A bunch of your edits are just masking a cewbot bug. In some specfic (but not yet identified) situation, the talkpage banners get relocated partway down the page, which obviously makes a mess of lots of things. Please don't compound/hide that by making a subsequent edit that merely masks one symptom of it. See for example:
Dear Wikipedians! I have a dream to create an article about the Silesian School of Iconography because I started it 11 years ago, and now I have some time since my children are on vacation, allowing me to devote myself to my passion. I once encountered this community and can't believe they aren't present on Wikipedia. I'm not very skilled with all the tools, so please: help me. I have a few more days to create great articles, but I also want to include them in Wikimedia Commons, where I'll upload all available works of the Silesian School of Iconography. I created the category "Silesian School of Iconography," but it seems something is not quite right. Help me make such a category. I'm also writing articles about some members of this school, but I can't gather all the materials. Perhaps I'll create basic drafts for further development, which I believe is also valuable. Please, take a look at the links (note! some are drafts and I'll be modifying them), but most importantly, I care about the Silesian School of Iconography. If you can, please improve these texts. 1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft:Silesian_School_of_Iconography 2) https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Monika_Jerominek 3) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Like_the_dewfall/Jolanta_%C5%9Awi%C4%85tkiewicz 4) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Like_the_dewfall/Dariusz_Klejnowski-R%C3%B3%C5%BCycki I also have issues regarding licenses and copyrights, as some images have been blocked. In the meantime, I'm sending images available on the website of the Silesian School of Iconography here under the "WORKS" section at the bottom of the page, and I don't know how to manage this. Please help me with that as well. Like the dewfall (talk) 00:08, 26 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Quotation marks are preferred but optional if the only characters used are letters A–Z, a–z, digits 0–9, and the symbols !$%&()*,-.:;<@[]^_`{|}~.
I believe the original primary reason the quotation marks are preferred where they are optional is that the Wikimedia software processes things slightly faster with the quotation marks. But from my perspective, it's preferred because it's easier for editors to deal with ref names if they are all done the same way, in quotation marks. Let's say, for example, that an article has a reference to a 2020 study by Jones, coded as <ref name=Jones/>. Now let's say in addition to citing the 2020 Jones study, we want to cite a 2022 Jones study. So the editor inserting the reference to the 2022 study first wants to rename the existing Jones reference to "Jones 2020", before inserting a new reference to "Jones 2022". Since the new name is going to need quotes, it's easiest if the existing names already have quotes. —Anomalocaris (talk) 21:45, 4 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
editing sandbox
Hi there,
You made a recent edit on my sandbox. Firstly, thanks for making the tables compliant with correct formatting. I guess I got lazy with closing bold quotation symbols as I was making lots of tables to see which actually looked best - they potentially will never see an actual published article.
Just wondering why and how you came across a sandbox of all places to edit? Especially considering they may never be published. Do you run scripts or something to alert. Genuinely interested as to how this all came about.
Again, thanks for the edit - it will be useful in case I bring those tables across to published articles so that they are in a complete state. Also, you don't happen to have any experience with creating templates do you? Eccy89 (talk) 14:22, 19 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Eccy89: For the past several years, I have edited a lot of Wikipedia articles to fix Lint errors. Before I worked on it, your page User:Eccy89/sandbox2 showed up with at least one fostered content error. In a table, everything has to be in a cell, so, if there is something in the markup between the table start and the table end that is displayable but isn't in a table cell, it is considered fostered content, and it displays above the table. Fostered content is sometimes caused by careless markup like this:
{|
This one-celled table is missing a pipe character in column one that would turn the rest of this line into a table cell
|}
And sometimes it's caused by forgetting to close an otherwise valid table:
{|
|Here's a table that has only one cell
|-
This is supposed to be after the table but somebody forgot the closing |}, so we're still in the table and this is fostered content
Once I started editing your page, I saw the problem with the <small>...</small> tags, and I kept going from there. I consider it worth spending time fixing lint errors in sandboxes because it helps create awareness about good and bad markup. Sorry, I don't know much about creating templates. I can create a template that's just a block to include in an article, but I don't know how to write templates that take parameters. —Anomalocaris (talk) 19:28, 19 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
After going into the linked page above, i am surprised that there ONLY FIVE pages with the fostered content type of lint errors. I thought it would be much much higher. Although I'm not sure what my error was. I saw you changed my bgcolor=... to style="background-color:#..." and obviously the small as you stated. I didn't know that small couldn't cross two lines. Interesting. Eccy89 (talk) 10:09, 20 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Outstanding work! A thanks-less task really. Mind you, I and see many others have thanked you, so maybe not that thank-less after all :-) – Eccy89 (talk) 22:37, 20 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Hello, I noticed you just took away some wikilinks that I had included in a web link. I assume that you meant well, and were enforcing some kind of policy.
