Disputatio Usoris:Robert.Baruch

Salve, Roberte!

Gratus aut grata in Vicipaediam Latinam acciperis! Ob contributa tua gratias agimus speramusque te delectari posse et manere velle.

Cum Vicipaedia nostra parva humilisque sit, paucae et exiguae sunt paginae auxilii, a quibus hortamur te ut incipias:

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Si plura de moribus et institutis Vicipaedianis scire vis, tibi suademus, roges in nostra Taberna, vel roges unum ex magistratibus directe.

In paginis encyclopaedicis mos noster non est nomen dare, sed in paginis disputationis memento editis tuis nomen subscribere, litteris impressis --~~~~, quibus insertis nomen tuum et dies apparebit. Quamquam vero in paginis ipsis nisi lingua Latina uti non licet, in paginis disputationum qualibet lingua scribi solet. Quodsi quid interrogare velis, vel Taberna vel pagina disputationis mea tibi patebit. Ave! Spero te "Vicipaedianum" aut "Vicipaedianam" fieri velle! --Rafaelgarcia 22:51, 5 Iulii 2009 (UTC)

Thanks, and ...

Salve, Roberte. I hope English is OK? Thanks for the new pages on asteroids. Keep right on ... To make the interwiki links, don't use "Link FA": that suggests -- wrongly in this case! -- that the other articles are "featured articles". Instead, copy the interwiki links from the foot of the English page (or whichever one you are using as a model), paste them at the foot of our new page, and add a similar one for the English page itself. Does that make sense? I have now done it, as you'll see, with your two new pages. Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 18:44, 5 Ianuarii 2010 (UTC)

Thanks, Andrew. I copied the template from 1 Ceres, which had the FA links. I'll incorporate your changes in all future asteroidal pages! Robert.Baruch 18:48, 5 Ianuarii 2010 (UTC)

maryland

Hey man, I saw you were active on the Terra Mariae page. Are you an MD native? I am, I went to Southern High School in Anne Arundel county, and did my B.A.s and M.A. at College Park. --Ioscius ^(disp) 21:13, 7 Ianuarii 2010 (UTC)

Well, I live in Rising Sun, MD now, but I'm a New Yorker by birth! So I'm up by Delaware (no sales tax, w00t!) and PA. Where are you located? --Robert.Baruch 21:19, 7 Ianuarii 2010 (UTC)

Actually, I'm in Labacum for the next few years, but I was living in College Park or around there for the past 10 years. Nowhere near Cecil. --Ioscius ^(disp) 21:23, 7 Ianuarii 2010 (UTC)

I guess you can't pop over for a Latin visit, then ;) -- Robert.Baruch 21:35, 7 Ianuarii 2010 (UTC)

The epoch

To take account of the problem raised by Iacobus at Disputatio:50412 Ewen I am revising the order in the second paragraph. I'll do it at 50412 Ewen, OK? Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 21:56, 9 Ianuarii 2010 (UTC)

It struck me that if the data on the page are not to be edited directly, we need to add a hidden warning to that effect. I've done this on the test page. Please correct/improve it as you like (or remove it if I've misunderstood). Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 10:05, 13 Ianuarii 2010 (UTC)

Formulae

Hello. I've seen you've been creating some templates, however, they are in English. Could you re-write them in Latin (and check that we don't have nothing similar already, check VP:F'LAE)?--Xaverius 18:45, 30 Ianuarii 2010 (UTC)

I definitely checked beforehand, and I couldn't find a similar formula. I will certainly attempt to rewrite in Latin, both the documentation and the parameters. -- Robert.Baruch 20:55, 30 Ianuarii 2010 (UTC)

The most urgent thing to do would be to translate the actual name for the template. Thanks.--Xaverius 21:06, 30 Ianuarii 2010 (UTC)

Asteroides

I just clocked up 200 asteroid names explained (until I got distracted by a pack of nymphs). I find I'm learning a lot! Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 17:21, 13 Aprilis 2010 (UTC)

Wow! Thanks so much for your effort! I was putting in diameter information, but I got distracted... --Robert.Baruch 18:18, 13 Aprilis 2010 (UTC)

Fremitus

Ave Roberte, I've noticed that you've inferred a personal rule by which you map Engl. -ing onto Latin present participle suffix -ns, -ntis ("fremans" [btw, should be "fremens"], "maumans", "baubans"). Let me adopt the schoolmaster's role for a while and say that this isn't possible, although you can do the mapping in the opposite direction. You can say leo fremens 'a growling lion', but when it comes to denoting 'a growling', you must use a Latin verbal noun, in the case at hand, fremitus. From the Latin point of view, Engl. -ing is an ambiguous suffix by which both active present participles and verbal nouns are formed. My paedagogical mood / mode ends here. :-) Vale! --Neander 01:51, 12 Maii 2010 (UTC)

Thanks, Neander, that does help me a lot. I haven't gotten up to gerunds and gerundives in my classes yet. So I can use -ns, -ntis as an adjective, but not as a substantive. Now, when you say verbal noun, would that be the participle? So that, for example, "a shaking tail" would be "cauda quassans", but "a shaking" would be "quassatus"? And would it always be the masculine? Sorry about imposing on you with all these questions. --Robert.Baruch 13:11, 12 Maii 2010 (UTC)

Well, these are pertinent questions.

"So I can use -ns, -ntis as an adjective, but not as a substantive." Participle can be used as a substantive, though usually it's used as an adjective; e.g., consonans, -ntis 'consonant' is a feminine noun, but basically, it's a substantivation of an adjective (littera consonans 'a consonant letter').

