User talk:Ram-Man/archive

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Hello there Ram-Man, welcome to the 'pedia! I hope you like the place and decide to stay. If you ever need editing help visit Wikipedia:How does one edit a page and experiment at Wikipedia:Sandbox. If you need pointers on how we title pages visit Wikipedia:Naming conventions. If you have any other questions about the project then check out Wikipedia:Help or add a question to the Village pump. BTW, thanks for starting the Akron, Pennsylvania article - you seem to have got the hang of things rather quickly. Cheers! --maveric149

Can you slow down and provide more information about these towns and bridges, please. An article about a covered bridge that tells me only that it's also called something else doesn't do much good. Ditto for those small town articles: they seem to be all template, no data. Two or three sentences on each--location, population, history, anything of interest--would help. Vicki Rosenzweig

I'll be focusing my work in the next few days and weeks on these areas. I am making templates so that all my work is consistent. I have a tendancy to forget my patterns, so I am setting up the templates now. I *will* fill in the detail. -- Ram-Man

Ram-man, can you put links to all of the Lancaster County places in the Lancaster County, Pennsylvania entry, please? -- Zoe

What links are you referring to? --- Ram-Man
Hershey Park, etc. Add a link to the Lancaster County page with See also:, or Places to see in the county:, something like that? Just a suggestion. -- Zoe
Sounds like a plan, but to save my sanity, I'm going to wait until I've finished with all of the towns listed in Lancaster County before I update the county page itself. That way I don't have to keep modifying it every single day. I can just do it all in one shot at the end to save time and effort. If someone else wants to do it first, fine, but it may just complicate things. Just a thought. -- Ram-Man

I don't think it is a good idea to be placing WikiProject boiler plates in county or city articles. Most of these entries will never have enough info in them to need WikiProject formatting. Please don't place-in any more boilerplates. --mav

Alright! -- Ram-Man

Ram-Man, see my response to your comment at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Cities -- Zoe

Let me know when you're through with the census data, and I'll take a look. -- Zoe

Ram-Man, was there something in particular you wanted me to look for in Autauga County, Alabama, or just the general format? -- Zoe

OK, I looked it over. It looks good, altho a little more detail than I'd be interested in, but you never know what people may want to see, and since it's publicly-available info, I guess there's no harm. -- Zoe

I may sound odd, but I would be interested in stuff like that. I can't be unique (can I? ;-)). And this is an encyclopedia not a novel. It isn't intended to be read like one. -- Me

Exactly. As I mentioned on another page, I'm mathematically-challenged, so my eyes glaze over when I see lots of numbers. But that doesn't mean it isn't useful. -- Zoe

It's good to see you setting up all these pages for counties. For a while I thought that you were working only on Pennsylvania, but this is much better. Are you familiar with the site http://www.naco.org/counties/queries/ ? It has a lot of usefully organized material.

Your work will make some of the material that I have that much easier to put on. Two years ago I bought several cardboard cartons full of little typed slips of paper (each about 1" high and 7" wide) You wouldn't believe how many thousands of those can go into a carton! Each has a little blurb about some obscure community somewhere in the United States, with the most important information being about how the place got its name. It's much easier for me to add this stuff when the County is set up. Thanks. Eclecticology

Aside from an edit conflict at Pendleton County, West Virgini there was no other problem resulting from your changes. Eclecticology

Can you check your mass county edits as minor? This is just a selfish request so I can filter them from the recent changes easily. If you don't think that's appropriate, no big deal. --The Cunctator

I did for all the county edits that *were* minor (like where I didn't add at least one paragraph), however most of the work I will be doing is with *new* articles that are 5 or 6 paragraphs long. That is hardly minor (and debatable whether it is an "edit"). I'm going to keep using minor only if I make small changes. I hope that's ok. Now I am fairly new to Wikipedia and maybe you know something I don't know, but shouldn't the "minor edit" be used only for an actual minor edit? Otherwise what is the point? If you tell me to do it again with minor I will, but I didn't want to violate the purpose of minor. -- Me

Hi Ram-Man, good work on all the county pages. However, also realise that this is an international encyclopedia, so please explain that all these counties and states are in the United States. Thanx, Jeronimo

Each entry has a link to [[U.S. State|State]] so that anyone reading the page can see. But I can change it [[U.S. State]] if you like. BTW, I'm not going back and redoing the 200 or so counties that i've already done. Having the link I put should be sufficient. -- Me
Though I'm not asking you to change all those counties you already worked on, I was just asking if you could consider doing it for future articles. BTW, I still think adding the country would help. However, feel free to ignore my suggestions. Jeronimo
I am going to leave it at what I am currently doing (take a look if you like). I think it is sufficient. It gets too wordy if you go something like this: Such and Such is a county of the United States in the State of some_state. -- Me

Hi, kudos all around for the work on all the counties, but I wanted to call your attention to an error and an important omission that I just fixed in Wikipedia:WikiProject U. S. Counties.

  1. The markup for sections is ==, not ===. These header levels are hierarchical. You should always start with == and go down. (= is the article title). See Wikipedia:Manual of Style for more on markup.
  2. I added county seat to the geography section. Every county has one. In lots of cases, it's the only significant town in the county.
  3. And, for my taste, anyway, I'd like to know who the county was named after.

Good luck to you on your adventures in the Wikipedia, Ortolan88

First: Great job on starting all those County articles! You are massively improving Wikipedia by starting these entries with the basics. However, I thought you said you were not going to place the WikProject boilerplates in the County articles? Not everybody who views these pages will be contributors and it will look odd to have such a notice on these pages. There is also the issue that we do plan on having print versions of Wikipedia available. In hardcopy these boilerplates will be very out of place and in order to have a decent print version somebody will have to remove these notices. I suggest, I ask, that these boilerplates be placed at the top of talk pages and not within the articles themselves. Unless you can figure out an easy way to fix the ones you have already created, then simply having the boilerplate in the talk pages of new entries would be fine. Thank you! :) --mav 00:37 Sep 26, 2002 (UTC)

I answered your question on my talk page. --mav

All those articles on Louisiana -- are they automatically generated from a database? If so, is the generation of dozens of articles the best way to present this data? --Ed Poor

I notice you've added some years recently. It was pointed out to me that the Wikipedia:Timeline_standards don't have a Year piece of text on the year line. Just FYI. Bernfarr

What I mean was that according to the standards, the text "Years:" is not at the start of the line showing the five years either side of the current year.

I changed 1534 to show you what I meant. This is how I interpreted those standards. Bernfarr

Take a look at Wikipedia talk:Timeline standards when you get a chance--the standard proposed (about leaving "Years:" off the line showing the years) has overwhelmingly not been followed. --KQ 03:03 Oct 6, 2002 (UTC)

This has been raised before. I've never *added* the "Years:" marker, but I don't always take it away. I don't suppose I am required to either. But I do it sometimes. -- Ram-Man

how can I get access to the mysql like you do? user:hfastedge

I had to compile the databases myself. I will probably post links to the databases sometime in the future. I put them on my personal page. I already have Microsoft Excel spreadsheets available with the data if those would help. Currently the data is not quite clean and it has some inconsistencies and such. But I may post it within a few weeks. -- Ram-Man
i dont believe your answer is clear, how can I stream info into the wikipedia mysql database as you seem to do. user_Talk:hfastedge
I don't stream the info. I use MySQL data on my own computer to generate large text files of the data. Then I open it up in a text editor and copy and paste the articles that I generated into the website. There is little automation other than article generation. The city data is probably going to take a different route in that since the data set is much larger (36,000 cities versus 3,000 counties) it will need to be automated by one of the wikipedia admins. -- Ram-Man

On adding those 35,000 automatic entries; I think we could probably arrange something. You could set up some kind of bot that goes through the web interface (like the guy that was importing those eastman bible dictionary entries), or we can set up a cleaner direct interface and a light client script/library/whatever. (But that's work. phew! ;) What may be simplest for now would be if you send me a delimited text file or something with the whole bunch; I can have a script insert each one into the database in your name on some sort of regular basis (One every ten minutes for the next eight months? Yikes!) or in a huuuge lump to get them over with. Better to talk it over on the mailing list first, though... --Brion 02:15 Oct 3, 2002 (UTC)