In any event, I really would like our readers to be able to find out, by visiting our articles, who Peter Schreier and Walter Olbertz are. Can you advise what would be a format by which I could do this? Thank you for your help.
Opus33: Links in links do not work. If you have a Wikilink inside an external link, the external link stops working when it comes to the Wikilink. You can see this in the version of Abendlied unterm gestirnten Himmel from before I edited it. Since my edit, Michael Bednarek fixed it another way, so the external link intentionally ends before the first Wikilink. I completed the task by removing the stray closing bracket (]). (I began this message before your "never mind" and decided to post it anyway.)—Anomalocaris (talk) 18:36, 13 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Fuzayl1: I haven't looked up the references in the book, of course, but the page numbers are in as needed. I reformatted them slightly and combined identical references. I expect other editors will make suggestions on further improvements. —Anomalocaris (talk) 07:13, 16 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
It was a copy and paste response because a set of Takashi Miike articles are all giving false disambiguation links but only if 5 apostrophes are used. Once those apostrophes are turned to 3 though it goes back to linking to, Pages that link to "Over Your Dead Body (film)". The only thing I can think is that somehow 5 apostrophes interacts with Takashi Miike template on each of these articles.
I'm going to change the redirect Kuime page to redirect strictly to the Film, placing a note in its talk page, and place a link at the top for those looking for the Japanese book. After which I will self revert my edits so those other articles can have their proper font back. RCSCott91 (talk) 21:33, 21 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Anomalocaris The disambiguous links have been resolved and I reverted the changes. I apologize for alarming you.
I was trying to make those changes quickly to find out which page or article was causing it. I'm going to leave a note at Takashi Miike template talk page, hopefully someone smarter than me can find out why the presence of a redirect page going to a disambiguation page where one of the articles linked on that disambiguation page has that template: it causes all other articles with that same template to link to the disambiguation page. RCSCott91 (talk) 22:44, 21 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Please, stop your decades-long campaign to delete |url-status=usurped from citations. This is one of the worst things I have read all week. I have spent years repairing usurped domains. Detailed at WP:JUDI. The flag has a purpose, it exists for a reason. Try: https://bcsportshalloffame.com/ .. it is a usurped domain. Every instance on wikipedia needs to have |url-status=usurped .. there are over 700 domains like that. And that's just for Asian gambling sites. It doesn't include all the other usurped domains. If you don't understand how the system works, ask for help, but don't undo things you don't understand. -- GreenC02:40, 15 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]
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My dear, thank you very much for your help for my first draft...
now can you help me to finally published it? because I have no idea, I don't know how to do... Can you do it for me?
pleeeeease. Thea20071 (talk) 13:11, 4 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Thea20071: I edited Draft:Gian Maria Aliberti Gerbotto on 4 December 2024. In that edit, I inserted a comment saying, "Please see {{MedalTableTop}} for usage instructions. I inserted the required missing |medals= parameter, not necessarily the right way, and there are several parameters used here that don't belong." Please follow that advice. I also lot of |title=... in cite templates. I thought this would make it really obvious that these references need titles. As it happens, on 5 January 2025, Citation bot edited the article and stripped out my inserted |title=.... But the need is still there. Every reference needs a title. Click the link and copy as much info as you can from the web page, including author, date, and title. If the link no longer goes to a valid web page, then find an archive URL at http://archive.org/, or find a link to a working reference, or remove the bad link altogether. These are some things that you should do to improve the quality of the article. —Anomalocaris (talk) 01:53, 5 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
My dear, I followed your suggestions doing my best, as best I could, also keeping in mind that these are the first times I've moved to Wikipedia.
I proceeded to remove all "Title" links to external internet sites that no longer exist, replacing them with new and functioning links. but I was unable to remove the red annotations "{{cite web}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)" made by the correction of the bot into edit source, I think. Can you please delete them? I'm not capable of it.
A thousand thanks.
Then, having made these corrections, I think my draft is ready for publication, right? And can you please give me a hand in this regard, since I have no idea how to then transform a draft into a public article on Wikipedia? I thank you again for the invaluable help you are giving me in this first project of mine.
Thea20071: I edited the draft again, improving a few references with author, title, date, publisher, newspaper, access-date. Also, period and comma go before, not after, <ref>...</ref>. These changes can be a model for the work you should do on this draft. Again, references with cite templates need titles. I edit Wikipedia pages, and I give advice, but I do not have a role in approving drafts to become articles. Cheers! —Anomalocaris (talk) 06:08, 12 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Disambiguation link notification for January 26
An automated process has detected that when you recently edited Eddie Canales, you added a link pointing to the disambiguation page CBC.