"Now, when you say verbal noun, would that be the participle? So that, for example, "a shaking tail" would be "cauda quassans", but "a shaking" would be "quassatus"?" There may be a terminological clash here. To me, 'a shaking' isn't a participle at all, because in this context, the -ing suffix doesn't contrast with the past participle -ed (i.e., you can't say 'a shaked' as a substantivised participle). But my knowledge of the terminological tradition of English grammar is rather weak. But yes, 'a shaking' would be quassatus as a normal derivative of the verb quassare. Another suffix, by which verbal nouns are derived in Latin, is -tio, -tionis (in some verbal stems, -sio, -sionis -- a result of a historical phonological change), i.e., quassatio. A further variant is quassus from quatere (from which quassare is a frequentative verb.)

"And would it always be the masculine?" Yes, verbal nouns in -tus, -tūs are fourth-declension nouns masculini generis, while nouns in -tio are feminine. Note that what I've been presenting here is how to derive verbal nouns from verbs. This is a grammatical process. Lexically, many nouns in -tus (4m) and -tio (3f) have got additional figurative etc meanings; e.g., besides denoting 'a shaking', quassatio also means 'a disturbance'. --Neander 19:41, 12 Maii 2010 (UTC)

So I've reached gerunds and gerundives in my class, and now I'm pretty sure I thoroughly understand what you are saying :) --Robert.Baruch 20:20, 11 Iulii 2010 (UTC)

Nice to see ...

... your name in the Nuper mutata. I must get back to those asteroid names. Meanwhile, would you be interested in doing another batch (if yes, we'll have to see what others think).

It strikes me that our hidden text message on the existing asteroid pages ought really to be converted to Latin -- which is our official language, after all. Do you run a bot that could do that? Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 19:43, 11 Iulii 2010 (UTC)

Yes, I sort of took a hiatus. Sure, I can do another batch. Which numbers? Also, I've asked the ESA to release the images of 21 Lutetia (from yesterday's flyby) as Creative Commons, so hopefully we can add the image.

There are two hidden texts, the first at the top, which I can probably bot-edit, and the second at the bottom, which is taken verbatim from the original database, so we can't translate that except by hand :) --Robert.Baruch 20:18, 11 Iulii 2010 (UTC)

I meant the one at the top. As an instruction to all, we ought to write it in the language that all (are supposed to be able to) read. Let's work out a suggested text. Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 20:31, 11 Iulii 2010 (UTC)

No one's objected. That seems to me to suggest the first lot were OK. If you're willing, I suggest you take it up to 3000 Leonardo. If you can, please add 7088 Ishtar, which shares a name with my granddaughter -- and with one of the regions of Venus -- and with a fictional planet invented by en:Poul Anderson that suffered global warming and a collapse of civilization every thousand years.

For the message at the top I suggest "Cave ne mensuras astronomicas huius textus emendes; e formula {{Data Asteroidum 0000}} automatice inseruntur." To replace the message "What it is named for goes here" we could say "Hic de origine nominis scribendum est." But don't make these two changes until Neander, Iacobus, or some other reliable pair of eyes has reviewed my Latin :) Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 11:42, 17 Iulii 2010 (UTC)

Or with hyperbaton: Cave ne astronomicas huius textus mensuras emendes. . . . IacobusAmor 12:22, 17 Iulii 2010 (UTC)

I'll wait for the approval of the phrases before starting on the load. --Robert.Baruch 15:41, 17 Iulii 2010 (UTC)

I've got nothing to add or take away. Per me imprimantur, vel simpliciter vel hyperbatice. --Neander 19:30, 17 Iulii 2010 (UTC)

We have the imprimantur! Let's take the hyperbatic route: "Cave ne astronomicas huius textus mensuras emendes; e formula {{Data Asteroidum 0000}} automatice inseruntur." And: "Hic de origine nominis scribendum est." Whenever you like ... Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 20:03, 17 Iulii 2010 (UTC)

Etiam! I shall work on translating the names found in the next 2,000 asteroids. --Robert.Baruch 20:07, 17 Iulii 2010 (UTC)

I am looking forward to the new pages! Just to make sure, let me remind you to add the interwiki links directly to the page. Thank you! --UV 20:18, 17 Iulii 2010 (UTC)

Will do! --Robert.Baruch 20:23, 17 Iulii 2010 (UTC)

Asteroids 1001-2000 are now complete, along with 7088 Ishtar and also 2309 Mr. Spock (because it's named after the discoverer's cat, which I found funny). I'll be working on 2001-3000 shortly. I've also modified the bot to include all the interwiki links that it finds in the en: version. --Robert.Baruch 23:00, 18 Iulii 2010 (UTC)

I'm going to have to go through the official names to add accent marks where necessary. Apparently the source that I scraped the names from didn't have the accent marks! --Robert.Baruch 15:07, 19 Iulii 2010 (UTC)

Done through 3000. --Robert.Baruch 23:00, 19 Iulii 2010 (UTC)

Hi, can i ask you something? How do you save the articles so fast? Did you use a software, or something like that? --Pakos 23:32, 19 Iulii 2010 (UTC)

I use the Java Wiki Bot Framework, and I wrote a Java program using that library to generate the articles. First I scraped all the data I could find about the asteroids and stored them in a file. Then I wrote a program to parse that file, generate the articles, and use JWBF to save them. However, to translate the names and observatory locations, I have to manually update the file. So even though it may take half an hour or so to save 1,000 articles, it actually takes something like 6 hours to get all the names and locations in those articles not only translated but also researched. Some names are easily found, some are just last name + initial, and then I have to Google to find the full name, if it is to be found. At the end, I'm completely bleary-eyed, but then I just hit the button and the articles all get uploaded. --Robert.Baruch 01:56, 20 Iulii 2010 (UTC)