35,000! Pure insanity! Not to mention the fact that that would leave me in the dust as far as the most active list goes. Keep up the great work! --mav

Put a little note at the top of the most active list that says "Not everyone deserves to be on this list. Case in point: Ram-Man used a bot to get his score up". -- Ram-Man
Adding that many good entries, bot or not, is still deserving of inclusion. However, listing bot assists next to old fashioned edits is not particularly informative. Until you shoot past me I see no need for any bot caveat. ;) --mav

The following are data for 30,966 cities of the United States. It is in raw form. cities.zip -- Ram-Man

I notice that you've been adding a lot of data on the counties. One thing I think you need to stop doing is put the population twice: once in the introductory paragraph and once in "Demographics." I see no good reason for the redundance and have removed it in a few places where I've happened to be looking at the page myself. -- BRG

I am not sure if I agree. Maybe we could get some other thoughts on the issue from others? The idea is that the population obviously belongs in the demographics section, but possibly in the summary too. The same goes with the county seat. It should be put under one of the headings as well as in the introduction/summary. The reason for the introduction is to introduce it (obviously). Only important information belongs there. Population is something important, so it was duplicated. I wasn't the first person to put population in the introduction. I just stuck with that tradition and also put it in the demographics for people who want the additional detail. -- Ram-Man
I disagree. I would leave it out of the introductory part, since its population (which changes every census) is not nearly as fundamental as the fact that it is in a particular state, its county seat is whatever it is, andstuff like that. Also, if Wikipedia survives till 2010, someone will have to be careful to change it in both places! -- BRG
Let's say it survives, then it is marked with a date marker in both places. Not that it matters to our discussion per se. Anyway, what about cities? Maybe I can agree that for counties it wouldn't have been as important, but for cities that is very interesting to some people. When a city has a million people that is significant. When it has 26 people (like some I worked on in Alaska), that is also very interesting to note and may catch attention. Having it in the introduction still adds some important information that many people like. -- Ram-Man

DISCUSSION MOVED TO: Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Cities

- I do not understand why you did this. It seems like the raw data should be kept in compressed form, and then generated on demand. This will make it easier to update the pages when the generated data is obsolete. What are you going to do 10 years from now at the next census? - Actually, this highlights a feature missing in the software used to run the webpage. It should be smart enough to auto-generate pages from a database.

If wikipedia is thriving in 10 years, then I will be thrilled. I am sure that it should not be too hard at that point to update the data using some sort of program which intelligently looks at the data. But alas I am not a system admin or anything of wikipedia, only a contributor. Maybe the software needs such a feature and it will be added at a later point. -- Ram-Man

IF WP is thriving in 10 years.? ye of tiny faith. How bout WP practically dwarfs all other pedias in 2 years, authoritatively as well, and puts them out of business in 5. But yeah, It sort of seems like a sys-job, which of course needs to start with a voice chiming in (you). And census data is changing more often now, by law isnt it? 10 years is too long, even for the census beureau. -Sv

There is a difficulty with auto-generating web pages: They can't really be edited and changed to match whatever people want. It is quite restrictive and the wiki format is not intended to do that. Maybe I am way off base, but that's just how I see it. Oh, and I hope wikipedia takes over the encyclopedia world in 2 years too, but there are *many* more important issues than what to do with census data in however many years it will be. -- Ram-Man

I think there may be a problem with the text you autoloaded for Iowa towns, maybe others. I just looked at a couple towns, at the number of people, households, and families. For the ones I looked at people and households were the exact same number, and families was a greater number than the number of people and households! Methinks some variables got transposed. Hope it's fixable. Wesley 19:38 Oct 18, 2002 (UTC)

The problem is isolated to cities in Iowa. Thank goodness! -- Ram-Man

How many cities are we talking about here? If there are more than a hundred then manual deletion is not practical and that is the limit of my database rights. For anything more involved you should talk with one of the developers (user:Lee Daniel Crocker or user:Brion VIBBER). --mav

There also appears to a problem with some Alabama cities. --mav

Ram-Man, a number of county/city articles are listed as orphan pages, I think about a 100. Will these be linked from another page soon? Jeronimo

When I am done adding all the information, I will be automating the process to check each city name with its respective county and add them if missing. So yes, it will be taken care of in the future. No one needs to take care of them, but if they want they can (I'm not stopping anyone!). -- Ram-Man

Ram-Man, could you please take a look at Talk:Burbank, Los Angeles, California? I think the naming's a little odd on these. --Brion 00:46 Oct 21, 2002 (UTC)

Ditto. --mav

Ram-Man, what are you currently doing when you hit a town that already has an article? I assume you're not just overwriting.

Also, it may be difficult to update this info at the next census, because people will have modified the article in such a way that automatic replacements will prove damaging. Are you going to update things by hand? If you're going to do this, it would be much better to update the Wiki software. That way I could add a sentence like "In %US_CENSUS:CURRENT_YEAR, the population of Strafford, Vermont was US_CENSUS:STRAFFORD,VERMONT:POPULATION." (or something like that) and have Wiki dynamically enter the relevant info Dachshund

I am *not* touching the articles that already exist. Later I will either do it by hand or have some sort of intelligent modification, but never just overwriting. As for the the wiki software, this has been raised as a possibility, but I don't think anyone has mentioned this to one of the developers (of which I am not one!). So you need to talk to them about that aspect. If this feature is in fact implemented, it shouldn't be too hard to automatically update each page. -- Ram-Man

I'm pretty sure that by the year 2012 when we have the new census data, that bots will be smart enough to update our city and county entries without destroying much, if any, human modifications. --mav

Especially if we keep the old data around (which it will be since it is always accessible on the Census Bureau's website), it should be as simple as finding the old data in a certain context and replacing it with new. -- Ram-Man

Quick note: The townships I've seen today all seem to be orphans. Is your bot planning on adding these links to the appropriate county articles (under maybe a "township" heading)? --mav

Orphans and Disambiguation pages are all on my todo list (which consequently is on User:Ram-Man). But alas, one step at a time. First I'll be adding all the cities. That should take a while. Hopefully everyone can be patient! -- Ram-Man

Just being careful. You are nearly doubling the number of articles in our database so we all just want to make sure everthing is correct. I feel better now knowing that you are aware of the situation - you may need to explain this several times again (some people use the orphans list a lot and having so many township entries in that list will render it useless until the townships are adopted). --mav
I'll try to make this a priority. Adding so many entries is indeed difficult, and people have pointed out many issues and problems with the who process. I've been adapting it as I go along. But much of the work may need to come from people verifying the information in their own towns. But this should happen over time. BTW, while most of the data is correct, I am sure there will be errors, such as that which was found with the cities which are in multiple counties but were not accounted for. -- Ram-Man

Hey, just to alert you to a possible bug somewhere: Mt. Airy, Maryland exists and is an incorporated town but no article exists for it, though you seem to have finished with all Maryland towns (Mount Airy, Maryland also doesn't exist, though Mount Airy, Georgia does). I don't know if any other towns, in MD or elsewhere, are also missing but I thought you should know. (Not a criticism, just wanted to make sure you're aware of it) Tokerboy 18:14 Oct 21, 2002 (UTC)

There are many cities listed in a variety of counties in some states (Maryland being one of them) where no article exists. The cities being generated so far are those for which automation was made easy. Certain cities could not be generated on this round because of disambiguation problems and other problems which will be taken care of in the future. Other possibilities include a naming problem, the census bureau not using it as a census location (even though it may be incorporated), and so forth. Thanks for the info though, and if you notice anything else strange, please mention it!! -- Ram-Man
That must be it. Mt. Airy's in four counties. Tokerboy 18:59 Oct 21, 2002 (UTC)
I don't know where you got the idea that Mt. Airy's in 4 counties. It's only in two. Were you the one, Tokerboy, who added two counties to the two I'd listed when I put it into the Frederick County article? -- BRG 10/22