@Anomalocaris Thanks for repairing the faulty citation in the Cleveland-Cliffs article. I added the new content to make the paragraph more relevant to the article. The way it existed just popped in out of the blue, with little context. I rewrote it to reflect that Gonclaves was speaking at a press conference on the purchase of US Steel. He did say (and I left it in) those remarks that Japan was evil and worse than China. His reference to “not learning anything since 1945” was that Japan had not learned “…anything since 1945. You did not learn how good we are, how gracious we are, how magnanimous we are, how forgiving we are." Which I condensed to “American benevolence.” The “crusty” comments of the CEO need to relate to the context of the article in an encyclopedic way, not just showing up like a tabloid headline. If you have some suggestions on how that might be accomplished, I’d be grateful for them. Hamish barebones (talk) 19:59, 4 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Hamish barebones: I don't have any ideas about this. If you are satisfied that there's nothing in the commented out paragraph that you want to put back in, I suggest removing the commented out paragraph. —Anomalocaris (talk) 21:18, 4 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Hamish barebones: HTML is the underlying markup of the World Wide Web, including Wikipedia. In HTML, comments are entered using <!-- ... -->. Comments are information for someone looking at the markup, that don't affect the display. For example, the markup
Have a <!-- comment -->nice day
displays as
Have a nice day
Cleveland-Cliffs has a full paragraph commented out this way. If you use the visual editor, you can see the paragraph just below the paragraph that begins "In January 2025, Goncalves called Japan". There's an icon that looks like an exclamation point inside a gray square, indicating an "invisible comment". Double-click on the comment to bring up a dialog box allowing you to edit or remove the comment. If you use the regular editor instead of the visual editor, just search for <!-- at the start of the paragraph. —Anomalocaris (talk) 20:04, 12 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Before GanzKnusper sent that message, at 22:24, 3 March 2025 (UTC), the user had already reverted Zinnober9's two corrections and my one correction to the user page and then removed the userboxes entirely, so there were no lint errors. At 14:34, 12 March 2025 (UTC), the user restored the user boxes the same way I did it, without the lint errors caused by {{plainlist}}. So there was a request not to edit their user page in the future, but the user ended up doing it my way. —Anomalocaris (talk) 00:08, 12 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Hi. You have restored obsolete information with an edit summary I do not fully understand. Horsley is no longer in Bywell ward; it is in the new Stocksfield and Bywell ward. Why do you consider the election result for the former ward from 2017 to be worthy of inclusion? If you want to include a result why not add this year's result for the new ward when it becomes available? Also, you say I didn't remove the table header. I don't know what you mean by that as it is clearly incorrect. Tammbecktalk07:29, 24 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Tammbeck: Thank you for asking me why I reverted your edit of Horsley, Northumberland. I came to this page because it had a Fostered content lint error. For an explanation of this error, see this talk page section #editing sandbox. The fostered content error was because you left in the markup
but deleted the rest of the table. Your edit summary was "Boundary changes". That didn't mean anything to me, so I considered your edit "unexplained blanking", which is grounds for reverting. It turns out you did explain it and I didn't understand the explanation. So, I guess the fix is to redo your edit, but remove the table opening line. I leave it to you. Cheers! —Anomalocaris (talk) 07:44, 24 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Aaron Liu: Yes, I was fixing lint errors, and the Polygon row was messed up, so I did my best to fix it. Glad to know the page had already served its purpose. Cheers! —Anomalocaris (talk) 20:15, 11 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I removed the "floor plan" from User Talk:174.128.153.62 because it was sandbox-like material at the top of a user talk page, and not part of any legitimate user talk discussion. You can access old versions of the page in the page history, and copy it into a sandbox or a draft page. –Anomalocaris (talk) 00:34, 14 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Altenmann: You have a right to ask other editors not to edit your own subpages, but you don't have the right to ask other editors not to edit anybody's subpages. Even your own subpages are not entirely yours. For example, if they violate WP:BLPPRIVACY, other editors can and should remove material in violation of this policy, even if there's a big sign at the top of the page asking others not to edit.
I will try to remember your request not to edit your own subpages, and if I forget, please forgive me.
Please be aware that I edit at least hundreds of user pages and subpages every year, and the great majority of users appreciate it. In the last month, 10 different users sent me notifications thanking me for edits to their user page or subpage.