And then we get to work, manually, on the origins of the names. I see Neander has done some already. Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 08:29, 20 Iulii 2010 (UTC)

Yes, and also correcting some things that just couldn't be handled by the article generator, such as the gender of the astronomer, and a few other things... --Robert.Baruch 13:18, 20 Iulii 2010 (UTC)

Hello everyone. Andrew has asked me to drop a line here as I originally had doubts about the asteroid pages being created by a bot. As everyone seems supportive about the project, I certainly see no need to stubbornly cling to any sort of resistance. I would just like to ask, though, what is our target number, what is our max number? Best. --Ioscius ^∞ 21:31, 22 Iulii 2010 (UTC)

I believe that many of our asteroid pages are even better than those at en:, especially the higher-numbered ones. In any case, there is a total of 15,525 asteroids in my database, of which we've covered 3,000, so about 20%. I leave it to Andrew to decide when there is enough information added to the pages, and when there is consensus to add more, and how many more. So I'm pretty passive :) --Robert.Baruch 23:53, 22 Iulii 2010 (UTC)

No, not to me, to a consensus [ah, yes, I see you did mention the consensus ...]! And thanks very much for your response, Iosci. I share the feeling that we should not increase our page numbers in this way at a rapid rate. In fact I was wondering whether I could interest Robert in the Vicipaedia:Taberna/Tabularium 14#Bad taxonomic pages. No one else seems to care about solving this problem, but I think they are an eyesore. Might we be able to adapt these pages automatically into text + taxobox? We could happily drop some of the intermediate levels of classification -- they have no notability and won't last.

I strongly agree, incidentally, that most of our asteroid pages are better than those at en:. Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 09:06, 23 Iulii 2010 (UTC)

I wouldn't mind having more asteroid pages -- not now, not next week, not even next month, but in the log run. Not that I'm personally interested in those clods, but their Namengebung may turn out to be of some cultural historical interest. For that purpose (among others) more data is welcome. --Neander 14:16, 23 Iulii 2010 (UTC)

Taxonomics

Here's the new section to discuss taxonomics. Let me know your thoughts -- I'm willing to work on some automation. --Robert.Baruch 13:22, 23 Iulii 2010 (UTC)

Any chance you could automatically find & import Wikipedia's biological-species-related articles that themselves have been automatically generated? For example, en:Horsfieldia palauensis (which = our Horsfieldia palauensis), when you bring up the edit page, says: "This article was auto-generated by User:Polbot." IacobusAmor 13:33, 23 Iulii 2010 (UTC)

Yes, interesting ... How many species are there in the world? Will you talk to Ioscius about this, Iacobe, or shall I? :) Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 14:27, 23 Iulii 2010 (UTC)

Am I that stubborn that you all have to draw straws to talk to me? ;] By all means, using bots to improve existing pages has never rubbed me the wrong way. --Ioscius ^∞ 20:29, 24 Iulii 2010 (UTC)

I'm reluctant to scrape the data off en:, considering that I don't know how that data was generated, or whether it was modified. I'd much rather go to the original sources... if I can find ones that can be downloaded! --Robert.Baruch 14:47, 23 Iulii 2010 (UTC)

Absolutely. Wikipedia is not a reliable source. Well, on the page that Iacobus points out, there is just one external link, to the IUCN Red list. Whether it would be possible to download from there, I don't know.

This, though interesting and potentially useful, is not the same question as mine above. However, getting back to those bad pages: if a downloadable source of species data can be found, it would probably be better to use it and to replace our pages, because we don't know their authority and they might be out of date anyway. Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 15:21, 23 Iulii 2010 (UTC)

Yes, that is what I am thinking, too. --Robert.Baruch 15:24, 23 Iulii 2010 (UTC)

The bad page example Phascolarctos has two external links.

• One is to animaldiversityweb, which links on to another source, Encyclopedia of Life, which in turn offers other linked information including ITIS and IUCN. I won't give links because you can follow all this with a couple of clicks. There's a lot there, but I don't know whether you can capture it automatically.
• The other is Systema Naturae 2000. This site encapsulates our problem: Rafaelgarcia raised this issue long ago. It looks as though our pages may often be a dirty copy(vio) of the Systema Naturae pages; on top of which, we don't know what authority Systema Naturae has for its high-level classification.

My first suggestion, then, is to see whether we can find something downloadable from one or more of the other sites that would allow us to replace at least some of these pages. ITIS is (in my experience) very reliable. But it doesn't include all species; probably no site does. Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 15:34, 23 Iulii 2010 (UTC)

According to Wikipedia, the current best guesses at the number of animal species are between 7,000,000 and 100,000,000. Most of them haven't yet been discovered & named. IacobusAmor 19:03, 14 Maii 2011 (UTC)

Another example of a bot-generated article, just now encountered: en:Philippine Cuckoo-Dove, marked at the top (in the editable text) by the notation "<!-- This article was auto-generated by [[User:Polbot]].-->." IacobusAmor (disputatio) 16:29, 9 Septembris 2012 (UTC)

Amice Iacobe, tamdiu non respondebam quia quaestum cum sodalitate Google in oppido Mountain View (Aspectus Montis) Californiae petebam. Hercle, die 15 Octobris initiabo! Saltationem felicem salto! Videbo si possibile est mihi programmaturam scribere ut paginas taxonomicas automatice ex illo fonte crearet. --Robert.Baruch (disputatio) 22:01, 11 Septembris 2012 (UTC)

Source: Catalogue of Life

The Catalogue of Life (browse the taxonomic tree here) seems to have favorable terms (notification that we are using the database, plus assurance that proper credit is given), and the data is conveniently available in a MySQL database including sources for the classification. I can code this up easily, similar to the asteroid work. The 2010 Catalogue has 1.25 million species, but of course we could pick and choose which subsets of the taxonomic tree to import. --Robert.Baruch 00:08, 20 Novembris 2010 (UTC)

To deal with our most irritating problem, is it possible to try replacing some (or indeed all) of our pages that are dirty copies from Systema Naturae? The way to find them, I think, would be to search for all pages that contain the string "******" -- because that is the way these pages are formatted.

