User talk:Caesar Schinas/Archive 3

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Caesar Schinas
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Moved everything except conversations edited today to /Archive 2. Caesar Schinas

Bot guidance

Hi Caesar,

I like [(Robot: Automated text replacement (-{{[Cc]reditline\|([^|]*)\|([^|]*)\| ?Paul Wormer ?}} +{{creditline|\1|\2}})) this sort of edit summary] and wish to encourage you to make this a habit. I am interested in learning to run bot scripts too (mainly for maintaining reference formatting) and would appreciate your guidance. Could you post one of your recent scripts somewhere, so that I can ask questions and comment? Thanks!

Daniel

The scripts I use are all (so far) from the pywikipediabot library, normally either replace.py or template.py.

The command I used with the regex above was simply

python replace.py -pt:2 -start:Template:! -regex "{{[Cc]reditline\|([^|]*)\|([^|]*)\| ?Paul Wormer ?}}" "{{creditline|\1|\2}}" -summary:"Remove Paul's name as requested"

I too like the sort of edit summary you mention, which is the default edit summary for replace.py - but I usually change it to something like - in that example - "removing name from credit per author request" or some such, because I think most Citizens will understand that better. Perhaps I should still include the regex at the end somewhere. Or perhaps I'll create a page in my userspace which lists all the command I use; what do you think of that idea?

Caesar Schinas 06:38, 10 June 2009 (UTC)

Daniel, see User:Caesar_Schinas/bot-recent. Caesar Schinas 07:58, 10 June 2009 (UTC)

Upload menu

I looked at your upload menu. I don't want to pretend to know about GUI's, yet I like to remark that—just like the old menu—the menu deviates much from what one is used to elsewhere on the internet. More familiar would be four tabs (copyright owner, not copyright owner, advanced, help) with drop-down menus that give the choices. Do the colors of the big squares in the menu, as it is now, have any meaning, or is it just a matter of aesthetics? --Paul Wormer 08:52, 10 June 2009 (UTC)

It's very difficult (or even impossible) to create any form of interactive interface like that on MediaWiki.

The only way I can see to further simplify this would be to have the first page ask just one simple question - "Do you own the copyright? (y/n)", and then have further questions after clicking yes or no. And so on. But this level of "simplification" would introduce a lot of extra steps, which I think would make the wizard less usable.

The colours do have a meaning; they refer loosely to the amount of freedom - green = high free, yellow = low free, red = not free. This colour scheme is already used at later stages in the process; I just brought it forward because I think that it is clearer if the buttons aren't all the same colour.

But it may be that this use of these colours will only serve to complicate matters... what do you think?

Caesar Schinas 08:59, 10 June 2009 (UTC)

what one is used to elsewhere on the internet — can you give me an example (other than Wikimedia)? I would be interested to see an existing upload wizard. Caesar Schinas 09:00, 10 June 2009 (UTC)