Evil question: Would it be possible/easy to include lat/long in the geography sections? The U.S. Gazetteer has this info (via http://dict.org). I've added this info to Marine on St. Croix, Minnesota and think it would be very useful. BTW, the population of that city is exactly the same as the info given in the 1990 U.S. Gazetteer 602. I think this is just a coincidence because a random sampling of other cities showed different results between your 2000 data and the Gazetteer 1990 data (mostly slight increases as would be expected). --mav

It should be noted that various organizations define the latitude and longitude at different points. That said, it shouldn't be hard to add this data in the future to existing articles. It all depends how easy it is automating the retrieval of the information from the U.S. Gazetteer. Thanks for doing the data checking on the cities too! -- Ram-Man
Could you slow down your 'bot a little? It's a good idea but it tends to hog the server when it downloads a bunch of pages in no time flat. And that means big pauses for us poor humans. It also fills up the recent changes too quickly. Last time someone used a bot, they had it adding one page a minute and that worked quite well. Any chance you could do this ? Cheers -- Derek Ross
I have been asked to do this before. I do have a half-second pause between each article, however, to date no administrator has asked me to do this. I have so far not increased the delay because I am not convinced that the bot is the cause of the slowness, believe it or not. I have been doing this for many days and even introduced many entries manually. During this time the slowness of the server does not seem to depend on the activity for the English Wikipedia. I have seen delays when there were *no* edits and equally I have been doing my own editing while the bot is running with *no* delays for quite some time. That is to say, I have seen no proof that the bot is slowing down the server. There was a discussion in the Village Pump about the foreign wiki's causing speed problems with the English one. I don't know anything about that, but to date I have not been shown conclusively that the bot is causing any slowdown. It might also be added that the bot does not download pages in no-time flat. It is not making parallel edits which means that it has to wait just like everyone else. It is for this reason I suspect that the bot is not causing a major slowdown and it is another problem that the bot is being blamed for. Feel free to prove otherwise though! -- Ram-Man
Nah, I think I'll give that a miss, too difficult. :-) The other possible cause of the slowdown might be the new spellcheck function. Whatever it is it's annoying. -- Derek Ross

Sorry about wiping the page. Computer problems at my end. -- Derek Ross

No problem, I figured that was the case! -- Ram-Man

the server can maybe cope with it, but it does make RC unusable by humans -- see ddiscussion on the village pump. Batches of 10 every 10 minutes might be better. -- Tarquin 21:34 Oct 21, 2002 (UTC)
Any chances of leaving it out of the Rc at all? TeunSpaans

No, your bot is not a major factor in server load. I can verify this by looking at the server logs directly. But the fact that it makes "Recent Changes" essentially useless while it's running is very annoying, and I would also appreciate it if you'd slow it down for that reason alone. We want to keep the whole Wikipedia user experience as consistent as we can. I am generally wary of any kind of automatic content creation, but I think these articles are a good thing overall since they're almanac-type information embedded in good human-edited prose, and since you're not overwriting existing human-edited articles.

Alternatively, if you can create the articles as a set of text files, I might be able to upload them to the server directly in such a way as to bypass the RC page. --LDC

What type of format would you like the files to be in? I can generate text files in the same way that I generate the articles for Wikipedia. As I asked in the village pump, would making all the changes "Minor" be a sufficient solution? -- Ram-Man

I like the idea of creating stub articles automatically. But I do think that cities and other places are sufficiently different from the character of encyclopedia entries as to deserve a wiki domain of their own, within wikipedia but grouped separately from it with respect to searching, recent change list, etc. David 22:06 Oct 21, 2002 (UTC)

Why? We have been acepting almanac-type information since the start of the project. An encyclopedia would not be complete at all without the top 10 to 20 percent of the world's most important cities in it and who cares if the others ride along? Hard drive space is cheap. --mav
I recall reading something in the Wikipedia information about what constitutes a full encyclopedia, and that on just any single topic you could probably write volumes about it. You could write a whole Wikipedia about cooking, plants, cities, or whatever. But of course we have to try to find balance. I'm just trying to do *my* part. That's all. -- Ram-Man

I agree with your points (except that hard drive space for articles on every city in the world might not actually be cheap--but I'm willing to concede the point). The reason it would be good to have separate domains for geography, famous people, years, etc., is to make it easier to search for a particular article within one of these conceptual domains. Also, having separate Recent Changes lists would help those who like to monitor activity. David 22:20 Oct 21, 2002 (UTC)

That would have been a useful suggestion back when the project started but it is a bit too late for that now. The best we could do now is add meta data to articles. There are already plans to add a language meta tag to articles so that all the different language wikis can be on the same wiki so I guess we could also add "subject area" or "type entity" tags too. Or JeLuF's idea below would work even better. --mav
There is some work ongoing to create supercalifragistical filters to automaticaly classify articles by looking at the links pointing to the article and the links the article has to other articles. These would "know" what a city article is. -- JeLuF

It has already been suggested that you should set your bot to submit one entry every minute. About how many places are left and how long might is actually take to complete at one article a minute? At that slow rate of submission I don't think it is practical to expect you to always be here here watching things. So maybe for each state you could first submit a couple dozen entries that are then checked for errors by several other Wikipedians. Then we can all be a bit more confident that your bot is doing things correctly while you are away from your computer. Another thing you could do is give your IP to the Admins so that if your bot is creating bad entries then an Admin can stop it from doing too much harm (you could then email the Admin who did the block to have the IP unblocked). --mav

In a best case scenario, the process would take 10 days to finish. However, it has taken about that amount of time so far without worrying about slowing myself down (more than .5 seconds/article). The reason being is that my wife uses my computer extensively, and it is subject to numerous reboots. It is also the case that wikipedia has problems and the bot is taken down for a period of time. I have done that numerous times. The reason for this is because I don't know what effect errors such as the "random page error" or the empty page error that hit today will cause on the bot. The bot does not handle such situations because it doesn't know about them beforehand. I monitor the bot while it is running to make sure there are no problems. This would of course be impossible in the other scenario and as you mentioned is ok. So with reboots and so forth, you can get some sort of idea how long it might take. No shorter than 10 days, likely much longer than that. Forget fixing orphans, adding boilerplates to talk pages (though I realize this is not necessary, I leave it as an example), or adding latitude and longitude, and adding disambiguation pages (which must wait until *all* the cities are done, since I have only been adding these in a limited fashion). All of these would take months to accomplish. Especially for orphans, a *lot* of needless work will probably be done by other Wikipedians. I also only have broadband until the end of the year. After that I'd be on a modem and you can forget me using the bot after that for massive edits. I can't tie up the phone line. So I have to do the majority of my bulk work before the new year. After that it will be back to writing small sets of articles every once in a while. -- Ram-Man

It should be noted that to date there are currently 600 errors and outstanding encyclopedia clashes between existing articles and generated articles. By the time all the cities are done, it will probably be twice that number. That is to say that I will have to do 1,200 articles by hand to import the data. Quite a bit of work, but doable. There is also up to 5,000 other cities and misc data that needs to be worked through. The data being added now is that which could easily be added in bulk. There are many special cases that need to be handled in a special way. Also it takes about 3 hours to generate all the articles for each city, so it is not a minor thing to make changes to the articles I am adding. -- Ram-Man

It's looking more and more like it would be a good idea to have the developers dump all the articles into the database at once. Simply doing the manual edits will take the better part of the rest of the year alone. --mav 00:07 Oct 22, 2002 (UTC)

I'm fast. The manual edits will take a month at most. ;-) But what about the other issues I mentioned aside from creating these initial entries? There still needs to be some way to modify all of them to add new data. -- Ram-Man

What happens for cities for which an article already exists? Are they over-written? Appended to? What if the information you append/overwrite is not as up-to-date or complete as already-written information? Or are you skipping cities for which articles exist? Thanks. Rlee0001 03:55 Oct 22, 2002 (UTC)

Currently the existing cities are skipped. I will manually add the new data at a later point. If I were to modify it automatically, I would not remove any existing data but basically append. I have not done so though and will probably not. Hope this helps! -- Ram-Man

Ram-Man, I notice that you created a WikiProject U.S. Cities a couple of weeks ago. Would you mind including a link to that project at the bottom of each bot-generated page? It was very helpful in writing the U.S. States articles; and this is a much more daunting task. New users may be intimidated by the apparent complexity of these articles and have no idea where to go next.