The challenge (one of the challenges) will be to deal with the fact that we will be working at various different levels of the classification. But pages at each level could perhaps be sorted into a separate group by searching for the correct number of asterisks!

Personally I think there is no need at all for us to feature a classification "tree" on our pages. If anyone wants that, wikispecies does it. Instead, as with the asteroids, we should provide readable text on one side, a well-selected infobox on the other side, and helpful links or bibliography below. Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 18:20, 23 Novembris 2010 (UTC)

stub

with reference to the discussion in the taberna I agree with you, Robert, each page, also a stub, makes me easier to prepare a new one, see for example A che punto è la notte where I used bomba, cereus etc.--Helveticus montanus 21:46, 22 Novembris 2010 (UTC)

Categories

I have added some new ones in the area you've been working in. This is well beyond my comfort zone, so feel free of course to correct the structure of supercategories etc. Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 13:36, 18 Decembris 2010 (UTC)

Roberte, inspired by your work on Terra Mariae, I've been looking at how Vicipaedia covers the geography of North America. Compared with its coverage of Europe (where we have hundreds of articles on obscure Italian & Swiss hamlets, and many articles on landforms such as bays, lakes, rivers, and such), the coverage of North (and South!) America is astoundingly thin. Making Vicipaedia's categorization conform to that of Wikipedia reveals the situation in all its horror—especially in view of the fact that many categories populated so far by one or two (or no!) articles in Vicipaedia are well enough populated in dozens of wikis as to have led those wikis to participate extensively in the systematization found in its most complete state in the English wiki. For example, see the interwiki links at Categoria:Geographia Terrae Mariae (and by implication, at analogous categories for each of the other states); also see the 58 (!) interwiki links at Categoria:Montes perpetui, a category that—inexplicably, one might suppose—had been missing from Vicipaedia until today. Browsing in the full system (at en:Wikipedia), one sees at a glance the defects of Vicipaedia. (In passing, one remarks on Vicipaedia's possible overemphasis on biographies, probably because simplistic formulaic definitions are easy for beginners to draft.) Any geographical articles you wish to add will most certainly be welcome! Let's give the Americas their due! And the same could be said for Africa, Asia, and Oceania: in fact, everywhere but Europe! IacobusAmor 11:04, 12 Maii 2011 (UTC)

I could certainly work on that, using a bot to identify missing features, and the same could fill in the category system. Did we ever come to a conclusion for word order? I.e. is it Comitatus X or X Comitatus? And is it country-dependent? --Robert.Baruch 16:58, 12 Maii 2011 (UTC)

Hmm. It may be. Since Google shows that the ratio of Lacus Curtius to Curtius Lacus is 38 to 1, I'd go with Neander's initial idea, of putting the generic term first. Of course that's just one classical example. IacobusAmor 17:42, 12 Maii 2011 (UTC)

It might be best to put the generic term first in prose but (as perhaps AKD suggested) to put the unique name first in lists, as with categories, so one might prefer to speak of Comitatus Glades in running text, but to categorize that as Categoria:Glades Comitatus Floridae. Take a look at it and see what you think? I'll hold off on linking the other counties to Lake Okeechobee for now. IacobusAmor 17:52, 12 Maii 2011 (UTC)

I'm pretty sure that the general consensus was that Lacus Curtius would be the lemma, and we write a redirect from Curtius Lacus to help the searcher. --Robert.Baruch 18:36, 14 Maii 2011 (UTC)

That's a lot of redirecting for categories! Florida alone has sixty-seven of them. IacobusAmor 18:56, 14 Maii 2011 (UTC)

Every state & territory

As the system shows, every U.S. state and Canadian province & territory, and maybe someday each Mexican state, deserves a set of categories; e.g., "Aestuaria Terrae Mariae," "Cavernae Terrae Mariae," "Flumina Terrae Mariae," "Lacus Terrae Mariae," "Montes Terrae Mariae," "Sinus Terrae Mariae," "Valles Terrae Mariae," all grouped under the concept of "landforms of Maryland." (For a few of these polities, certain categories will be unpopulated and therefore nonexistent; for example, there seem to be no "estuaries of Idaho.") Also, since almost every state will eventually have articles on issues relating to its borders, almost every state will have the category exemplified in Categoria:Fines Terrae Mariae and Categoria:Historia geographica Civitatum Foederatarum. ¶ Not to mention an overwhelmingly large set of categories relating to settlements; see, for example, en:Category:Cities in Maryland. ¶ That an extremely high proportion of the categories in question have "CommuniaCat" entries emphasizes the importance of these categories. IacobusAmor 11:51, 12 Maii 2011 (UTC)

I've just now created a stipula for Lacus Okeechobee to see how it might look. It's curious that so few geographical features have attracted writers. For many, topics of interest almost seem to be random biographies, famous Hollywood films, and quaint European villages. :/ IacobusAmor 17:42, 12 Maii 2011 (UTC)

Now I've made a stipula for Domus Clingman (which I climbed many years ago), but the "Infobox mountain" isn't working quite right. The text is riddled with red, perhaps owing to neglect of U.S. geographical topics. IacobusAmor 19:33, 12 Maii 2011 (UTC)

