User talk:RogueScholar

Hello, RogueScholar! Welcome to Wikivoyage.

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Thanks for your update to Fort Bragg.

All the best,

Ikan Kekek (talk) 05:07, 21 March 2019 (UTC)

Day abbreviations

Hi there. When you get a minute, could you please read the policy page Wikivoyage:Time and date formats? It's a bit difficult to get used to at first, but here at Wikivoyage we do have a preferred style for abbreviating days of the week: M, Tu, W, Th, F, Sa, Su, rather than Mon, Tue, Wed...

Anyway, I just noticed you replaced some instances of our preferred format with something else (at Wilmington), while making a bunch of good edits including correct formatting corrections. If you could check out the policy and bear that in mind moving forward, that would be appreciated. Best wishes, ThunderingTyphoons! (talk) 07:01, 18 August 2019 (UTC)

@ThunderingTyphoons!:Salutations, fellow Wikivoyager! Thanks for pulling my coat about this, I have indeed been making edits in complete ignorance of that policy, which is somewhat frustrating since I thought I'd done a fairly comprehensive review of the pertinent policy pages before sinking my teeth in here, but I promise to remain mindful of them going forward.

Do you happen to be aware of the criteria which led to those being selected as the canonical abbreviations? Strictly from a algorithmic standpoint they strike me as...well, horrific, with strings of varying lengths of either one or two characters it makes them harder to accurately parse programmatically (not overwhelmingly so, but still...). I haven't yet encountered a use case to inspire me to want to write a bot for work here on Wikivoyage but I'm sure that time will come, and it would be a comfort to know that those considerations are taken into account during policy discussions.

Thanks again for being so diplomatic in bringing this to my attention. One of the things that led me to start contributing here was a general sense of disgust with the frequency of needlessly rude interactions I've been subject to on Wikipedia (mostly in my particular bailiwick, to be fair, that being the Education/Schools area) and it's been incredibly refreshing to see how you and so many others here go out of your way to be thoughtful with how you communicate with each other as well as the newbies. Take care and I look forward to seeing you again around here. Cordially, — 🐈⚞ℛogueScholar⚟^{🗨₨UserTalk} (Tales of recent mischief) 07:27, 18 August 2019 (UTC)

Don't worry about making mistakes - there are quite a lot of standards and conventions and policies to navigate through; even those of us who have been here years still forget things from time to time.

As for when or why those formats were chosen, that was before my time, but I imagine there's a virtual paper trail on the talk page of the TDF policy. I agree with you that the format is not ideal, and you are welcome to propose a change in policy. That said, the last time that was suggested, the consensus seemed to be that there might have been a better way to start writing days back in 2003, but that that particular ship had long since sailed; it would be too much effort to find and replace millions of instances of one format with another.

We are a friendly wiki in general, that's true. I still remember what it was like to be new; many people had a lot of patience with me, so I try to emulate that. It's gratifying to hear nice things from a new Wikivoyager, though! All the best! ThunderingTyphoons! (talk) 10:50, 18 August 2019 (UTC)

Hi Roguescholar. Just to let you know, there was a discussion on the formatting of days around two years ago (see here). And there was a strong consensus to move towards a 3-letter abbreviation and make Wikivoyage align with the rest of the world (8 supported and 3 were against it - a clear majority). Unfortunately, nobody was bold enough to plunge forward to update our policies). You are welcome to restart the discussion and hopefully it will get over the line. I agree that Wikivoyage's weird day abbreviations are one of the ugliest things on the site. You will have my fullest support. Gizza ^(roam) 00:34, 22 August 2019 (UTC)

@DaGizza: Thanks for bringing me up to speed! I've been trying not to get sidetracked on my commitment to see that the current Collaboration of the month fully reaches it goal and so hadn't yet gone digging into the history of how things got to be the way they are re: the day of the week abbreviations, and what you just shared has me excited to dig in on that topic next. Honestly from what I've seen in the few months I've been here so far, giving some ardent attention to the state of the documentation here in general may trump any proposed collaborations that are presently in the queue; there's simply no end to the outdated /inconsistent (or just as bad, wholly absent) information to be found on any number of template documentation pages, policy articles and other general infrastructure documents around here. Before I decided to throw myself bodily at this month's collaboration my pet project had been the Template index page which had largely been languishing for over four years and had a host of templates shown with old fields in use or no mention of additions that had been made, some had even long-since been deleted or never been included there at all, and that's not only detrimental to the overall quality of contributions here but to the morale of those doing so. I'll stop rambling now but if any of this resonates with you then please keep an eye out for a discussion I'll be trying to spearhead in short order to address it, and thank you so much again for the Cliffs' Notes version of the day abbreviation consensus. If all that's been needed to bring the community's will to fruition is someone too dumb to avoid wading neck deep into shark-infested waters, then I believe I might be just the man for the job. ;) Warmest regards, —🐈⚞ℛogueScholar⚟^{🗨₨UserTalk} (Tales of recent mischief) 01:09, 22 August 2019 (UTC)