PS If a town is already in Wiki, how about posting your generated info to the Talk page, or a subpage like "/Stats", so it can be incorporated by hand. I'm sure you're probably already sick of this project, so feel free to disregard. Dachshund 05:14 Oct 22, 2002 (UTC)

We have already gone over this. See Wikipedia talk:WikiProject French departements to find out why this is a horrible idea. WikiProject tags are meta talk and should only be in talk pages. ---mav
I visited the page that Mav suggested and all I see is a long comment by him, with no further debate. Does that constitute a decision on the part of the Wiki community, or is there a debate that's actually gone on somewhere else? I'll take this up on the Pump. Without those WikiProject notes, the U.S. States articles wouldn't be in the shape that they are. Dachshund
See some more thoughts at User talk:Ram-Man/archive. I started thinking that same way until it was pointed out that the boilerplates do not fit with the purpose of Wikipedia. They violate the principles that wikipedia stands for and as such, they were all removed to the talk page where they happily reside. They look out of place in an encyclopedia otherwise. -- Ram-Man
I checked out your talk archive, but again all I saw was a small comment from mav. I brought it up in the Pump because I thought maybe the rest of the community would pay more attention there.
In any case, what are the particular Wiki principles that rule this out? There are any number of situations in which we insert meta-commentary into an article. This seems like a great one. I should also point out that Talk pages have had a tendency to bite the dust during major server upgrades, or at least they have in the past. Dachshund
All my responses will be at the Village Pump -- Ram-Man

Ram-Man, From the above, I understand that you used the dutch towns as a trial project. Would you be willing to run them (with Dutch textxt) against the dutch (nl:) wikipedia? I would be more than willing to translate your texts into Dutch. TeunSpaans

I'm not sure where the idea came from about Dutch towns. I have never touched them. On the otherhand, this bot could be run on any language wiki just with appropriate human edited text. -- Ram-Man

Please slow the bot down: it's hitting performance for other people. How about a 60 second interval between updates? The Anome

Its probably not the interval but maybe the amount updating per update? Lir 17:15 Oct 24, 2002 (UTC)

The speed of the bot is not affecting performance. See the comment above by LDC when the bot was running about 10x the speed it is now. Wikipedia has a lot of problem with lags. This has been happening for weeks. It is not caused by the bot, even though people like to blame it on that. ;-) There is currently a 5 minute interval between batches of entries (to keep the Recent Changes page from getting too cluttered) -- Ram-Man

Can we run an experiment to find out if it's the bot, please? Would you turn it off for, say, 5 minutes, then on for the same period, then off, then on, etc. for long enough for us to see if it makes any difference? I just had the devil's own time blocking a vandal, partly because of the lag and partly because your entries are driving the other entries off the 'recent changes' list too fast. Even if the bot is not causing the lag, it's definitely causing the list problem, because by the time the lag lets me get to the list, the bot has dumped another cycle of entries, so please, please, please, do slow it down. -- isis 17:30 Oct 24, 2002 (UTC)
It isn't the bot, but I turned off the bot.. that is it will only spit out 1 article every 5 minutes, so it is effectively off (1 article is negligible). I'll turn it on whenever someone so desires. However the system logs do show that the bot is not causing the delay. -- Ram-Man
What I want to know is how the bot works when nothing else does! It may have something to do with using the /w/wiki.phtml format (i've heard rumors that it works better) but overall I have no clue. -- Ram-Man

Well, it may be mere coincidence, but as soon as you turned the bot off, my lag dropped from 3 to 4 minutes to get to another page to real time. Thank you. -- isis 17:54 Oct 24, 2002 (UTC)

Me too. Maybe it's a bandwidth issue rather than a server issue or maybe it doesn't slow down the web server but it backs up the MySQL server somehow. -- Derek Ross 17:59 Oct 24, 2002 (UTC)
After turning the bot back on to its old speed it did not appear to change the lag time. I did notice however that lags went up (for me) to about 5 or 10 seconds shortly before the bot woke up from a 5 minute nap. But during the addition of the articles, the lags did not get any worse. I think the other case *was* coincidence. -- Ram-Man

Hey its possible, but then again I wouldn't know: I'm not a system admin! All I know is that i've seen pages lag no matter what I did in the past (since this has been happening for a long time). In fact when I ran the thing with no delay there were times with no lag. Can I explain it? Nah! But lets say that our test proved it, then doing things in large blocks is a bad idea. Better to do small chunks with less delay vs. large chunks with large delay. -- Ram-Man

Out of blatent curiosity, i'm going to turn on the bot at the old speed for one round and see if the lag comes back. Just for one round of entries. Then back to a slower speed. -- Ram-Man

I am curoius i how you made the bot? - fonzy

I'd prefer not to say. And that's not because i'm a prick. Most people around here hate bots and I have no intention of releasing my methods in the event that someone decides to wreak havoc on us by writing a script or something. If someone else can write one independently, great! I'm not the first to write a bot, but definitely the first to write one that generates articles in such volume! -- Ram-Man

Could you possibly e-mail it to me? I'm more intrested in the programming sence than creating one myself. - fonzy

It's bad code. You don't want it! BTW, the bot does not actually generate articles. I use MySQL for handling the data and generating articles from it. The bot merely plays with the web site. -- Ram-Man

o, ok. - fonzy

This raises a really good point. Any decent programmer can write a bot. Somebody should really write some kind of bot detection and permissions code before we have a problem.

actually, what might be more interesting is connecting the wiki to a chat bot that could 'talk' about the content of the site...Alicebot.org has a php based bot (that's what wikipedia is built on right? php?) whaddayouthink? dgd
Very interesting thoughts! But I don't see the need for either at this point. Maybe someday we'll have all those nifty features. I suppose we should *write articles* now.  :) -- Ram-Man
I'm glad you think it's interesting! I mention it because technically the conversations that people have with the chatbot can form the basis of the articles...the bot asks people what they know and the data gets 'piped in' to a kind of 'waiting area' for review. I'm imagining a kind of Socratic relation to the data and to the people using the 'pedia. Well, just a thought anyway. Back to writing and editing :)--dgd

Could you send me the statistics about Charlotte, North Carolina? I wrote as one who lives here, but someone might want to know how many Russians (and Poles and Bosnians) here are, or what percentage of the population is Jewish. -phma

I'll be merging in the data in the near future. I'm a little swamped but I'll try my best. -- Ram-Man


Hi, Ram-Man. No, no bot for Oxford and Cambridge colleges. Just, I believe it's important to make a distinction between oxford, cambridge and elsewhere. There are several colleges in oxford and cambridge with the same name, already people are confusing the two on Wikipedia. Cambridge was already fairly organised (X College, Cambridge), Oxford was not. Also, there are probably lots of other colleges in the world called 'Jesus College' etc - not fair for Oxford or Cambridge to get the monopoly. I added all the pages by hand (bit of cut and paste though). I agree, they are stubs, but it's so when somebody does add info, it's in the right heading. I also went through and edited about 50 to 100 articles to point to the 'correct' college. WillSmith (Malaysia) 16:02 Oct 26, 2002 (UTC)

I wish you had said something before you set up the tartans project template, because we need for you to undo it. As you can see from the talk page, it's now a project on clans, and the tartans are going to be images on the individual clan pages. There's going to be one page discussing clans and with the individual 100+ of them listed on it, and one page on tartan (which is already an open link on Kilt). We're at the point of I'm going to make a prototype page and User:Derek_Ross is going to make sure we've got everything right (because he's in a clan), and User:fonzy is going to help, so we're way past what was on the page you put in the template. So could you please delete it and put in one for the project titled "Clans of Scotland" reflecting where we are now? -- isis 21:39 Oct 27, 2002 (UTC)