Oh boy, another formula to port, yay! :) How about Capsa montis? --Robert.Baruch 19:46, 12 Maii 2011 (UTC)

Sounds good! ;) IacobusAmor 19:48, 12 Maii 2011 (UTC)

We also need "Formula:Infobox lake." IacobusAmor 14:37, 13 Maii 2011 (UTC)

Choice of terms

For "landforms," I've been using conformationes terrestres. This use has been consistent, so If a better term is found, bots can easily make replacements. The only inconsistent use covers "coastal and oceanic landforms," given in Vicipaedia as Categoria:Conformationes litoris et maris, a nicely populated category, created (by yours truly) on 17 May 2009. ¶ Similarly, I've used flumina everywhere for 'river', but of course a bot could change that to fluvius if consensus eventually preferred. Note that each major geographical type gets its own category: Categoria:Fluvius Potomacus, Categoria:Sinus Chesapeacus, en:Category:Chesapeake Bay Watershed, etc. IacobusAmor 11:51, 12 Maii 2011 (UTC)

And en:Category:Tributaries of the Potomac River has 148 articles in it! Cassell's says classical Latin uses no noun for 'tributary', but tributarius is presumably usable in a pinch. IacobusAmor 11:57, 12 Maii 2011 (UTC)

Speaking of waterways, I've blocked out the category for "Intracoastal Waterway," since the Latin term isn't obvious; however, that's an important geographic feature of the East Coast, so it'll need wikifying someday. IacobusAmor 12:26, 12 Maii 2011 (UTC)

I used amnis for short in the Capsa coloniae, but for tributary, Traupman uses the full phrase amnis in alium influens. But I suppose a fluvius tributarius would work, so long as NF doesn't apply to figurative meanings. I'm pretty sure fisticuffs will ensue should we actually use fluvius tributarius. For waterway, I've used via aquaria (a way of water), which seems apt to me. Via aqualis (a water-way) would probably also work. What do you think? --Robert.Baruch 16:58, 12 Maii 2011 (UTC)

Thanks to Nuada, Vicipaedia already has Categoria:Tributarii Arni, so I went ahead and created the category Categoria:Tributarii fluviatiles. Of course it can be changed as necessary. Some other tributaries, without fluviatiles, already exist. Traupman's term is a definition, not a synonymlike phrase. Don't you hate those things? IacobusAmor 17:42, 12 Maii 2011 (UTC)

Coord

What alterations would be needed, to the coord template I have just copied from en:wiki into Eresus, to make it appear in the upper margin like your nice new ones? Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 19:30, 24 Aprilis 2011 (UTC)

Adding "display=title" (or "display=inline, title") to the template will display the coordinates at the top of the page: [1] --Aylin 19:46, 24 Aprilis 2011 (UTC)

Oh, it's not that nice. I don't like the fact that it displays both DMS and decimal. I like en:'s better, but I think that's just a matter of changing {{coord}}. --Robert.Baruch 21:24, 24 Aprilis 2011 (UTC)

I think I've fixed it by changing MediaWiki:Common.css - it seems to display only one of the two formats now :) --Aylin 22:28, 24 Aprilis 2011 (UTC)

Good work! I couldn't figure out why the formulas here and on en: were pretty much the same, and yet it wouldn't work here. Excellent! --Robert.Baruch 23:45, 24 Aprilis 2011 (UTC)

á

Salve, Roberte. I've seen that you use repeatedly á when you write 1st decl. sing. ablatives (like here, here, and etc). Unless this has changed recently (I've been rather absent this year) our norm is not to use any sort of diacritics when writting in Latin. Not that it is wrong, but for the sake of consistency all across the vici (imagine how many 1rst. decl. sing. ablative forms are in all the 52.000+ articles we've got), better not to use them.--Xaverius 18:24, 28 Aprilis 2011 (UTC)

Yeah, I sort of got in the habit after IacobusAmor talked about it. I can stop doing it, unless there is a real ambiguity. --Robert.Baruch 18:40, 28 Aprilis 2011 (UTC)

Please, do so! I think that as an encyclopedia we should be consistent, and all pages should follow the same ortography! Thanks, --Xaverius 21:18, 28 Aprilis 2011 (UTC)

Just be thankful it's not à or â for ablatives and è for adverbs, as the orthography used to be! IacobusAmor 23:28, 28 Aprilis 2011 (UTC)

Blimey...--Xaverius 23:46, 28 Aprilis 2011 (UTC)

Paginae: Comitatús CFA

OK, so I've played around with a program which starts with some data files from the US Census 2010, specifically:

• DEC_10_PL_GCTPL2.ST05.csv, which lists the population of each state and each county (or subdivision) of each state.
• 2010_Gaz_counties_national.txt, which lists the land and water area of each county (or subdivision) of each state.

The state subdivisions in each state are mostly counties, but there are parishes (Louisiana), municipios (Puerto Rico, not a state, but still important enough to include in "the states"), city/boroughs (cities big enough to be counties), and areas (Alaska). But I'll just call them counties from now on in the below, and it should be understood that it is a stand-in for whatever the subdivision for a state is called.

Starting from these files, the program locates the corresponding county article in en: and attempts to extract the county seat, the year of founding, and all the interwiki links.