Please be aware that there are a large number of editors that patrol and fix pages listed on maintenance and error pages, including the subpages of Category:CS1 errors, the subpages of Category:CS1 maintenance, and the subpages of Lint errors. (These are other lists of pages editors use to find pages needing cleanup.) That's why Zinnober9 edited User:Altenmann/sand, and if you revert, someone else is going to come along and fix it again.
Also, please note that I could have removed the seemingly useless <a> tags altogether, but out of respect for you, I left the tags in, and only fixed the misnesting and unclosedness, in case you had some strange purpose for the <a> markup. (That does not mean that Zinnober9 was wrong to remove the <a> tags. It just means I was more cautious.)
My edit summary was written carefully to inform:
This is a complete mess, but I fixed it in a tiny way: <a><b>...<a><b> → <a><b>...</b></a>. HTML tags must close and nest, except for the few [that] don't close, such as <area>. <a> tags nearly always are of the form <a href="http...">Anchor text</a>, a plain <a> tag doesn't mean anything.
I take pride in writing thoroughly detailed edit summaries that say what I did and why. I wish everybody did.
Altenmann: WP:USERTALKSTOP says "In general, one should avoid substantially editing another's user and user talk pages, except ..." Fixing lint errors is not considered a substantial edit. Again, I'll try to remember to avoid your user pages, and again, if one of your user pages is listed on a lint error page, other editors are likely to come along to fix it. Cheers! —Anomalocaris (talk) 23:41, 16 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
@Altenmann: Likewise; you are also correct and not correct. You do have the right to ask us individually not to edit your page, but you are also wrong since WP:OWN will NOT protect you in keeping known and problematic issues intact on your pages for reasons of "I want it this way" and other well-meaning editors will be attracted to these errors if left unfixed.
It is fine that you copied something from elsewhere, but it is a bigger problem to copy something with errors and then refuse for that problematic content to be corrected within the policies of Wikipedia. If it's on Wikipedia, it should adhere to Wikipedia policy, and those two policies you mentioned do not block our corrective measures unless there's a valid, concrete reason for these errors to be temporarily kept. If you conducting tests to resolve a known issue and need some time to sandbox it and figure things out, we can respect that while you conduct your tests, but would prefer the errors be deactivated if there's going to be a long period of inactivity (in idea of weeks or months).
The issue that we are interested in resolving on your page are that none of the tags in your copied material have any closing tags, a required, nonnegotiable element of HTML. You are also missing a table opener and table closer causing each table row "tr", cell "td" and header "th" tag to complain they are stripped (in addition to being unclosed) since they have no structure to build from (essentially this is akin to building a house with no roof or walls), and all the paragraph and bolding tags are all complaining that they are not closed, which, in non-table situations would cause these commands to leak outside of expected range and cause additional issues if they intermingled with other syntax.
I'm personally neutral about the <a> tags, since they aren't reporting currently tracked errors, but they are a bit of a GIGO situation since they are unrecognised HTML tags that are displaying as plaintext, which is not ideal.
I respectfully ask that you reconsider and either correct these issues yourself, or permit us to correct them in a way that satisfies you. We can be agreeable on how some errors are corrected IF there's options of solutions, but a good number of editors are trying very hard to keep these syntax errors from repopulating and causing page breaking havoc, and we are especially watchful of table errors since we've eliminated the backlog of all "Table tag to be deleted" and "Fostered table content" table errors last fall. We still have a ~3 million other tracked errors in backlog still to resolve, and do not appreciate people undoing our Wikipedia permitted corrective efforts without a good, concrete reason.
How can we resolve this issue so that we are all happy with the outcome?
Altenmann: When I said in the summary of my edit of User:Altenmann/sand "This is a complete mess" I wasn't exaggerating. See: lint errors: User:Altenmann/sand. Multiple unclosed formatting tags is a high priority lint error. There are only 2 such errors in all of English Wikipedia, and they are both on User:Altenmann/sand. As Zinnober9 says, "If you [are] conducting tests to resolve a known issue and need some time to sandbox it and figure things out, we can respect that while you conduct your tests, but would prefer the errors be deactivated if there's going to be a long period of inactivity...." Will you please fix your sandbox to remove the lint errors in the next few days? —Anomalocaris (talk) 04:26, 18 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
G13 draft articles
Hello, Anomalocaris,
I'm not sure why, but you seem to be going to draft articles that are due to expire and be eligible for CSD G13 speedy deletion in a day or two and making minor edits on them. For the vast majority of these drafts, the new editors created an account, then created a draft the same day and then left Wikipedia to never return. So, making a minor formatting correction six months later, preventing the draft's deletion, won't even be noticed by these editors who are not interested in becoming regular editors here.