How about disambiguating "High Point" while you're at it? There's one in North Carolina that doesn't have an article yet, but the two in Florida and the one in North Carolina are enough to at least start a page, I think. -- isis 16:32 Oct 28, 2002 (UTC)

I am currently disambiguating the ones in just one state. The ones in different states I plan to do in the future. The reason I have not done that is because there is still a fair bit of work to do on cities (about 2,500 special cases need to be done manually or modified specially to be used by the bot). As such, I am not ready to start disambiguating the other entries. If I do, I have to manually add the ones we missed later, and I'd like to avoid that! -- Ram-Man

I have a general problem with phrasing: all those city/town entries you're dropping in say "xx.yy% have a woman whose husband does not live with her". That's not normal or clear English. "A woman whose husband does not live with her", to most people, is someone separated but not divorced. I think that this means something like "have a female head-of-household" and covers female couples, widowed/divorced/single mothers, and possibly roommate situations. But that demographic category probably does not include (for example) my friend who is currently separated but not yet divorced from her husband, and living with a new lover, though she is in fact a woman whose husband does not live with her. Vicki Rosenzweig

I took (roughly) the wording used by the Census Bureau. You could look closely at their statistics to see what that number more accurately means if you'd like. I could also add it to the list of things to do. The values could be automatically updated to reflect a new wording if a better one is decided on. -- Ram-Man

Is Little Britian Township spelled right? It keeps showing up on the mispeeling list, and the title does not match the first line. -phma

Britain is the correct spelling. I fixed it. -- RM

Bonjour Ram-Man, I'm Aoineko from the french Wikipedia. We are interest in create french town articles with automatic process. I have already many idear to how to do that, but it may be great if you are agree to share your experience. If you are, please contact me : aoineko(a)noos.fr . Aoineko

Hey, the Goshen, Indiana article had a typo. It said

Goshen, Indiana is a town of 29,383 people (As of the 2000 census]])

I deleted the extra brackets around census, and it doesn't look like your bot is doing it to all the articles, so maybe it was just the one. I don't think a search for "census]]" goes quite right, so I'm not sure if it's even possible to look for others. Tokerboy 02:56 Nov 1, 2002 (UTC)

I'll just monitor playing Chess with Lir at the talk page.

Im pretty sure you should have been able to win that game. Lir 01:30 Nov 19, 2002 (UTC)

MarderIII: b4 d5 d4 Bf5 e3 e6 a3 Nf6 c4 Nbd7 c5 a5 b5 Qe7 Nc3 e5 c6 bxc6 bxc6 Nb6 

 dxe Qxe5 Nb5 O-O-O Bd2 d4 Nf3 Qc5 Nfxd4 Ne4

zeblk: you're lost MarderIII: i am? zeblk: i put it in crafty MarderIII: who am I/ MarderIII: ? zeblk: i don't remember MarderIII: im white MarderIII: i should have lost zeblk: the score was like -2.04 MarderIII: black is winning? zeblk: yeah

since then he has been idle-i donnoLir 02:13 Nov 19, 2002 (UTC)

Probably missing something.... i guess I'm just in a bad mood...

Ram-Man, Cedar Grove, New Jersey and Cedar Grove Township, New Jersey are identical articles referring to the same entity. Any preference as to which should be kept and which should be a redirect? I THINK there is an additional locality called Cedar Grove in southern NJ but I can't seem to find evidence of this on the internet, it may perhaps be smaller than a township. -- Someone else 03:06 Nov 19, 2002 (UTC)

I have no preference. I am not a local, so I don't know what it normally goes by. The "Township" name may be the official legal term, so maybe that would be the best choice. -- RM
Sounds good, if someone finds another Cedar Grove in NJ then Cedar Grove, New Jersey can become a disambiguation page. -- Someone else

If your opponent is too cranky to hide hide chess moves, there's no reason why you shouldn't. I'll defend the rambot forever, but this is just bad manners. (And why play chess here anyway?)Ortolan88

I should have signed it. That was *me* who was cranky. Busy day at work ;-) Thanks for the support, but nothing is amiss here. Why play chess here? Because we can. It gives little breaks between the actual work and it doesn't hurt anyone. -- RM

If you or your opponent don't mark the chess moves as Minor Edits, then they go in the Recent Changes page of all of us who ask that Minor Edits not be displayed. So, it hurts me, because I only look at the last 200 changes and for every one that is a chess move I have missed a possibly interesting or significant edit. For example, since I am marking this change as minor, most people don't even know I am talking to you. I asked her to stop it and she just went right ahead cluttering up the Recent Changes page. Ortolan88

"Doesn't hurt anyone" is relative to what others think, no? I personally don't really care that you are playing chess on Wikipedia but several others do and have asked you to either stop or at least mark your edits as minor. There is no reason why you should expect to use Wikipedia for any and all personal uses. Also, recent changes pollution is a big deal for people. Believe it or not but back in July I actually revieved each day's Recent Changes. Of course back then there were less than a 1000 edits a day. Now there are well over 4,000 edits a day and this type of review is impossible, so I don't try. Others are trying to keep Recent Changes useful for hourly checks and it is here that Recent Changes pollution comes into play. --mav

Minor changes are easy. I can do that. Don't know why I didn't already! -- RM

http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Lir/Chess

RM - This belongs on the Jesus Christ talk page, but the talk page there is so long my browser will lose half of it if I try to edit it (sorry). But no, "Jacob son of Joseph" is not an error...The original reads "Yaaqov bar Yosef" which is "Jacob son of Joseph". The initial reports "helpfully" translated "Jacob" to "James", probably because that's how the brother of Jesus is best known in English, and the translator wanted to enhance that association. -- Someone else 04:15 Nov 23, 2002 (UTC)

RM, is it OK for me to use your real name on the Wikipedia page? It looks odd to only have a user nick in the history section of an encyclopedia article. If this is OK, would you prefer your name linked like this Derek Ramsey or something like this Derek Ramsey (user:Ram-Man)? --mav

You can use my name like you did above. I don't usually go by my real name (in fact I think I only used it one other place in Wikipedia). So I try to keep that to a minimum, but using it now would be fine. -- RM

There seems to be a problem with some of the Minnesota pages: the entry for St._Louis_County,_Minnesota starts off with "Scott County is a county located in the U.S. State of Minnesota", Scott_County,_Minnesota starts off naming Sherburne County, Sherburne_County,_Minnesota names itself as a description of Sibley County....

There are probably more. This looks like some kind of off-by-one error by the rambot, but I'm not touching these because I don't know whether the page for say, Sherburne County actually does have the data for Sibley or Sherburne (links on the page suggest its Sherburne, but the naming confusion deters me from changing it) 

Malcolm Farmer 11:30 Nov 25, 2002 (UTC)
These are just a stupid one off error of sorts when I did this a long time ago manually. No bot involved, just human error. I'll fix it. -- RM

Howdy Ram-Man. Since you seem to have an interest in the mathematics articles, I wanted to call to your attention the WikiProject we're developing at Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics, which attempts to provide some standards and goals for math articles. Contributions requested and welcomed! Chas zzz brown 21:58 Dec 1, 2002 (UTC)

Nice work with adding the geo coordinates. However it is probably overkill to have anything more precise than minutes; let alone seconds to the thousandths decimal place. I'm pretty sure that is a point less than the width of a metre. Also, what geographic Datum are you using? NAD 27 or NAD 83? This is important information due to the precision being inputted in the articles (NAD 27 and NAD 83 are offset from each other by about 80 metres in the east-west direction and about 20 metres in the north-south direction -- at least in my part of the country). The seconds can stay if you think they are important but the decimals after the seconds only tend to distract and not inform. The data in parenthesis expressed in decimal degrees can stay as is so long as we know what Datum the data are in and the source of the actual data. --mav

Well the bot will be done by morning so I guess my only choice now is to block the bot. Please understand. Just visit my user page and use the email this user option. --mav

Hey Ram Man! Just watching you update some geographic data - so fast you are! I figure you are really a computer program, doing some neat update on the text. I don't know enough about Wikipedia - are there hooks to make this easier, or do you have to work with the vanilla interface? It could be done with that, but would be easier if there are hooks. Example (using vanilla version): 

                 Fetch page from WP
                 Select the edit page button and fetch again
                 Extract the text to edit
                 Do systematic edit or formatting
                 Send edited page back to WP.