Then, we look in la: and search for a county article in any of the following forms (Comitatus should be understood as a stand-in for the actual type):

• Comitatus X (State)
• Comitatus X
• X Comitatus (State)
• X Comitatus

If the article is found, we're not going to attempt to generate a new article. If no article is found, we will be able to generate the article. Based on the results of the program, there are 3 219 counties, of which 1 733 do not exist, and the rest ended up with these formats:

• 1: Comitatus X (State)
• 0: Comitatus X
• 775: X Comitatus (State)
• 710: X Comitatus

So we can just keep the "X Comitatus (State)" title, move the "X Comitatus" to the standard "X Comitatus (State)", move that one "Comitatus X (State)" and generate the rest. In prose, though, we can use Comitatus X. --Robert.Baruch 04:29, 17 Maii 2011 (UTC)

I thought the standard was going to be Comitatus X. In most cases, it has the pragmatic advantage of putting a declinable element first and an indeclinable element last, resolving at the start any syntactical vagueness offered by X Comitatus. IacobusAmor 10:23, 17 Maii 2011 (UTC)

I think that's a good point -- it hadn't occurred to me in this context. Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 10:39, 17 Maii 2011 (UTC)

OK, we can do that, and have redirects from X Comitatus (State) for searching. --Robert.Baruch 16:20, 17 Maii 2011 (UTC)

Is "Comitatus X (State)" really Comitatus Novum Eboracum perchance? If so, it may be confusing 'New York' (the state, Novum Eboracum) with 'New York' (the borough, Manhata), so it should be read 'The county named New York'. The phrase Novum Eboracum covers three distinct political entities: a state, a county, and a city. IacobusAmor 10:17, 17 Maii 2011 (UTC) IacobusAmor 10:14, 17 Maii 2011 (UTC)

At first, it would be "Comitatus New York (Novum Eboracum)", with a redirect from "New York Comitatus (Novum Eboracum)" because I'm not sure I can go through all three thousand-odd county names and convert to Latin where possible. Then, we would have to manually merge that with Manhata. --Robert.Baruch 16:20, 17 Maii 2011 (UTC)

That all looks really great to me, including the last two sentences; but, not being an inhabitant of a US county, I leave others to make the final choices about word order &c. Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 08:51, 17 Maii 2011 (UTC)

Asteroids by date of discovery

I notice that the subcategories of Categoria:Asteroides repertu digesti have just one supercategory each -- i.e. this one -- but if they're going to be like our other event-year categories they should have two, the other one being the simple year. E.g., "Categoria:Asteroides anno 1802 reperti", which currently has the text [[Categoria:Asteroides repertu digesti]] should really have [[Categoria:Asteroides repertu digesti]] [[Categoria:1802]]. I wonder whether your bot could do this? Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 13:36, 20 Maii 2011 (UTC)

Sure, that should be easy enough to do. --Robert.Baruch 14:07, 26 Maii 2011 (UTC)

Once my bot alter-ego gets its bot flag set, I'll get this done. --Robert.Baruch 15:42, 27 Maii 2011 (UTC)

I've asked our grapheocrates Usor:Adam Episcopus to grant the bot flag to your bot. --Aylin 16:02, 27 Maii 2011 (UTC)

Papiliones Terrae Mariae

Hi, Robert. In case you'd like to try your hand at some local butterflies, the list at Index papilionum Terrae Mariae should prove handy. Some of these articles are short & formulaic, to the point that we can work on them while doing something else with our ears, like listening to music or talkshows. Some, of course (for example the Papilionidae), are long. For models, see some of the lepidoptera listed under Dewey Decimal Classification 595.78 on my page Usor:IacobusAmor/Coepta. Cheers! IacobusAmor 14:56, 24 Octobris 2011 (UTC)

Nice! I'll try a few. My interest seems to bounce around a lot: I've done some TV shows, some movies, now a few butterflies? --Robert.Baruch 23:47, 24 Octobris 2011 (UTC)

In the sky

Far be it from me to distract you from the butterflies, but I wonder whether you'd be interested in adding all the remaining asteroids that have names, starting with 3001 Michelangelo? I think you long ago estimated the total at 15,000 or so, of which 3,000 are already done. I think this was so successful an exercise that we should complete it: and since Helveticus is in process of adding 33,000 (!) extremely short pages about French communes, no one can argue that some more asteroid pages with solid-looking text and infobox would reduce the quality of Vicipaedia ... How do you feel about this? Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 12:24, 10 Ianuarii 2012 (UTC)

The asteroid pages, being not insubstantial, contribute usefully to the enterprise; however, articles whose sole text is approximately thirteen words/phrases—"A est commune B incolarum (anno 2011) praefecturae C in D regione E"—don't provide much enlightenment, though of course as markers laid down for future growth they're welcome, one supposes. IacobusAmor 13:08, 10 Ianuarii 2012 (UTC)

In this, Iacobe, (as in many things) I think you and I agree in toto. Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 14:43, 10 Ianuarii 2012 (UTC)

Can do. I'll do it under my User:Robert.Baruch.Bot account. --Robert.Baruch 15:16, 10 Ianuarii 2012 (UTC)

Looks like I can probably do 1,000 per day before my eyes get all bleary from trying to resolve first initials of astronomers and translating names. I've done up to 4000 Hipparchus today. --Robert.Baruch 02:02, 11 Ianuarii 2012 (UTC)

Beautiful. The existing 3753 Cruithne isn't a serious contender in the Latinitas stakes. Shall I delete it so that you can replace it? Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 09:56, 11 Ianuarii 2012 (UTC)

Yes, please! --Robert.Baruch 14:53, 11 Ianuarii 2012 (UTC)

Could you please overwrite 3251 Eratosthenes as well? Another thing: Index Asteroidum 3001-4000 and Index Asteroidum 4001-5000 still show a number of redlinks - would it be possible for you to create redirects from the unaccented titles that are listed on these two index pages to the asteroid pages you created with the correct diacritical marks? --UV 00:15, 12 Ianuarii 2012 (UTC)