I think it's great if you want to work to improve a new editor's draft to get it in shape to submit to AFC for review and, hopefully, it will get into main space. But if you are just adding punctuation or doing some cosmetic change like moving a header, I don't really see the point of spending your time doing these changes to an abandoned draft. You might check on the page history of a draft or sandbox and see if it is being actively edited.
But you have been editing here for much longer than I have so at the same time, I want to let you know that I appreciate all of your contributions. I just am not sure if this is the best use of your valuable time. Thank you. LizRead!Talk!06:20, 18 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I see from the discussion above this one that you, and presumably other editors, are fixing lint errors or some other common mistakes that appear on a list somewhere on the project. I understand how that might take you into Draftland so I guess I'll ask that if a draft hasn't been edited in 6+ months or longer, just let the mistake go unfixed because the draft is headed towards G13 deletion any day now. Thanks. LizRead!Talk!06:26, 18 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Liz: Yes, I emptied out draft pages with empty headings. For a long time, I have known about WP:OLDDRAFT, but I've never known exactly how it works, and hoped that there was some intelligence that would see that trivial edits such as fixing lint errors would not reset the calendar. I've never known. There ought to be a way to flag an edit as general wiki cleanup but not draft-contributing, so the deletion calendar doesn't reset. Do you know anything about this? —Anomalocaris (talk) 07:34, 18 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
An edit is an edit is an edit. It doesn't matter whether it is a productive change or just putting in a blank space. I don't know any way to tag edits like you suggest. I'll just say that today we are deleting drafts/sandboxes whose last edit was November 18, 2024 so that gives you an idea of what we are working with with G13s. You can find the lists we work with today at G13s for May 18th. If you find a draft whose last edit was in November or December, maybe pass on changing it. I'd give different advice if the pattern is for editors returning to work on drafts they created but that's just not what I see in my work with Draftspace. They create an account, they create a draft and then they disappear, at least 95% of the time.
Also, you really shouldn't be editing in archives like you did in Wikipedia:Requests for undeletion/Archive 395. You aren't going to get blocked over this but we emphasize to new editors not to edit in talk page archives so experienced editors shouldn't set a bad example.
Liz: Wikipedia's linter crew keeps lint errors in the Draft namespace under continual control, except for Missing end tags, which for some reason are difficult to keep up with. When I work on those, I work on the most recently edited, so the oldest ones will probably never get fixed and just scroll into G13 deletion.
For 8 years, Wikipedia's linter crew has been editing archives to fix lint errors. If you poke around, you'll find lots of archive pages that have been edited to fix lint errors. Most of that work is complete, except for replacing obsolete <font> tags. Empty headers is a new lint error and we are going to fix those wherever they are. It's also good to edit archive pages to fix links, such as a link to a talk page discussion pursuant to that discussion is archived. This is just routine maintenance. Cheers! —Anomalocaris (talk) 08:21, 19 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
List of smallest stars
Thanks for the edits, also i'm sorry for the rather aggressive reaction in the first edit summary, but at least the errors are mostly gone. I need to say, i was waiting AnomieBOT to fix all the issues, generally it does the hard work. 21 Andromedae (talk) 21:34, 28 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
21 Andromedae: Apology accepted, and I'm sorry for the rather aggressive deletion of all of your hard work (which, of course, was not lost, thanks to the page history). I saw a plethora of undefined ref names, a plethora of various Category:CS1 errors, I figured you would use the page history and come back and do it right, which is what you did, so, thanks for cleaning it up mostly. The last three errors were easy for me to fix. Citation bot's edit of 19:52, 28 May 2025 (UTC) of List of smallest stars did manage to clean up the CS1 errors. This amazes me, because there are currently 175,508 CS1 errors according to the category page, so a lot of CS1 errors seem to be beyond the Citation bot's ability to fix Also, Citation bot left behind 13 undefined ref names. When I edit a a page, I never save if I've introduced any new citation errors or warnings, or any new unintended redlinks, or new undefined ref names, or pretty much any new warnings of any type. With an exception that if someone enters a newspaper reference with a title something like "Chicago Tribune January 1, 1906", I'll change that to "|newspaper=Chicago Tribune |date=January 1, 1906 |title=unknown" to make the actual error really obvious. Cheers! —Anomalocaris (talk) 00:09, 29 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Kindred: The Embraced Smalldiv
Just to let you know, the "smalldiv" on the Kindred page is broken and only displays "{{{1}}}" on the page instead of the actual letter text.—Samz707 (talk) 21:28, 31May 2025 (UTC)
I've had this happen to me too many times. Now I always try to use 1= when I replace center or small with {center} or {smalldiv}, even if I think it is not needed. The other thing to watch for is pipe characters inside the wrapped text. – Jonesey95 (talk) 23:00, 31 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Randomdude121: Yes, there is such a thing as an empty heading lint error, which is how I found your page. It didn't occur to me that your empty heading had an actual purpose. I have created a workaround at User:Anomalocaris/sandbox/Lint Test, which is to replace the empty heading with
@Anomalocaris, what would you suggest be put in empty HTML-style headings to fix empty heading errors, without causing changes to how the page looks?