                 Repeat this for each wanted page - using a list of pages

This uses at least one extra fetch operation, compared with using an API which allows downloading of text ready for editing.

Where can we get details of Wikipedia API, and do you have details of your progam (is this the one called rambot?)? David Martland 07:33 Dec 8, 2002 (UTC)

No API yet, but there should be one. (Discussion should go to m:Wikipedia client.) Note that when piggy-backing on the web interface, you can skip the first load by going directly to the action=edit URL. --Brion 20:34 Dec 8, 2002 (UTC)

Can you check this problem from Wikipedia:Duplicate_articles some time?

Could you also check out Oxford, Connecticut? Its population density is an astounding 45,019.5/km² which is rather odd considering the town covers 8,857.8 km² and has a population of 58,300. There are also 1,948,969 families cramed into 58,300 households which is an average of 33 families for every household. According to the demographics, 70% of the population doesn't fall into any racial category - even other. Damn I would hate to live there. ;-) --mav

They seem a bit out even in other cases, although less extreme. E.g., Lakewood, California: 79,345 people, 24.4 km² of it is land, so why is the density 3,248.7/km² and not 3,251.8? Also, why is density of housing units expressed in persons/km²?
I suspect the reason for the density being off by that amount is just a roundoff error. Assuming the people are correct and the population density is correct, the amount of land is only estimated which accounts for the difference. The only solution here is to increase the precision, which I think many people would not like. In the event that this is not roundoff error, I will check this in a later automated scan of the data (to verify it) -- RM
I think the number of digits of the densities is excessive. Also it is strange that it is more than for the area. I would say that 3 digits is more than enough: 3,250/km². Also: 79,300 people. Patrick 13:21 Dec 9, 2002 (UTC)
Looks like I have a lot of problems. I'll be quite busy in the days and weeks to come ;-) I just checked my data sources and I think some of that was because of a previous data error. I thought I fixed it all. I'll have to scan and compare with the current stuff. Just be patient! -- RM


Just for everyone's reference, I can set the bot to recheck each article for correct data. I'll do that after the current bot run. Unfortunately, I never caught the housing units being expressed in the wrong terms. Unfortunately this is going to require parsing every single article, but it is not a hard fix. -- RM

Trying again: the whole "have a woman who does not live with her husband" phrasing on all those town and county pages bothers me--not just because it implies that a married couple is *the* basic household (that assumption may be in the figures you're bothering) but because what it actually says is that n.nn% of households include a married woman whose husband is elsewhere. A household of, say, a widow and her three unmarried children, or a brother and sister, or three single friends sharing expenses, has no husband to live with or not live with. How about "have a female head of household"? I've known households which have "a female who does not live with her husband"--women whose husbands are on overseas duty in the military, people who are separated but not divorced, and such--but doubt they're the large percentage being discussed here, especially since there's no mention of men who do not live with their wives, who logically exist in equal numbers. Vicki Rosenzweig

Yes. I like this wording much better. --mav
The wording I changed it to is basically the wording the census bureau uses. It is a married female "householder" (same as "head of household"). As far as I know, this includes those who have husbands serving overseas and all the other things you mentioned. Nevertheless, the census bureau specifically mentions that it is a female head of the household with no husband present. It would be factually inaccurate to put anything else. Disagree? -- RM

I think what I will end up doing in the future is adding some definitions to these terms in the Geographic references page when I finish citing the sources. -- RM


Yes, I disagree. "No husband present", the wording at www.census.gov, is not the same as "whose husband does not live with her". "No husband present" does not assert that the woman has a husband; "whose husband does not live with her" does assert this. Many if not most of the households in those numbers are headed by unmarried (single, divorced, or widowed) women, not by women whose husbands are living elsewhere. Why not use the original wording? Vicki Rosenzweig
I think we are having a misunderstanding... check the bot's articles, they are changing the old wording to "have a female householder with no husband present", which is basically what you are asking for I think. -- RM
66.73.252.142 is currently on a vandelism spree - is it possible to stop them from editing? Karl

Mark their name under Vandalism in Progress or notify an administrator. -- RM

ALERT! Ram Bot's Minor Edits are increasing the article counter each time they do a minor edit thsi explains why the artcile counter has gone up by 4000! in 5 days. it went up bu 15 just now and there were no new articles.

I have just checked it is RAM BOTS minor edits the mment it starts up again the article counter increases.

-FONZY

ps i dont think its other peoples minor eidts i just think its RAMBOTS.

The article counter is entirely inaccurate anyway -- the count system is wrong, the update system is wrong, and errors have been accumulating for months. Don't stress over it. --Brion 11:44 Dec 9, 2002 (UTC)
I wonder why these minor edits would cause the counter to go up. Must be a bug in the counter. That's too bad, because I always liked having the counter, as inaccurate as it is, it was at least *something* to look at and it motivates you to do more. -- Ram-Man

Why not simply provide good links to this data instead of copying it to wikipedia? is your botting signigantly collating data from various sources of the US census or is it really just copying.

This has been discussed before in various other locations, but let me explain some more. The information to date has come mostly from a single source. I took some raw data and calculated some values based on it, and created articles based on the original data and the calculations on that data. For instance, the "% water" category was a calculated field. Now at the moment I am adding the geographic coordinates which do come from a different source. I also have plans to add even more information (See Geographic references). So these are just articles that form a basis for more complete articles. The intention here is only to add information in a certain area. What is mainly needed is for other people to add information about their hometowns. In this way it will not merely be data copied from a single source. Hope this explains it! -- RM

Is there any way in which the automated changes can be filtered out of the Recent Changes page? At present this seems to be the only activity - it is overwhelming! 195.137.39.195 08:38 Dec 14, 2002 (UTC)

They can be filtered out by not showing minor changes, of course this filters out ALL minor changes aswell as RamBot changes. Also I'm not sure if you can do this without registering. If you register it is an option in Special:Preferences. Mintguy 08:42 Dec 14, 2002 (UTC)

Maybe there is some way in which the Recent Changes page could have some more general form of filter, not just for Ram Man or Ram Bot? Would that help? David Martland 08:40 Dec 14, 2002 (UTC)

I've already suggested the creation of a new type of user account that would just be used for bots. To have such an account the bot owner would have to prove that their bot was harmless (as Ram-Man has) and promise that the account would only be used by the bot. Then all edits made by the bot under that account would be marked with a "B" in Recent Changes and would be not be displayed by default. As it is, the 'hide minor edits' feature is useless for anybody worried about vandalism since non-logged-in users can (for some reason that totally escapes me) mark edits as minor. At the very least I wish the developers would disable the minor edit box for non-logged-in users. --mav
I hate the problem as much as the next person. Nevertheless, we have to live with what we've got until the developers make the change. -- RM

It was a great idea to set-up a separate user account for the bot. Now it is easy to tell you two apart. ;-) It is unfortunate, however, that this wasn't done to begin with since the bot's previous edits are mixed-in with yours and it is therefore impossible to have accurate statistics of your edits vs the bot's edits. Oh well, no biggie. --mav