Buffalo/North Buffalo

I have seen your edits there, and I advise you calm down. --Comment by Selfie City (talk | contributions) 13:17, 18 August 2019 (UTC)

@SelfieCity: Who's not being calm? I'm just being bold and speaking my mind. I'd attempt to open a dialogue about the subjectiveness of a term like readability versus an actual schema of good grammar and format like Turabian, et al., but after watching the East Palo Alto discussion I'll pass on that too. Thanks for the suggestion, —🐈⚞ℛogueScholar⚟^{🗨₨UserTalk} (Tales of recent mischief) 14:03, 18 August 2019 (UTC)

OK. I think, however, you could have added <nowiki> and solved the problem with adjusting the prose, which was, in my opinion, better before the changes. --Comment by Selfie City (talk | contributions) 14:09, 18 August 2019 (UTC)

@SelfieCity: To the first point, that doesn't at all match my experience with the nowiki tag, though I am, admittedly, far from an expert on MediaWiki specifications. The <nowiki> tag from what I've seen only instructs the parser not to interpret what's between the tags. That does nothing to a regular expression search of the unparsed source code of an article, as far as I know, since you're not even invoking the parser the tags just become more raw input for the search as remains true for what lies between them.

To the second point, setting aside which set of prose you liked better, you can't honestly tell me that with all the infinite ways to articulate a thought using the English language that there aren't a multitude of ways to convey the sentiment in those sentences that don't involve a colon after the street name? The two that I used were plucked out of probably a couple dozen options I ran through in my mind in the space of less than a minute, just as I believe would arise in the minds of anyone else of average intelligence that set themselves to the same task. My frustration arises from the fact that neither of you who reverted my edits seemingly even took that minute to attempt to rectify whatever it was that you disliked about my selections; instead the path of minimum effort was selected and you clicked undo. I simply think it's in poor taste to react to another's efforts in the act of creation with a destructive act involving no similar effort, that's all. I don't expect anyone to agree with me, mind you, I'm just letting you know what motivated my pushback in this instance; for my part the matter is already closed. —🐈⚞ℛogueScholar⚟^{🗨₨UserTalk} (Tales of recent mischief) 14:52, 18 August 2019 (UTC)

A fundamental element of Wikietiquette around here (so fundamental, in fact, that for Star-level articles it ascends to the status of full-fledged policy) holds copyediting well-developed articles to be taboo absent a truly compelling reason to do so (i.e. factual inaccuracy, misspellings or bona fide grammatical errors). "Subjectively, I think the prose reads better this way" is not a compelling reason; nor, in my mind, is the fact that there's a bug in the regex whereby "Hertel:" is read as a phone number with no spaces. Presumably there's a list somewhere that you're consulting of all files on Wikivoyage that contain spaceless phone numbers, but now that you know this is a false positive, why can't you just make a mental note of that and move along? Is it just for the sake of no longer having to see Buffalo/North Buffalo on that list? Why is that of any importance at all, let alone more important than the actual content of this project? -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 15:14, 18 August 2019 (UTC)

RogueScholar, we all have our views, but I feel like you have an attitude of "I think this is right." AndreCarrotflower has spent years (since 2012, if you go through Wikivoyage and WT article histories, at least — maybe as early as 2011) improving and maintaining the Buffalo articles so they are now some of the best-written elements of Wikivoyage. There is poorly-written content on Wikivoyage that could do with copyediting, but this isn't it. Our goal, as a travel website, is to have content that is straight-forward, attention-getting, and easy to understand. Adding long, stringy sentences works well on Wikipedia, but is not the best thing here. I appreciate your efforts, and I would have no objections if you were adding new content where it belonged, but messing with a star or near-star article because you personally don't like the prose is not the right way to deal with the issue here. Plunge forward is fine, but it doesn't mean that you ignore ACF (AndreCarrotflower) and change a piece of writing that is completely reasonable. --Comment by Selfie City (talk | contributions) 16:00, 18 August 2019 (UTC)

To AndreCarrotflower's point about copyediting, there is one other time when copyediting is acceptable that I think is worth mentioning, and that is when an article's content was copied from somewhere else and should be changed to improve SEO. What's wrong, when it comes to your recent copyediting, is the spirit of it: "tit for tat" and "you removed my addition, so I'll remove yours." --Comment by Selfie City (talk | contributions) 16:04, 18 August 2019 (UTC)