No problem -- please have 3251 deleted, and my program will rewrite it. --Robert.Baruch 01:50, 12 Ianuarii 2012 (UTC)

Done. Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 09:58, 12 Ianuarii 2012 (UTC)

Thanks. Having been through the "whoops" one too many times, I've learned it's a bad thing to give your programs the power to undo months of work without HITL technology. :) --Robert.Baruch 19:21, 12 Ianuarii 2012 (UTC)

Since not a few asteroids & animals (usually butterflies, it seems) are named after people, both real & mythological, do we have a way of cross-checking to build interconnections among these things, either in "vide etiam" sections or via categories? See, for example, {{Categoria:Species insectorum ex hominibus appellatae}}, {{Categoria:Species insectorum ex hominibus mythologicis appellatae}}, and {{Categoria:Genera insectorum ex hominibus mythologicis appellata}}, which of course are quite incomplete but still may be regarded as a brave start. IacobusAmor 13:44, 11 Ianuarii 2012 (UTC)

Sadly, there isn't a "named after" field that can be scraped. The only other alternative would be to look at the asteroid's name, which isn't necessarily uniquely resolvable. --Robert.Baruch 14:55, 11 Ianuarii 2012 (UTC)

Both I and Neander have occasionally worked on this, adding the information to Robert's pages, using what you might loosely call our human intelligence! Future results will swell the subcategories of Categoria:Asteroides origine nominis digesti. The sources of names might seem obvious, but it's surprising how often one is surprised :) Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 16:09, 11 Ianuarii 2012 (UTC)

True, but some really are obvious: 3079 Schiller, 3092 Herodotus, 3095 Omarkhayyam, 3097 Tacitus, 3240 Laocoon, 3244 Petronius, 3288 Seleucus, none of which seems to have been categorized in this respect. IacobusAmor 03:13, 12 Ianuarii 2012 (UTC)

I don't know what you're proposing. Obvious to humans (yes, you're probably right in those cases except Seleucus) is not obvious to bots. A bot can't say "One Herodotus is much more famous than the others so it must be him" because a bot can't think. "It's obvious to me" is in any case not good enough for an encyclopaedia. So what are you proposing? If you want to do some of the human job, that's fine, the reliable source to check and cite is:

Lutz D. Schmadel, Dictionary of Minor Planet Names (Berolini: Springer, 2003)

It usually takes about two six minutes per page, but it can be quite a bit longer. It's damned interesting, too, because you usually learn from it, and write down for other readers, not just what the name comes from but also why the discoverer chose it. See 100 Hekate and 218 Bianca for unusual examples. [I changed the time estimate to six minutes -- ten pages an hour if one is lucky -- because it's normally necessary, as part of this, to check whether we have an article on the subject/person concerned, and very often a new discretiva page is wanted.]

Another job to do, if you're offering, is to go through the early ones (where someone has identified the source) and add the appropriate category, because we did not at first have these source-of-name categories. I think it was Robert's idea to add those. Categories still need to be added, from info in the text, to nearly all the pages between 2 Pallas and 230 Athamantis. Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 09:55, 12 Ianuarii 2012 (UTC)

Or we could just scrape off of en:List of minor planets named after people... :) --Robert.Baruch 14:26, 12 Ianuarii 2012 (UTC)

Ah, that shines another light on the subject! I never saw that page before. I see that there is also en:List of minor planets named after places. I guess a bot could do this for us? Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 16:27, 12 Ianuarii 2012 (UTC)

Yes and no. It could include the asteroid in the category, but it wouldn't be able to add the name to the asteroid article, because that would require more translation. --Robert.Baruch 18:32, 12 Ianuarii 2012 (UTC)

Hmm. I recall the rule that categories shoud reflect what's in the text -- if we go by that, we wouldn't add the category until the info is added (manually) to the text. I guess we also don't quite know how reliable that list information in en:wiki is. However, if Iacobus wants to urge that we should use these lists to add categories here, I guess I would go with it :) It could be useful, in fact, in that it would group pages usefully and thus render subsequent text editing slightly easier. Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 21:18, 12 Ianuarii 2012 (UTC)

More programming?

Thanks for helping with the code of Bellum Indosinense II. Now that the box is basically working, I've noticed a few problems and cited them in Taberna. Cheers! IacobusAmor 17:09, 22 Ianuarii 2012 (UTC)

Other business ...

You might like to know that the discussion on portalboxes, between you and Iacobus, has now moved to his talk page.

Thanks very much -- I never said before -- for all those asteroids. You've reached 10,000! And now I'll get back to investigating the names :) Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 14:44, 19 Februarii 2012 (UTC)

I got lazy and stopped. I'll get the rest done soon, and I will correct the names with accents on the index pages after that. Promise! --Robert.Baruch 15:14, 19 Februarii 2012 (UTC)

I don't blame you. There are other things in life than asteroids. Take your time!

