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User:Spartathenian

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>Moderate pending changes backlog: 8 pages according to DatBot as of 01:30, 2 April 2025 (UTC)

Hi! My userboxes will tell you a bit about me, and there's plenty more in the sections below about my areas of interest. I'm essentially into historical topics—ancient, medieval, and modern—for research and writing. I've become increasingly involved in maintenance, which needs a huge community effort, and I'm doing what I can to improve and correct article content and references (a mammoth task!).

If you want to ask me anything, or give me any feedback, please go to my talk page. Thanks. Spartathenian (talk) 12:39, 23 March 2025 (UTC)

Work in progress

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Two tasks moved into pending while I'm on vacation.

Pending

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These two are works in progress moved to pending while I'm on vacation (till mid-April):

Maintenance

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  • HarvSfn is a selection of sfn issues for attention
  • dates.js— ensures date format consistency
  • dashes.js— converts rogue hyphens (especially in date ranges) to dashes

WP:AWB

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I had used this before to create some lists, and I've had plenty of experience using similar utilities professionally. I applied for editing rights when I reached the ECo level of membership, and I'm quite impressed with AWB's maintenance and error resolution capabilities. For example, I've been using it to seek out instances of generic expressions in citation title parameters, and I've focused on the widespread '404 Page Not Found' varieties. AWB copes with this extremely well by searching through the category and highlighting articles with a 404. You still have to deal with the error manually, but it is so much simpler using this tool than to search painstakingly through the category in normal screen display.

AWB does have a near semi-automatic function if your amendment is a very minor one that cannot really go wrong. One thing I've noticed is that WP:GEOLINK is widely ignored, probably because most editors are unaware of it. I have Scottish ancestry, so I read a lot of articles about the country, and it has struck me how often I see Scotland in blue (appropriately, in the real sense). As a major country, it should not be linked. If you use AWB to do a simple change like unlinking, which needs only a swift check with little or no manual intervention, you can whizz through an entire category in a very short time.

One thing to be aware of, though, is that AWB sends your edit count rocketing. I might do thirty edits a day by normal editing, but AWB has you in triple figures without you even realising. As edit count is an indication of "experience", I wonder if AWB edits (and any using similar utilities) should be totalled separately? Probably more trouble than it's worth, that, so forget it.

The main constraint of packages like AWB is tedium, especially if you load too long a list. It's probably best to limit each list to about 100 articles, and yourself to one daily session.

Weighing up the pros and the cons, however, I do recommend AWB to anyone doing maintenance work. Spartathenian (talk) 13:57, 15 March 2025 (UTC)

Useful summaries

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  • unlinking major countries per WP:GEOLINK and MOS:OVERLINK; plus copyediting and general fixes
  • Fixing references. "404" and "Page Not Found" in CS1 errors: generic title. Also general fixes, including application of WP:GEOLINK.

WP:RPC

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This process is intended as a quick check to ensure edits don't contain obviously inappropriate content, including:

I would also expect suitable sources for added content, less so for update amendments.

Pending changes reverted

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At other times, some of these articles had pending changes I approved. The dagger symbol (†) indicates an article that had edits I reverted because of vandalism.

Learning points

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  • see WP:RSP for reliable and non-reliable sources
  • use italic title to italicise titles of pages about publications (books, songs, etc.)
  • see WP:GNOME for tips on error correction
  • see book sources to find publishing info via the book's ISBN:
  • example of how to use both chapter name and book title in same reference:
  • {{cite book |last=Acerbi |first=Fabio |chapter=Archimedes |title=New Dictionary of Scientific Biography |volume=I |pages=85–91 |publisher=Scribner |location=Detroit |year=2008}}
  • be aware of WP:COMMONNAME when choosing or questioning article titles
  • Template:GAList/check lists GA review symbols
  • WP:GEOLINK advises on place name linking
  • consider using WP:ALTTEXT when placing or amending images, especially in the lead
  • if relisting an AFD, check for dubious posts by anyone who could be gaming the system

Articles

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Created

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Substantial development

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Miscellaneous

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These are some of the other articles I've worked on (R=review), and hopefully helped their improvement:

Reviews

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WP:RANPP completed

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WP:AWSE pending

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Current list of articles (1,000 characters) reduced from 196 to 40.

These generally need little if anything to be done, so I strike and delete them after reviewing. The purpose of AWSE is to review and clear the current list, before replacing it with a fresh list of slightly larger sized articles. Anything in AWSE that does need work is added to the Articles section above.

WP:RCP completed

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