Robert Ullmann 19:07, 19 August 2007 (UTC)

Tweaked {{vulgar slang}}, using your style. Seems to me if someone writes that, rather than vulgar|slang, they probably want it as one noun phrase? Robert Ullmann 19:12, 19 August 2007 (UTC)

hakuna matata

Hey, thanks for getting rid of the lyrics.  :) Neskaya ^talk 23:38, 26 August 2007 (UTC)

Hehe. I'm so busy butting heads with our local troll that I didn't really know quite what to do about the article. Neskaya ^talk 23:42, 26 August 2007 (UTC)

I should clean this up. I live in Nairobi; in apartments attached to a hotel. The band sings Hakuna Matata (NOT the Disney song) for the tourists at least once a week ... ;-) It is not English. Will fix. Robert Ullmann 23:43, 26 August 2007 (UTC)

Spanish entries

Hi Mike, I yet did not change the "Spanish (Castillian)" headers. My personal preference is to use "Spanish", although there seem to exist opinions claiming that "Castillian" is right term (e.g. on omegawiki). Anyhow the Spanish entry guide Wiktionary:About Spanish states that the header should be "Spanish" and the Spanish Wiktionary uses "Español" and not "Castellano" as language heading. Maybe the issue should be discussed with the rest of the users and if there is a consensus to use "Spanish" a bot could change the "Spanish (Castillian)" headings.Matthias Buchmeier 09:10, 28 August 2007 (UTC)

It should definitely be "Spanish", as that's the normal English term. Also, in much of Latin America, Castellano is used to mean something like "proper Spanish", "educated Spanish"; us being a descriptivist dictionary, that's not the impression we want to convey. —Ruakh_TALK 16:30, 28 August 2007 (UTC)

Bot run

Thank you very much for downloading pywikipediabot and experimenting with it. However, please see WT:BOTS and do not run that from your own account. Please visit http://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Userlogin&type=signup and create an account such as User:Mike DillonBot for running those. And do remember to request bot approval for it. TIA. --Connel MacKenzie 14:22, 9 September 2007 (UTC)

My personal inclination is that you are a rather technically oriented person (particularly as demonstrated on WT:GP,) so I don't think you running a bot can be expected to be a one-time thing!  :-)  

I would however, rephrase my thing message from earlier in a better manner. That is, less of a "warning," and much more of a "WELCOME NEW BOT OPERATOR!" Sadly, I haven't had sufficient coffee yet to know how to phrase that. --Connel MacKenzie 14:39, 9 September 2007 (UTC)

IPA as square

ɡ (IPA letter) is a square on my computer. RJFJR 21:08, 10 November 2007 (UTC)

Are both of these a square?

• ɡ (plain)
• ɡ (using {{IPAchar}})

Mike Dillon 23:18, 10 November 2007 (UTC)

Yes. (I'm probably missing some font set loaded. I don't know what I'm missing. How many other people are missing it as well?) RJFJR 02:33, 11 November 2007 (UTC)

They appear as forms of the letter g on my computer at work. RJFJR 14:19, 12 November 2007 (UTC)

by extension template

I inserted the "by extension" template in breakfast. Does it have any effect other than what is visible? What about "figuratively"? Are there others like this? DCDuring 03:09, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

A straight answer is always good. Thanks. DCDuring 03:47, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

CustomSearch.js

If you let me know when your version works I will include it, I've lost the old one I made. Conrad.Irwin 00:09, 6 January 2008 (UTC)

I will take it on faith, most of what you suggest seems to work like magic :) (I have only got up to IE6 working properly - see ies4linux, there is a beta version on IE7 but I can't use the address bar in it). Conrad.Irwin 00:32, 6 January 2008 (UTC)

Admin

Hi, would you like to have admin tools here? If so I can nominate you. DAVilla 03:26, 29 January 2008 (UTC)

I guess I've been around long enough to have a pretty good sense of conventions and policies, so why not? I can't say that I expect to have much use for the tools, but I'm sure I can help out here and there. Thanks. Mike Dillon 05:15, 30 January 2008 (UTC)

Unfortunately we have a lot of pages working in the background that are protected, so sooner or later you may run across something you'd like to be able to do but would have to ask permission for. Or if you never do then hey, it doesn't hurt anything... as long as you're competent enough not to accidentally delete a high-volume page. ;-) (And yes, funny as it may be, it has happened before.) Please accept here. DAVilla 19:17, 30 January 2008 (UTC)

Reverting all the way

You may want to be a bit more careful with reverts. You missed some stuff on मत्स्य. I suppose in a little while you'll have the revert button, and so you won't have to worry about it as much, but as an admin it's always a good thing to be on the watchout anyway. Atelaes 01:18, 11 February 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for the note. I didn't really come at it from a "reverting" angle. I was just finding stuff that had Image:Example.jpg and didn't realize that a whole section had been removed. Mike Dillon 02:03, 11 February 2008 (UTC)

