Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 01:22, 4 February 2010

Horizontal option

Cite4wiki looks very cool. Can you attach the beta in an email? (yes I'm windows based, and use Firefox pretty much exclusively). I use User:Mr.Z-man/refToolbar (turned on in preferences → gadgets) for some citation preformatting, though once I'm involved in an article, I find it easiest to just grab past citations and change the parameters, especially when I have used the same source and accessdate earlier in the article. I have never liked the look of vertical spaced citation formatting when I'm in edit mode. I much prefer as compact a reference as possible i.e., {{cite news|url=|title=|work=|etc.}} with no spacing at all.--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 03:45, 1 February 2010 (UTC)

... I prefer citations in the vertical format; you might try boosting the number of rows in your editbox (prefs, under editing; check 'Widen the edit box to fill the entire screen', too;). Cheers, Jack Merridew 06:39, 1 February 2010 (UTC)

Yeah, I do that myself. I vastly prefer the vertical cites, since it is easier to find them, read them and ensure they are coded properly. I will provide an option to use horizontal ones, though. — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(ل)ˀ Contribs. 19:46, 1 February 2010 (UTC)

Will e-mail it to you. I haven't figured out yet how to create preferences options in FFox add-ons, but if you have even really meager JavaScript sense you can easily modify the source to not use vertical citations. — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(ل)ˀ Contribs. 04:11, 1 February 2010 (UTC)

(outdent) Update: Horizontal version will be available as a 1.4 downloadable add-on variant, but won't be the default. — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(ل)ˀ Contribs. 19:46, 1 February 2010 (UTC)

Good stuff.--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 11:28, 2 February 2010 (UTC)

Site query.nytimes.com

A few bugs: this is what I got from a NYT article I used it on:

<ref>{{Cite web|url= http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?_r=1&res=9F02E7DF143EE73BBC4151DFB7668383669FDE|title=THE NEW BILLIARD EXPERT.; MR. 'YANK' ADAMS' FIRST ... - View Article - The New York Times|first=|last={{Err|{{authr?}}}}|work=query.nytimes.com|year=2010 |accessdate=February 1, 2010}}</ref>

Some suggestions: Make it cite news, not cite web; make work=The New York Times. --Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 05:09, 1 February 2010 (UTC)

The script wasn't detecting "query.nytimes.com", only "nytimes.com", so I'll add that one. In the interim, try just www.nytimes.com articles to see the customization at work. The www.nytimes.com detector already fixes the work, and new version will do same for query.nytimes.com.

— SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(ل)ˀ Contribs. 19:46, 1 February 2010 (UTC)

Site-specific datamining

this is what I got from a NYT article I used it on:

<ref>{{Cite web|url= http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?_r=1&res=9F02E7DF143EE73BBC4151DFB7668383669FDE|title=THE NEW BILLIARD EXPERT.; MR. 'YANK' ADAMS' FIRST ... - View Article - The New York Times|first=|last={{Err|{{authr?}}}}|work=query.nytimes.com|year=2010 |accessdate=February 1, 2010}}</ref>

Can it scrape the date? The date for any newspaper citation is never "2010" of course.

--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 05:09, 1 February 2010 (UTC)

For now anyway, the date is something that will need to be manually fixed. For known news sources, the date will (in 1.4) actually show up as an error if it is not manually fixed, for the very reason you point out; for cite web sources, the year is okay as a default, but not for online newspapers, which always give a full date for every article. Obviously, the title will need also adjusting if the site adds "... - View Article - The New York Times" crap. Given enough time, I can script that kind of stuff away, I suppose, but the problem is that if it ever changes by even one character, then the script will have to be updated. For NYT in particular and some other newspapers, I could probably scrape the date (I'd be surprised if it were not in a span or div I could identify by name/id), but the same caveat applies that if NY every changes anything about this, then the tool breaks. Something I'll consider for 1.5.

— SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(ل)ˀ Contribs. 19:46, 1 February 2010 (UTC)

PDF datamining

All New York Times PDFs (example) have "Published: January 29, 1878" at the bottom, and that part of the PDF page (unlike the body text of the article) is OCRed, so I would think you could get it recognized. --Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 05:09, 1 February 2010 (UTC)

PDFs: Not in the picture, really. JavaScript works on Web pages per se; any PDF you are actually reading online in your browser is being read in a PDF viewer plugin to which the JavaScript has no access at all. Anyway, I'll have a look at the URL you've given here and see what JS can do with it; if the PDF's being loaded in a frame or something, I might be able to get details from it. — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(ل)ˀ Contribs. 19:46, 1 February 2010 (UTC)

— SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(ل)ˀ Contribs. 19:46, 1 February 2010 (UTC)

PS: Redevelopment of this tool in Java might be able to directly deal with PDFs, but that's for someone else to look at; I don't speak Java. — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(ل)ˀ Contribs. 20:04, 1 February 2010 (UTC)

1.0 formatting issue

fyi, on Cite4Wiki, I get a few garbled characters after the closing ref-tag. I just tried to paste them here in nowiki-tags and MediaWiki got rather confused by them. Fine work, otherwise. Cheers, Jack Merridew 06:39, 1 February 2010 (UTC)

I was using v1.0 and just bumped to the experimental v1.3 and the loose char issue cleared up.

Cheers, Jack Merridew 07:21, 1 February 2010 (UTC)

Ha! 1.0 was not my code. That was Cite for Wiki; my Cite4Wiki began at 1.1, based on the former's 1.0, which I believe was first-and-last published in September 2009.— SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(ل)ˀ Contribs. 19:46, 1 February 2010 (UTC)

I used the for wiki a few years ago; the version User:Jehochman had linked off his user page (which went broken for some reason; a FF update, I think). I currently have v1.0 of 4 as well as v1.3 of 4. The first version, I installed a few months ago, off Mozilla.org, and the second, yesterday. I'll be uninstalling the old one soon enough. You said somewhere that v1.4 is nearly ready and I'll be sure and grab that. Cheers, Jack Merridew 20:38, 1 February 2010 (UTC)

ISO date format

Aren't the dates in cites supposed to be numeric, such as 01-02-2010 for today? Cheers, Jack Merridew 07:21, 1 February 2010 (UTC)

Dates in citations are definitely not supposed to be ISO format any longer, per deprecation at WP:MOSNUM several months ago, and slow deprecation in the templates themselves. The date format should match the rest of the article. There are still zillions of citations that need cleaning up, but this add-on won't make more broken ones. :-)

That's good to know; I've not been following such discussions. Cheers, Jack Merridew 20:38, 1 February 2010 (UTC)

Code formatting options

I like the vertical formatting, but start lines with the vertical rule, a space, then the arg. Cheers, Jack Merridew 07:21, 1 February 2010 (UTC)

The " |foo=" vs. "| foo=" issue is one of personal preference. I've gone with the most readable option, to me, and both seem to be common, as is "|foo=", " |foo =", "|foo =", "| foo =", " | foo =", and so on. The parser doesn't care. Without creating a really complicated prefs panel, I can't account for all of these tastes (it actually gets worse - some people want horizontal layout, but also want very particular spacing before "|" or after it or both or neither and before "=" or after it or both or neither, sometimes with matching options for each of the two characters and sometimes not, and so on and so on). I think it would be far more valuable to spend at least my developer time on more customized site filters that fill in correct source-specific values, but if someone wants to develop such a XUL preference window for the add-on, then please join the project. — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(ل)ˀ Contribs. 19:46, 1 February 2010 (UTC)

Such a prefs panel would be messy work and we really don't want too many personal prefs pumped into the database. I also use spaces on either side of the '=' and will sometimes line the '=' up into columns for better readability. These are all habits that originating in coding real code. Here's an example of how I prefer cites to be formatted (scroll down a bit; there are a bunch). Cheers, Jack Merridew 20:38, 1 February 2010 (UTC)

Yeah, I know some people prefer that, but I don't (too much useless whitespace that doesn't really help readability enough to make it worth it) and I'm not willing to change the tool to use someone else's preferences, all other things being equal. If MOS ever comes up with code style guidelines, I'll have to tool do what those say. I have no objections to a prefs panel for this stuff, but won't build it myself, at least not any time soon. "Real code": Depends on the code. I absolutely positively hate it when people space HTML code like this, but I also hate it when they don't do that with PHP and JS. Different standards (written and otherwise) apply to different languages, and differ depending upon your coding community and background too (there's even more than one school of thought on how to format C code, with some prefering variation from the K&R style). I.e., it's a can of worms I don't really want to open. :-) — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(ل)ˀ Contribs. 21:56, 1 February 2010 (UTC)

Reflinks tool conflict?