@AndreCarrotflower: I was being sincere when I said I considered the matter closed, but I know you carry a lot of water around here, so an acknowledgement and attempted meeting of the minds seems appropriate. I wasn't aware of this "taboo" of copyediting high-status articles and can certainly agree to add that to my list of local mores to remain mindful of, though I fail to see how it can be reconciled with the very nature of a wiki. To lock down the stylistic elements of a page once its content reaches a certain critical mass seems to communicate to all users that if they are not present during an article's period of primary evolution, they're unworthy of contributing to it at all, unless they happen to live in that area and are abreast of local developments that bear on content. How does that not ignore the possibility that the next Hemingway, Theroux or Hunter S. Thompson might stumble upon a great article and choose for some unknowable reason to move it towards being a masterpiece? The essence of art (and surely this entire exercise is a literary art) is that perfection, if it exists at all, is completely ephemeral. Today's paragon will inevitably be some tomorrow's mediocrity, just as soon as someone comes along with a greater capacity to imagine what that paragon could be. That's all just a thought exercise, though; I've been around these wikis too long to expect to impact their operating philosophies even trivially, let alone so dramatically. Consider your message received and agreed to, even if not understood.

By the way, the list to which you refer and that I have been attempting to clear is part of the current Wikivoyage:Collaboration of the month, and I believe the regex behind the search was specified by Traveler100. I was merely trying to accomplish what had been set forth there as our collective goal as a community, and while I've crafted more than my fair share of regex criteria over the years, I wouldn't presume to wade into any of those that are so widely promulgated as that until I'd become far more conversant in the local code schemas. I'll take your advice and just move on to other things and hope that brings this rather tedious exercise to a close. —🐈⚞ℛogueScholar⚟^{🗨₨UserTalk} (Tales of recent mischief) 17:39, 18 August 2019 (UTC)

I've said my piece, and barring something else comes up, I'm finished on this discussion. --Comment by Selfie City (talk | contributions) 17:46, 18 August 2019 (UTC)

Possibly amusing

Talk:Macau/Archive_2006-2011#Street_name_question Pashley (talk) 02:53, 27 August 2022 (UTC)

New modules

Hi. Please tell me about the new modules you're importing. Why do we need each one of them? Ikan Kekek (talk) 03:24, 9 October 2024 (UTC)

I'm still wondering about this. It really isn't necessarily the case that we want to import all the bells and whistles from Wikipedia. We want to keep this site relatively easy to edit, to the extent we can. Ikan Kekek (talk) 02:54, 11 October 2024 (UTC)

@Ikan Kekek: Well, funny enough, it all started from just trying to edit the documentation for the Listing template, I believe it was. I tried half a dozen times, but the damned links in the documentation header had such a badly mangled layout, clicking on edit ending up triggering the purge link. As I dug into the issue, it was obvious that the template syntax was just so much more cumbersome than using Lua, I set out to migrate it over. I, of course, knew that the enwiki/mediawiki Module families were fairly interdependent, but admittedly not quite to the extent that they in fact are. Rather than splice needed elements of various modules into some Frankenstein version here, I just acceded to bringing over each one as it demonstrated itself to be a link in the chain, and that's where I am still, though it does seem like I've pretty much got it settled now. This isn't my first rodeo, hehe, and it goes without saying I'm testing everything before I make any live changes; this part is really just about establishing the environment to be able to do so. Module-space around here is a ghost town, so I didn't see the harm, really. — ⚞🐈ℛogueScholar🗨₨Talk⚟ (My recent mischief) 03:15, 11 October 2024 (UTC)

I was wondering this too – I tried to edit the documentation pages for a few templates to do some minor syntax fixes and ran into the same issue as you a few days back. --SHB2000 (t | c | m) 03:18, 11 October 2024 (UTC)

@SHB2000: OMG, it's a tiny bit like losing your mind, isn't it?? LOL. I tried a different browser, then booted into Linux, but it was always the same. Then I'd try to offset my clicks to compensate, and I'd get the view link instead. I could've just used a URL parameter, of course, but by then I was already in "quest mode" and determined to understand what was going on and why. Honestly, the way those boxes are constructed now, the DOM feels like a super-massive black hole, so now I just want to do a fix on it the right way instead of pulling a little on a thread from "this side" and a little harder on one from "that side"…and though I didn't foresee needing this many modules, I still believe 100% this is the wiser and more time-sparing approach. I'm the sort that enjoys wiki "gardening" for its own sake anyway, but something like this that just makes it possible for people to do what they need to do in the moment without frustration, it gives me the warm and fuzzies. If you guys can just have a little faith and let me run a bit, I'm all but certain you'll be pleased at the end. Does that sound alright? — 🐈ℛogueScholar🗨₨Talk (My recent mischief) 03:45, 11 October 2024 (UTC)

Yes. As long as users don't need to see or get confused by any of these modules, etc., if they make it easier to edit this site, wonderful! Ikan Kekek (talk) 04:20, 11 October 2024 (UTC)

@Ikan Kekek: Pretty much – modules, CSS and JS pages are more so back-end than front-end (templates) if that's a helpful analogy. Otherwise, please plunge forward, RogueScholar! SHB2000 (t | c | m) 05:05, 11 October 2024 (UTC)