Welcome to the merry band

Congratulations. You are now an admin here. We do have such a page as Help:Sysop_tools, which you may wish to read about now. Remember that you can still request attention as usual, if you are in doubt about what to do, and you're always welcome to ask the rest of us for help. --Dvortygirl 04:16, 16 February 2008 (UTC)

Browser-integrated search

Copied from my talk page, problem is fixed but you might be interested in yet another cross-browser issue :( Conrad.Irwin 23:39, 17 February 2008 (UTC)

Hi, Conrad. Was the browser-integrated search code interfering with something or otherwise causing problems? You removed it in this edit, so WT:CUSTOM no longer lets users add broser-integrated search. Rod (A. Smith) 21:46, 17 February 2008 (UTC)

Hmm. I see now that the code was appropriately refactored to MediaWiki:CustomSearch.js. Unfortunately, that code doesn't seem to run for me on WT:CUSTOM. Is there a known bug? Rod (A. Smith) 21:55, 17 February 2008 (UTC)

Never mind. Fixed. Rod (A. Smith) 22:44, 17 February 2008 (UTC)

Ok, I think User:Mike Dillon made that code, so it might be worth letting him know. I just moved it around as he wasn't a sysop at the time. Conrad.Irwin 23:25, 17 February 2008 (UTC)

What was the error? Were you getting "This feature is not supported by your browser. Sorry!" or was something breaking? If you were getting the message, what was the browser that this change made it work on? (P.S. sorry to reply on your page, Conrad) Mike Dillon 23:39, 17 February 2008 (UTC)

lol

This is one of the funniest edit history statements I've seen in a while:

Category:Children (diff; hist) . . (+26) . . Mike Dillon (Talk | contribs | block) (fix parentage)

--EncycloPetey 18:06, 18 February 2008 (UTC)

Indeed. :) Mike Dillon 18:08, 18 February 2008 (UTC)

Preloadtitle - thanks again.

Thanks again for your help with the preloadtitle thing. :-) —Ruakh_TALK 02:13, 23 February 2008 (UTC)

Using your bugzilla expertese

Hi Mike, seeing as you did so well with preloadtitle, I was wondering if you could help me get an even less consequential change committed that would help a lot with ensuring the vast amount of Javascript around works more consistently. https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=12773 . Any input would be much appreciated, even though this only affects borderline situations. Conrad.Irwin 11:40, 3 March 2008 (UTC)

What is the strict flag for? I can see what it does, but I'm not sure why someone would want to use it.

Once we figure out how to either explain it or remove it, I can give them a patch for wikibits.js (bugs with patches have much better chance of being resolved). I can't really see any harm in that patch; in the normal case where all of the calls to addOnloadHook go before runOnloadHook happens, it won't do anything and if you do get a timing issue, your hooks will still execute. The one thing that might be kind of weird is that runOnloadHook will stop executing hooks if there is an exception, but that won't happen with this patch in the case where the hooks are executed directly. Mike Dillon 16:33, 3 March 2008 (UTC)

That was Splarka's idea, he seemed to think that there might be occasions where if you missed page load it was already too late to run, but I can't think of any situations it would be useful myself. Though possibly if someone had a hook that may be added to the queue twice, and once it runs the first time it shouldn't be run again, but then again that wouldn't work with the non-race condition anyway. Conrad.Irwin 16:41, 3 March 2008 (UTC)

Template:topic cat

I just noticed that you've been expanding the use of {{topic cat}} and I was wondering if you've run into any problems beyond the outstanding issues I've already mentioned at User:Mike Dillon/Topics. Mike Dillon 22:34, 15 March 2008 (UTC)

It's been working quite nicely, I like the ability to have specific descriptions set. The only thing I'd like to do is to be able add the main language category (e.g. Category:German language to categories such as Category:de:Etymology and Category:de:Slang - that would be excellent - we could then do away with a lot other nav type templates.--Williamsayers79 19:26, 16 March 2008 (UTC)

This is possible right now. All you need to do is put something like [[Category:{{language|{{{lang}}}}} language|{{{current}}}]] into Template:topic cat parents/Etymology and Template:topic cat parents/Slang, probably in addition to the "standard" call to {{topic cat parents/helper}} to get parents that are part of the prefixed topic tree (e.g. Category:Lexicons). Mike Dillon 20:11, 16 March 2008 (UTC)

Excellent, I will try and have a go at this soonish. Regards, --Williamsayers79 20:51, 16 March 2008 (UTC)