Your suggestion works for wikitext-style headings, but when used with HTML-style headings, it causes extra height/padding because of text being present inside the heading as opposed to none being present earlier.
Randomdude121: I have various solutions to empty heading lint errors.
If it's the first heading on a talk page, I look at the discussion immediately following and make up a short crisp title. See my edit ofTalk:55 Fiction. In this case I probably should have capitalized the heading.
If it's a talk page that someone created and signed but didn't actually say anything, and there's nothing after that, I remove the heading and the signature. This is admittedly bold but I believe it is right. See my edit ofCategory talk:Cuesta Cougars baseball coaches.
In the example you gave involving the user page User:Phxls, I don't know if the user values the space that was taken up by the empty heading. I assumed the space wasn't important, so I removed it. That changed the number of headings from 4 to 3, which meant that the table of contents didn't display, so I inserted (for my first time ever) the keyword __TOC__ to get the table of contents to display. If the user likes the original spacing, they can revert, in which case I may come back and figure out a way to match the space, without an empty heading. If the user is OK with the change but doesn't want the table of contents, they can remove the keyword __TOC__.
Additional points:
When the only thing in the heading is a nonbreaking space, it's an empty heading. I think you know that.
Preservation of appearance is not always essential. When editing someone's user page, it is usually a good idea to preserve the appearance. (In the case of User:Phxls I tried to minimize the change but I didn't zero it out.) In a talk page, it's usually OK if the spacing changes a little bit. In an article, there's nothing sacred about any layout, and if spacing changes a bit, that's rarely a problem.
Have you read Wikipedia:Linter? Have you installed lintHint? Are you using linkHint? It's pretty hard to work on de-linting without it.
Empty headings might have been your first exposure to lint errors, but it's actually a low-priority error. The Outstanding linter errors on enwiki is a handy page for choosing where to fix lint errors. The highest-priority lint error that's nowhere near wiped out is misnested tags, which is nearly wiped out in the Article namespace but widespread in other namespaces.
Hi. Thanks for having a go recently at trying to fix an issue with the 'no include' on the Host Landing page. At a very quick glance I'm not able to see what the problem was initially, or how you tried to fix it. Unfortunately, however, we've now lost the numbering and naming for most of the host (and thus the total tally of how many hosts we currently have listed - which is terribly useful). It now suddenly starts with '1' at User Xoak, who's actually around the 106th host on the list!
I'm afraid my time is severely limitied right now to try toinvestigate and fix things, so I wondered if youwouldn't mind taking a look to see if you can tidy up the page whilst reinstating the left-aligned and numbered Host usernames?
Many thanks, Nick Moyes (talk) 13:16, 20 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I'm afraid the issue is very visible to anyone who has 'Auto-number headings' set to 'On' in Preferences>Gadgets. Give it a try and you'll see what I mean. Numbering now starts c. two thirds the way down the list, so I don't this is an improvement. If you're unable to fix it (including ensuring that future automatic edits made on Host signup to that page) I think you should revert your changes, please. The Lint error seems preferable to a messed-up List, which has looked fine up to now. Kind regards, Nick Moyes (talk) 20:30, 25 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Nick Moyes: I went to preferences and checked 'Auto-number headings'. When I look at the current version of Wikipedia:Teahouse/Host landing, I see the first hosts numbered as 1.1 Cullen328, 1.2 ColinFine, 1.3 Alextejthompson, eventually 1.106 Xoak and the final entry is 1.141 JesusisGreat7. When I look at the the version just before I edited it, I see the exact same thing. In case it matters, I use Windows 11, Mozilla Firefox, and the MonoBook skin. As soon as I can see the problem, I can try to fix it. —Anomalocaris (talk) 22:27, 25 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]
If you go to WP:TH and click on the 'Meet Your Hosts' button, the page you're taken to is notWikipedia:Teahouse/Host landing, it's Wikipedia:Teahouse/Hosts. The Host_landing page is transcluded into that page, and that's where the absence of a host name and numbering up to User:UncleBash007 (but not User:Xoak) occurs. From Xoak onwards the numbering starts from One, though the host name is also now rather annoyingly centred, rather than left-aligned. That difference matches your edits to the Host Landing page, though I can't for the life of me see what's causing the disruption on the Teahouse Hosts page itself.