Well it would be in the many many thousands anyway. Also, the active wikipedians page has only been updated twice since I joined Wikipedia, so it doesn't appear to matter too much. And besides, I think I deserve the credit for that ;-) -- RM
Of course you deserve credit silly. :-) But it still would be nice if human edits and bot edits could be distinguised. Even though the result is often the same, the process, time and effort per edit is very different. --mav
Is anyone ever going to update the Wikipedia:Most active Wikipedians page? I found that page to be quite informative when it was up to date. I actually would love to know how much work the bot has done, but alas it is too late now. I had no idea I was going to get this involved in this project when I started. I just got sucked in. -- RM
I guess I should have warned you about getting sucked in. I agree that the most active list needs to be updated (alas, you will most definitely have at least 30,000 more edits than me but at least people will stop saying that I have no life outside of Wikipedia due to the large gap between me and the next most active user ;). --mav

I think I've found the problem with the number of articles counter; until the counter update code gets rewritten, be sure you're sending the field 'wpCountable=1' with the form submit; otherwise it thinks you've changed the page from one that is not countable to one that is, and increments the article count. Uggh... I'll reset the counter manually once the update code's fixed. --Brion 04:52 Dec 10, 2002 (UTC)

Okay, you shouldn't have to change anything in the bot -- I've removed the need for the wpCountable field; it checks the actual text instead, which is more reliable. (Also, the count now goes down if a countable page is deleted -- a longstanding cause of smaller drift.) The count's been recalculated, and should track correctly from here out. --Brion 05:56 Dec 10, 2002 (UTC)
I think that this bug may have earlier caused the counter to include a few hundred redirect pages that it shouldn't have. Maybe not, but I am glad it is fixed now. -- RM

Ram-Man -- I hate to tell you this, but the 'bot's throwing up garbage. Some of the so-called towns aren't towns. They may be recognized suburbs, and the census bureau may be dividing areas by them, but just from looking at places I've lived, I can tell that they aren't real. For example, Toro Canyon, in Santa Barbara county, is a long canyon filled with prvate roads, just of the intersection of Foothill and Mission Canyon. The people who live there will tell locals they live in Toro Canyon for the cachet of living in a private neighborhood, but if you asked them, or addressed mail to them, it would be to Santa Barbara, CA. Isla Vista may now be recognized as its own place (but I doubt it), but I think it's still technically administratively part of unincorporated SB County and has a Goleta zip.

In Georgia, Decatur is a city. Druid Hills, North Druid Hills, and North Decature are not -- they are neighborhoods, some of which actually encompass parts of both Atlanta and Decatur. Could you please check into it? THanks! JHK

Obviously, the bot is only going on the info available -- and from what you're saying, that info (the census info) is inaccurate and perhaps misleading. This will require a manual fix, but that's not really a problem since these articles are intended to be raw data-type articles anyway. It's gonna be a lot of work, but it always was going to be a big job. -- Sam

These issues are well known. A friend of mine lives in the town of Neffsville, Pennsylvania, which is a part of Lancaster Township, Pennsylvania. The locals, including my friend, refer to the place as "Neffsville" even though it has a Lancaster, Pennsylvania address. One important thing to note is that the Postal Service uses its own way of naming that is totally separate from what anyone else uses. The Postal service has been known to give addresses for one county when the actual location is legally (or not) in another county (which can cause headaches for auto insurance premiums). The fact is that *somebody* calls these by this name, otherwise they wouldn't be there. The benefit is that each little village/suburb/neighborhood that is recognized (at least by the census bureau) has its own little article with information about it. That way people who live in these no name places can actually find or add information on these places. The other issue is that inevitably people from places like Neffsville are going to want articles and they are going to make them, even if they are not postal names or even legal names (they may be one of them, both, or none). I see great benefit in starting the articles with unique data so that there is consistency. I am sure some people will disagree with me, but I think even the small areas are useful to know about (for some people). -- RM

Sorry -- I don't think you got my point -- I have nothing against small places -- but some are just local neighborhood names -- It doesn't make a lot of sense to have separate articles for lots of these, and not because of the size, but because someone travelling to those places would never find them from the description in the article. For example, I someone told me about Belltown, Washington, I would look for driving directions to Belltown and never get there -- because it's about 6 square blocks of downtown Seattle! The way the bot is working, we could ostensibly have several Chinatown, Californias -- because several cities have districts called Chinatown -- some perhaps mentioned in the census, some not. --JHK
I don't know why the census bureau chooses what it does. But I assume there is something about those neighborhoods that administratively makes it worthy of its own individual status. Let's take what you think is the worst case scenario: 100 articles on every Chinatown in the United States (There might well be many more than that). I personally don't see a problem with even that. Someone wanting information on "Chinatown" can see that there is one in San Francisco, Chicago, Philadelphia, etc. an find information on exactly the one they want. These do not and should not be labelled as "towns" because that is deceptive, but I don't see why we can't have an article on these neighborhoods. Chinatown's are a very important part of American society and they deserve to be a part of Wikipedia. I guess if they are labeled now as a "town", this of course would be better of being changed. Alas I am relying on people who know about these places to improve the raw articles since I can't possibly begin to know every place in the U.S., let alone the world. -- RM

While at first I was annoyed at the Ram-bot, I've grown to love it. My question is, where's Needham, Massachusetts? How come some towns seem randomly to have been left out? There are some others, too. DanKeshet 16:39 Dec 13, 2002 (UTC)

There are two possibilities. The first is that the census bureau does not consider it a city. If that is unlikely the second option is that in the data I have it is listed twice. What that means is the same name has two different sets of data associated with it. One may be labeled as a "town" and the other as a "city". I have not had the time to figure out how to get around this problem. Until that point somewhere between 1,000 and 2,000 cities will remain unfinished. Hope this answers your question! -- RM

If we're interested in adding further information about a city or town to its article, will the updates by the bot delete what we've added? --asilvahalo

Yes you can make changes don't worry. It would be a very bad thing if the bot deleted what anyone added. If that did happen, I should be notified about it immediately so I can correct it. But so far there hasn't been any known problems. Keep writing! -- Ram-Man


The current bot run is, according to the rambot page, supposed to be adding coordinates. Yet this doesn't seem to be the case: [1] Just a heads-up. --mav

I went to bed before finishing my updates, so it was slightly out of sync. Thanks for the info though. All the other things it was doing. -- Ram-Man

Ram-Man:

Howdy! I'm new to Wikipedia. I started to enter the county seats of some counties in Kansas, and "mav" told me your bot was going to do that someday. When I asked him for further details, he directed me to you. What I was adding was a sentence to the county page like this example from the Pottawatomie County, Kansas page:

The county seat is at Westmoreland.

I was also planning to go to the county seats' pages and add something like

Westmoreland is the county seat of Pottawatomie County.

Were you planning to have your bot do both/either/neither? Obviously the bot can do it faster/better than I, and will do the whole US, not just Kansas. For now, I've suspended my efforts and will work on other articles about this part of the world.

I would appreciate your insight/comments. THANKS! Zeaner 14:53 Dec 18, 2002 (UTC)

Thanks for your concern. My source of information for county seats is at http://www.campbellslist.com/county_seats/select_county_seat.html. It will be a bit of time until I have it ready and I start adding it to the articles. It is perfectly fine for you to add the county seat info if you like. I don't know when I will get around to doing it (Lots of things to do), and I will just ignore any articles that already contain the words "county seat". It really is up to you, though the work would probably be duplicated. Hope this gives you an idea of what to do. -- RM
Got it. Thanks! Zeaner 23:53 Dec 18, 2002 (UTC)

Question re Washington Court House, Fayette County, Ohio - Where is it? Did the U.S. Census database shorten it to just Washington? Or has the town shortened its name since the 1960s? Or are there two "Washington" towns in the same county? I think they're one and the same place (even their official website seems schizophrenic). Would it mess up the Ram-Bot to move the article to Washington Court House? Thanks! -- Marj 23:14 Dec 27, 2002 (UTC)

Later... I moved the Washington, Ohio contents to Washington Court House, Ohio -- that is the name of the town, however strange. Also linked Fayette County, Ohio to the correct name of the town., Just FYI in case you come back anytime soon. Will you be back? -- Marj 05:00 Jan 11, 2003 (UTC)
Who knows. I need some inspiration. That and I got really busy during the holidays and just never got back around. I just check back occasionally. -- RM

I am going to create an article for the missing Augusta, Georgia, if I add such an article will rambot be able to later add the data for that city automatically (without deleting the content already there? will the fact that the article already exists prevent rambot from adding the content? should I wait to add content until after rambot creates the article?