I like the vertical formatting, but start lines with the vertical rule, a space, then the arg. Also, Reflinks forces the 'Cite' template to lower case 'c' so the tools edit-war (as do many tool). Cheers, Jack Merridew 07:21, 1 February 2010 (UTC)

That tool seems to act on bare URLs pasted in as "references" and converts them to actual citations as best it can. The output of Cite4Wiki won't be what the tool acts on, so there doesn't seem to be a conflict. — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(ل)ˀ Contribs. 19:54, 1 February 2010 (UTC)

Reflinks will apply common fixes and tweak all the other citation templates on a page to use the lower case 'c' so your upper case 'C' will end up coerced to lowercase if someone hits the page with Dispenser's tool. For what it's worth, I was using 'C' and stopped bothering once I noticed this. Cheers, Jack Merridew 20:38, 1 February 2010 (UTC)

Hmph. I've asked Dispenser to have it stop doing that. If he won't, I'm not going to care. ;-) — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(ل)ˀ Contribs. 21:50, 1 February 2010 (UTC)

Useful tool

This is a useful tool and I thank you for putting it out there. More here should be using such tools. The standards for referencing are going to go up over time and the unsourced BLPs are just the beginning. Cheers, Jack Merridew (who's a sockpuppet who goes by 'David' in real-life) 20:38, 1 February 2010 (UTC)

Credit really goes to User:Jehochman and User:Unit 5 for coming up with this in the first place. — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(ل)ˀ Contribs. 17:32, 2 February 2010 (UTC)

Hijacking of Cite4Wiki code

I'm a little shocked to see that you have basically hijacked the addon's code and the "cite4wiki" name I gave it. I did not so much as receive a single email at my attached email address about this. I do not use this account often, but I would have reacted to any email. I'm curious as you how you justify this sort of unethical behaviour and considering what my next step will be. Unit 5 15:56, 2 February 2010 (UTC)

I tried contacting you weeks ago, here, in e-mail at the e-mail address publicized in the source code for Cite for Wiki 1.0, and via addons.mozilla.org's forms for contacting the add-on author. I guess the one possible way of contacting you that I could have tried but didn't was WP's "e-mail this user" form, but by that point I'd given up or not thought to try that avenue.

The code has been GNU Lesser Public Licensed since Jehochman & Manuar's original version (aside from Mozilla Public Licensed code snippets in there, but there's very little license difference), which means anyone can do anything with it within the terms of the open licensing, including derivative versions as long as they perpetuate the same licensing terms (kind of like Misplaced Pages itself). I kept a similar name ("Cite4Wiki"; yours was "Cite for Wiki", though the shorter string appeared in a few places in the code) out of respect and a desire to credit you, basically. If you'd prefer it were renamed, that's fine. This has nothing to do with taking anything from you or shutting you out, but improving the tool. You were not reachable, so I moved on with it. Sorry if this is somehow offensive to you. You were a "wikimissing person", the code had not been updated in any public way since September 2009, and it was spitting out incorrect Wikicode that people were actually using. No offense intended, but I don't think I've done anything wrong here much less "unethical" which is a very strong accusation, although I can understand your initial reaction. I'm not sure what to do to make you happier. My earlier messages to you, via three different means, were attempts to get in contact so that our efforts could be combined, and my goal the entire time has been to find you and work with you on this. Heretofore, however, I haven't even been able to add you to my version of the code's addons.mozilla.org project because the only addresses you've publicized that I can find do not correspond to whatever address you exist as on that site as a developer I can add. I've been stuck for weeks trying to get through to you (and, yeah, at this point, I wish I'd thought to use the one option I didn't try). — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(ل)ˀ Contribs. 16:53, 2 February 2010 (UTC)

1. I monitor the emails you claim to have written to, and no, you did not send any email to me over this issue. In high-handed fashion, you decided you wanted to change the addon, and to hell with me, basically.
2. To claim I was "not reachable" is a self-serving lie. I repeat, you DID NOT send messages to those email addresses. Nor did you contact Ratel.
3. I am extremely busy at the moment, so I cannot pursue this malfeasance further. At the same time, I want what's best for the project. If you can indeed improve the addon, more power to you. All I ask is 1) acknowledgement for involvement and 2) that the output remains a one line wrapped citation (the original reason I got involved bec I cannot stand the multi-line citation format, or if you want carriage returns, give a preferences option to allow either. Unit 5 01:22, 4 February 2010 (UTC)