I have a different question. See how it works when you go to the category page for a year Categoria:1914 or a birth or death Categoria:Nati 1900. You get that clever navigation box at the top of the page. Any chance of doing something just like that for the other Annales categories? (You can see a list of the ones I mean under Categoria:Annales). Might that interest you? Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 15:29, 19 Februarii 2012 (UTC)

There should be a way to consolidate all those individual formulas into a more general formula that can be used for any Annales category. I'll experiment. --Robert.Baruch 15:27, 25 Februarii 2012 (UTC)

Species

I gather you're at work on the species (and may have been at work on them for quite some time already). This is really great. Any help I can give, e.g. in devising a standard text, don't hesitate to ask! Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 13:51, 24 Septembris 2012 (UTC)

Where the English wiki has a taxobox, that can probably be copied in toto, with minimal (and sometimes no!) changes in the specifiers at the left-hand side. Many don't even have to be localized; for example, the English words "name" and "type_genus" and "subdivision_ranks" work just fine. ¶ From the English taxoboxes, can you find a way to generate "Categoria:Taxa [name]" and "Categoria:Taxa [year]"? IacobusAmor (disputatio) 14:16, 24 Septembris 2012 (UTC)

I thought we didn't want to use en:'s stuff because we wanted to go straight to the source? --Robert.Baruch (disputatio) 23:58, 24 Septembris 2012 (UTC)

It is surely better to go to a reliable source. Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 11:10, 25 Septembris 2012 (UTC)

True, but you can generate your own taxoboxes from the data, provided you've got the taxobox format in hand. A program could perhaps even find an appropriate photo from wherever the fasciculi are kept and insert it into the taxobox, though that process may be unnecessarily complicated at this stage. IacobusAmor (disputatio) 13:01, 25 Septembris 2012 (UTC)

My program does grab images from commons :) --Robert.Baruch (disputatio) 13:04, 25 Septembris 2012 (UTC)

Great you are preparing more species articles! I just wanted to point your attention to the Wikidata rollout upcoming not too many months from now; taxoboxes will definitely be one of Wikidata's first targets. So maybe we should find a way where the information you extract now could then be moved over to Wikidata? For a start, you might take a look at meta:Wikidata/Technical proposal and meta:Wikidata/Notes/Data model primer. Greetings, --UV (disputatio) 23:54, 24 Septembris 2012 (UTC)

Hmm. Rather like the asteroid project. --Robert.Baruch (disputatio) 23:58, 24 Septembris 2012 (UTC)

It's good to know the asteroids are still in your mind ... Not very many named asteroids beyond 10,000, I think. Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 10:42, 25 Septembris 2012 (UTC)

Ooh, RDF. I like the idea of converting the data to Wikidata's preferred export format, and then just importing when the time comes. --Robert.Baruch (disputatio) 00:16, 25 Septembris 2012 (UTC)

VisualEditor

Salve, Robert.Baruch,

I see that you've used VisualEditor here recently. I'd like to know if you encountered any problems or have ideas about how to make it better. It's going to be made available to everyone here in about 10 days, so I'd especially like to know about any big problems before then. Feel free to leave a note for me or to send me e-mail. Thanks, Whatamidoing (WMF) (disputatio) 22:05, 2 Ianuarii 2014 (UTC)

I haven't encountered any major issues. I did find some minor problems about a month ago, but those problems seem to have gone away. One major drawback, though, is the inability to add a formula such as {{dubsig}}, and it's a real pain to add references. But it's early days yet. I wouldn't have any objection. --Robert.Baruch (disputatio) 04:21, 4 Ianuarii 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for your reply. I'm glad that some of the minor problems cleared up. Can you tell me what the dubsig template does? Does it display on the page, or is it invisible?

Improving the reference dialog is one of the two main projects at the moment. You can post suggestions at w:en:Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Feedback/Toolbar if you have any ideas. Whatamidoing (WMF) (disputatio) 01:31, 7 Ianuarii 2014 (UTC)

It's visible. It does this:^?. --Robert.Baruch (disputatio) 03:22, 7 Ianuarii 2014 (UTC)

Please look at Usor:Whatamidoing (WMF)/Harenarium and tell me if that's what you want to be able to add. Whatamidoing (WMF) (disputatio) 22:34, 9 Ianuarii 2014 (UTC)

Yes, that's one of them. But there are loads of formulas. I'd really like to use all of them :) --Robert.Baruch (disputatio) 05:09, 10 Ianuarii 2014 (UTC)

You should be able to use almost any template/formula. The thing is that it's got a weird name, "Transclusion", so it's not obvious. Go to the "Insert" menu and choose "Transclusion" (the puzzle-piece icon—and yes, it's very puzzling!). Under "New Template", type in the name of the template you want ("dubsig") and "Add template". Add any parameters and then "Apply changes" to put the whole thing into the article. You can read more about it at mw:Help:VisualEditor/User guide#Editing templates. Whatamidoing (WMF) (disputatio) 20:04, 13 Ianuarii 2014 (UTC)

De iubilaeo Vicipaedianorum

Annum 2016 prosperum et felicem omnibus amicis Vicipaedianis opto! Apud Tabernam consentivimus annum 2016 (quem iubilaeum nostrum Helveticus nuncupavit) praecipue dedicare ad textum paginarum Vicipaedicarum augendum et meliorandum. Huic proposito consentiens (si tu consentis!) sic pro communi inceptu nostro agere potes:

• Quando paginas novas legibiles, fontibus munitas, et non brevissimas creare vis, crea! Ne timeas!
• Quandocumque paginam aut breviorem aut mendosam aut male confectam reperis, cura! corrige! auge!
• Si paginam novam brevissimam creare in mentem habes, recogita ... An potius textum longiorem scribere oportet? An prius aliam paginam, iam exstantem, augere potes?

Quo dicto, Vicipaediani liberi sumus. Paginae etiam breves, quae inter veras "stipulas" admitti possunt (vide formulam "Non stipula"), accepturae sunt sicut iam antea accipi solent. Scribe igitur sine metu, sicut iam scripsisti! ^[en] Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 18:50, 1 Ianuarii 2016 (UTC)

Asteroids

Hi, Robert. Haven't seen you for a while! In case you have any time to spare for Vicipaedia, there's a question about asteroid data on the Vicipaedia:Taberna right now ... Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 09:50, 26 Ianuarii 2018 (UTC)