I hope you add this city soon, as it is the largest of the missing cities and the only city with a population of over 100,000 which is missing.

Go for it. The bot works around existing articles. I flag them accordingly and do some manually, but that is perfectly fine. It is better for the article to start since it could be many months until I put up the article. -- Ram-Man

I've been looking at the town/city entries for Oregon, & I noticed a problem. (Let's use the list of towns in Washington County, Oregon as an example.) Many of these "towns" are NOT incorporated municipalities, & as far I know (I'm drawing on just over 45 years of living here in Oregon to say this), you have included a few entries that AREN'T even unincorporated communities.

I first noticed the problem with Garden Home-Whitford, Oregon: one can talk about the unincorporated community of Garden Home, which is just inside of the Washington county border but feels like another part of Portland, Oregon, & one can talk about the unincorporated community of Whitford, which (IIRC) is just north of the Washington Square Mall. But none of the locals talks (or thinks) of them together as a single unit. This must be an artifact of how the US Census groups residences in this part of Washington County when they crunch the numbers & produce a demographic abstract.

I see signs of this artifact in the subject West Haven-Sylvan, Oregon. At least Cedar Hills, Oregon, Oak Hills, Oregon, & Rockcreek, Oregon, while little more than 1960s-vintage developments with perhaps a home-owners association (which is charged with the task of making sure lawns are mowed & modifications to houses appear to be complete to passers-by), could each be called an "unincorporated community". A number of the other unincorporated communities do have some trace of history to make an article worthwhile.

And I suspect this problem exists in other articles your bot createCaenom the Census materials.

I guess my question is what should I do when I encounter these issues where a beaucratic decision in distant Washington, DC on how to handle the data has created something that doesn't quite exist in real life. Some of the entries can be massaged into reflecting the true situation on the ground; some, I feel, cannot. And I'd like to get this problem resolved & Wikipedia's reputation for accuracy helped before I introduce a problem all of its own -- Wanker's Corners, Oregon. (It's a real unincorporated place, to the SW of Lake Oswego, Oregon & north of I-405. But before I link to it, something of its history must needs be written to prove to the incredulous that it does exist.) -- llywrch

There are many census areas that may not be easily classified as "towns". Some may just be neighborhoods of larger cities. There are a variety of solutions to these "fake town" problems:
1) Reword it so it says the correct term instead of town. (This was applicable in the case of U.S. Air Force Bases, which are not towns).
2) Make a note in the beginning of the article that "While not a real town, the census bureau considers this a unique place" (this could fit into #1 in some cases as a "Census Designated Place")
3) If the "town" is really a group of towns, such as [[Place A-Place B, Washington]], turn it into a disambiguation page that links to the real towns.
4) Maybe the article can be redirected to a better article if it is merely a subunit of another.
5) ...
The point here is to try and make the data more accurate than was capable with an automation process. There are many solutions, and deleting the articles may be a solution, but if that were to happen, the bot might inadvertantly recreate the article. Better is a redirect if possible. -- RM

Well, what is the proper term for these units? Census tracts? The reason I ask is that in some cases (let's take Cedar Hills, Oregon, where I spent most of my childhhod), what the US Census thinks is the boundaries of the community versuses what I would think they are may be very different -- & both vary from a NPOV possible deciding crieria (in this case, the Cedar Hills Home Association, of which my father was president for a year).

These questions are up to you to research and decide, as they must be taken on a case per case basis. Every article that ram-bot creates can be justified in one way or another. Many towns are historical anachronisms, having long been annexed swallowed up, made in to a neighborhood/suburb or a big city. And it is perfectly alright to say so in the article. - 209.112.170.183

As we start to include unincorporated communities (many of which need to be included for various good reasons), questions like this will keep popping up. I don't expect you (or anyone) to immediately have the answer, but if someone follows me with the same questions, at least she/he will know this is a problem that requires some thought.

(I would have read & responded sooner, but working on the all of the Counties in Oregon tired me out, & I turned my attention to other things. I guess I'm not addicted to Wikipedia, I just spend a lot of time here.) -- llywrch 23:26 Mar 2, 2003 (UTC)

You missed the party! We were Slashdotted on Jan 22 after we reached our 100,000th article. I hear you had something to do with the fact that we hit 100,000 so early. ;-) --mav

Actually most of the reason I was gone was because I was reading the Lord of the Rings Trilogy. To me, that is more addictive than even Wikipedia, if you can imagine that. Plus, the break did me well. Everyone seemed to slow down over Christmas, and I just went away and well.. Hopefully I can do a few things now again :) I did notice the slashdot article and the 100,000 article and it made me happy. But If I was around, I would have made sure I was made that 100,000 article, just to say I did it. ;-) -- RM

re: St. Albans, Maine and Saint Albans, Maine - the former was created by the bot, and moved to the spelled out name by a wikipedian. However, when you did your "misc updates", the bot replaced the redirect with the text, creating a duplicate article. This has probably happened lots... :-(

Greetings, O Ram-Man. If you are in the mood to solve geographic anomalies, check out Southampton, New York - three places with the same name and but one bit of data) - (and solve the mystery of why Stamford, Connecticut didn't show up on the census's radar!) -- Someone else 01:18 23 May 2003 (UTC)

If a city is missing, try adding it to the list on User:Rambot and then I will have a permanent listing of the city to take a look at in my own time. Thanks for the heads up! -- RM

Cool<G>! -- Someone else 01:29 23 May 2003 (UTC)

While I suppose it's ridiculously unlikely, you're not the Ram-Man who plays Unreal Tournament 2003, perchance? Evercat 01:32 23 May 2003 (UTC)

Nope that would be too weird. So alas, it is someone else. But you should tell that person that they stole my name ;-) -- RM

Welcome back! Your edits were missed (damn, I just passed up the Rambot on the most active Wikipedians page:). Nothing much has happened at all with bots and geography articles since you left. We have just improved upon many of the geography articles via human edits (no major changes with the geography-based WikiProjects). --mav 02:15 23 May 2003 (UTC)

Except for the beginnings of encouragement to include citations on World Factbook/Dept of State-derived pages. Koyaanis Qatsi
Oh, it's just that I neglected to add proper citations on all the country subpages when adding the info, so now I'm going through and adding them. It's slow and it sucks. Anyway, best to get it right the first time. example: Politics of Bermuda. Koyaanis Qatsi
Well, all of the History of, Geography of, Demographics of, Politics of, Economy of, Communications of, Transportation of, Military of, and Foreign relations of X Country pages have some information from the CIA World Factbook. (countries imported are listed here). Some but not all of those pages were supplemented with information from the US Department of State website, as described here. You'll notice that the U.S. Dept of State stuff is a bit inconsistent in what it covers and what it doesn't; as a result, there's no set pattern for what pages have been supplemented with their information. I do think mav's wording on the citation is better than the one I had. Let me know what I can do to help you script the changes--if you'd like a table of pages supplemented with U.S. Dept of State info, or whatever. Thanks.  :-) Koyaanis Qatsi 01:18 29 May 2003 (UTC)
It was history of Australia, specifically this diff which said at the bottom "This article incorporates public domain text from the CIA World Factbook 2000 and the 2003 U.S. Department of State website," but Tannin took offense at that citation also. The pages should be cited, I'm sure, but I'm not working on it any more because 1) It's a lot of damn work and 2) I'm not getting into a fight about it. Koyaanis Qatsi 05:40 31 May 2003 (UTC)

See reply at Waukesha, Wisconsin. -- John Owens 04:32 31 May 2003 (UTC)

Domo arigato, Mr. Roboto, for doing the jobs nobody wants to. --cprompt

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