I've updated {{topic cat parents/helper}} to add the language category if addlangcat=1 is passed. Mike Dillon 04:33, 17 March 2008 (UTC)

I've looked at the Etymology category configurations and I think this is a pretty complicated situation that addlangcat=1 is not sufficient to handle. Category:Etymology is under Category:Fundamental, but the language subcats like Category:hu:Etymology are under Category:Etymology and their language (e.g. Category:Hungarian language). I think that Template:topic cat parents/Etymology has to have its own special conditional logic to handle this stuff since Category:Etymology doesn't go into Category:English language. If you dig deeper and deal with the derivations categories, it gets even crazier where you have things like Category:Serbo-Croatian derivations under three language categories. I hesitate to go too far to make one template and configuration scheme handle too much. Mike Dillon 05:20, 17 March 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for looking into this, I might have a play around myself.--Williamsayers79 18:46, 21 March 2008 (UTC)

Topic cat for Ancient Greek

Mike, I was wondering if I could ask a favour. I really don't understand the whole topic cat.....stuff, and sadly don't have the time to learn just this moment. However, I do occasionally create these types of categories, and would like to do it correctly. So, would you be willing to give the Ancient Greek cats all that snazzy new templating action that has been written, as I usually just copy off one of them when I write a new cat. I apologize for my laziness on this. I promise that I will learn this stuff later, when I have more time at my disposal. Many thanks. -Atelaes λάλει ἐμοί 02:42, 7 April 2008 (UTC)

I'll take a look at it. Mike Dillon 02:52, 7 April 2008 (UTC)

Thanks much. -Atelaes λάλει ἐμοί 05:03, 7 April 2008 (UTC)

Helper for derivations categories

Thank you for putting together a help for the derivation categories, it will save a lot of hassle.--Williamsayers79 19:56, 13 May 2008 (UTC)

blank lines

If you remove blank lines like this, the AF bot will just put them back. We normally want a blank line between the inflection line and the first definition, to make editing clearer. --EncycloPetey 05:14, 6 October 2008 (UTC)

Problem is it looks like crap because it's turning into more like 2 ems of visible whitespace. Possibly a problem with the {{es-verb}} template. The rendered source looks like this:

<p><b>estar</b> (<i>first-person singular indicative present</i> ...)</p>
<p><br /></p>
<ol>
<li>To have a (transient) location in space. ...

That </p> <p><br /></p> <ol> markup is junk. Mike Dillon 05:59, 6 October 2008 (UTC)

I fixed this in Template:es-verb itself. Stupid Mediawiki/HTMLTidy... Mike Dillon 06:01, 6 October 2008 (UTC)

Yeah, the problem is in the template {{es-verb}}, which is still experimental. We're developing a better template coding to replace it, so the whitespace problem would have been solved soon anyway. --EncycloPetey 15:07, 6 October 2008 (UTC)

template:topic_cat

There is discussion at Wiktionary:Grease pit#American_Sign_Language_language. Any input or assistance you can provide would be much appreciated.—msh210℠ 20:44, 19 January 2009 (UTC)

Thank you very much for the fix.—msh210℠ 20:03, 9 February 2009 (UTC)

Template:nav description

Is that still needed for anything? {{topic cat}} is handling that now, and it looks to me that it could be safely deleted. — Carolina wren discussió 06:53, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

Killed these. Sorry it took me almost two years, but I don't think it was hurting anyone to have them hanging around. Mike Dillon 06:34, 10 November 2011 (UTC)

Invitation to events in June and July: bot, script, template, and Gadget makers wanted

I invite you to the yearly Berlin hackathon. It's 1-3 June and registration is now open. If you need financial assistance or help with visa or hotel, just mention it in the registration form.

This is the premier event for the MediaWiki and Wikimedia technical community. We'll be hacking, designing, and socialising, primarily talking about ResourceLoader and Gadgets (extending functionality with JavaScript), the switch to Lua for templates, Wikidata, and Wikimedia Labs.

Our goals for the event are to bring 100-150 people together, including lots of people who have not attended such events before. User scripts, gadgets, API use, Toolserver, Wikimedia Labs, mobile, structured data, templates -- if you are into any of these things, we want you to come!

I also thought you might want to know about other upcoming events where you can learn more about MediaWiki customization and development, how to best use the web API for bots, and various upcoming features and changes. We'd love to have power users, bot maintainers and writers, and template makers at these events so we can all learn from each other and chat about what needs doing.

Check out the the developers' days preceding Wikimania in July in Washington, DC and our other events.

Best wishes! - Sumana Harihareswara, Wikimedia Foundation's Volunteer Development Coordinator. Please reply on my talk page, here or at mediawiki.org. Sumana Harihareswara, Wikimedia Foundation Volunteer Development Coordinator 14:18, 2 April 2012 (UTC)