Do please try viewing the Host list from the public-facing page (via the Meet Your Hosts link) and let me know if you can see the issue I've tried to describe above. If you aren't, I think it best if you or I simply revert your AGF edits as the disruption to the way the page displays seems worse than fixing any minor lint errors, as appreciated as they would otherwise be. I'm afraid I'm not sufficiently technical or time-rich to delve into and appreciate the precise cause of this weird anomaly myself. Cheers, Nick Moyes (talk) 13:32, 29 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I’m afraid I don’t, to be honest. Although the Hosts page looks ok now in mobile view, your changes have had a negative impact on the page layout in desktop view, and it now looks really naff without the left aligned Host name header which it used to have. Could you try and fix that by reinserting them when you have a moment, please? Then we’ll all be happy! Alternatively, someone with the time a skills could redesign the page, but I suspect neither you nor I are up to that. Cheers. Nick Moyes (talk) 18:50, 1 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Nick Moyes: I created pair of test pages so we can see side-by-side the difference between the old and new markup. The new markup is to use noinclude markup around every host's heading. The old markup is to use noinclude markup inside every host's heading. I recreated the old markup in Wikipedia:Teahouse/Host landing/sandbox. The page is up-to-date with recent changes in Wikipedia:Teahouse/Host landing, but uses the old markup and extends the noinclude markup, starting from Xoak all the way to the end. And I created Wikipedia:Teahouse/Hosts/sandbox, which is identical to Wikipedia:Teahouse/Hosts except that it calls the sandbox version of the host landing page. In other words, Wikipedia:Teahouse/Hosts/sandbox shows how things used to be in the old markup and Wikipedia:Teahouse/Hosts is what we have now with my "improvements". At least in desktop view, everything looks fine to me. Having the two versions should make it easier for you to explain what further work I need to do. I look forward to your reply. —Anomalocaris (talk) 20:16, 1 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Nick Moyes: Every time you have commented here, I have replied the same day. Whatever the problem is here, I am trying to solve it expeditiously. It's been 12 days since I heard from you. I hope you will reply soon so we can get this problem solved. Cheers, Anomalocaris (talk) 20:24, 13 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I am currently away on a family holiday. I will reply on my return next week. Sorry you were left wondering. I appreciate your input on this. Kind regards. Nick Moyes (talk) 11:07, 17 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I was about to move the noinclude tags to outside the heading tags on the host landing sandbox page when I noticed the previous lint fix edits to that page and the pointer to this discussion. The page is still listed in the empty headings lint errors. -- 92.18.76.185 (talk) 11:30, 31 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Nick Moyes: You said six weeks ago, "I will reply on my return next week." Since then, you have edited Wikipedia exactly one time, on 14 August 2025. We need to settle this matter. Please let me know as soon as possible if Wikipedia:Teahouse/Host landing is acceptable, or if not, what further change is neeeded.
If your edit Wikpedia again, and you don't reply here on this talk page, I will take that as a statement from you that you consider that my fix to Wikipedia:Teahouse/Host landing is correct and you have no further objections. At that point I will figure out how to make it so that new additions to the host landing page automatically go in with <noinclude>...</noinclude> around headings of newly added sections. Cheers! —Anomalocaris (talk) 20:45, 31 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Someone else edited the hosts landing sandbox page a short time ago and added a closing div. That page is still listed in the empty headings category. -- 92.18.76.185 (talk) 17:49, 1 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Nick Moyes: On 14 September 2025, you made 4 edits to Wikipedia, and you've made 2 more since then. You still haven't replied here, so I take this as a statement from you that you consider that my fix to Wikipedia:Teahouse/Host landing is correct and you have no further objections. Moreover, you are the only one who raised any isssue with my work on Wikipedia:Teahouse/Host landing, which confirms my belief that my fix is correct.
I have been extraordinarily patient with you. You started this discussion on 20 June. I responded quickly each time, and by 29 June I believe I solved the problem. You said I had not solved it, so I created a set of test pages on 1 July. On 17 July, you promised to reply within a week. We all have responsibilities in our lives other than Wikipedia, so it's OK that you took time to attend to life's other priorities. But when you came back to Wikipedia, you should have prioritized this. Next time you have a complaint and another editor goes out of their way to address your concerns, I hope you won't leave them hanging for almost three months. —Anomalocaris (talk) 05:51, 21 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]
A. B.: Good work. I was editing just as it got moved, so I copied my changes to the draft, and then got confused and blanked the draft, and you unblanked it. —Anomalocaris (talk) 03:13, 23 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Hey. I first freaked out a bit when I saw the extensive change. Some were not right, because 165mm and 4x80mm are industry labels. Formatting them elseway would not be right. Otherwise, all other changes are great. The extent of your effort became evident to me as I restored some of these small things. Thanks for helping. Fred Hsu (talk) 01:10, 28 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Hey Anomalocaris, just curious why you removed my topic on the help desk. It's no big deal, I'm trying to discuss the same thing on the user's talk page, but I want to make sure I didn't put anything in the wrong spot. CleoCat16 (talk) 20:44, 18 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I appreciate the acknowledgment, and I went back and made some more improvements to your user page and talk page that I hope you will like. Of course, you are free to revert if you don't like the changes, but I think you'll agree that black on dark blue is hard to read, so the wikilink color needs to be close to white, but if it is white as I set it, there's no way to know it's a link unless it's underlined. —Anomalocaris (talk) 21:55, 20 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Regarding spacing, your edits make no changes to how the citation templates are viewed by readers. Spacing in templates is essentially a null edit. Regarding the use of websites, noting specifically that there is a "website" parameter, this is just personal preference. All that needs to occur is for referencing to be consistent within articles, which it is in this case. Again, just a personal preference. In articles you have written, feel free to use the citation formatting that serves you and that article best. In this case, I have written most of the article and taken it through GAN. Not sure why this matters to you, considering you've never edited the article before, but I recommend just moving on. None of your edits make any substantive change to the article and are 100% personal preference. « Gonzo fan2007(talk) @ 21:28, 6 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
As a follow-up, and just to add some weight to this:
WP:CITEVAR: Editors should not attempt to change an article's established citation style, merely on the grounds of personal preference or to make it match other articles, without first seeking consensus for the change. and it is normal practice to defer to the style used by the first major contributor or adopted by the consensus of editors already working on the page.
{{Citation}}: the template documentation provides to guidance on specific spacing methods. Note that in every example provided on the documentation page, space is added before and after the pipe, and before and after the = sign. Note that the |work=/|website= parameters specifically note that the name of the work (in the case of a website, its url) should be provided. Thus, the way it is consistently applied in this article is fine.
Both the WP:GACR and WP:FACR require a list of all references (sources of information), presented in accordance with the layout style guideline and consistently formatted inline citations using footnotes, respectively.
Gonzo fan2007: Wikipedia is a free encyclopedia that anyone can edit. The most important thing in a Wikipedia article is the references. The references are how users can see that what the article says is true and learn more. I pay a lot of attention to references to get them right. Right now, there's a reference that says
In your version, the user might think, "I wonder where Fox6Now.com is located." In my version, the user clicks on WITI and sees Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Help:Citation Style 1#Work and publisher says, "On websites, in most cases "work" is the name of the website (as usually given in the logo/banner area of the site, and/or appearing in the <title> of the homepage, which may appear as the page title in your browser tab, depending on browser). Do not append ".com" or the like if the site's actual title does not include it (thus |work=[[Salon (magazine)|Salon]], not Salon.com)." CBS Sports is branded at the top of the page with the CBS eye logo followed by, in all caps, CBS SPORTS, but Wikipedia policy is to avoid all caps, which means it needs to be "CBS Sports", which is exactly the usage at the bottom of their page, where it says, "CBS Sports is a registered trademark of CBS Broadcasting Inc." Nowhere on the website of CBS Sports does it say CBSSports.com. Similarly, ESPN is ESPN, not ESPN.com. Similarly, USA Today is USA Today, not USAToday.com. For these and other reasons, I believe your reversion was harmful to Wikipedia, but I'm not going to edit this article again. Cheers! —Anomalocaris (talk) 22:38, 6 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Strange links in links errors in User:Discographer/Various–Music
Discographer: Yes, I came to User:Discographer/Various–Music because it was listed in Links in links lint errors. The errors didn't make any sense, so I fixed missing end tag errors, which were easy. Then I wrote something on your user page with heading "Strange links in links errors in User:Discographer/Various–Music", and four minutes later, your page was no longer listed on the Links in links page, so I deleted my comment, but you obviously saw it, because you copied it in this section heading. I had a feeling that there was something messed up with closing brackets, and you found and fixed some in your edit of 23:38, 7 August 2025 . lintHint does not detect any errors in the version just before that edit, so I'm impressed that you found these errors. How did you do that? —Anomalocaris (talk) 06:28, 8 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
is my sandbox. If you want to help, it would be nice to let me know first, so we don't edit conflict doing the same thing. Rant now over, thank you!𝕁𝕄𝔽 (talk) 16:45, 12 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
JMF: Yes, I edited User:JMF/sandbox. You had a table with everything on one line. The new line markup (|-) and the end of table (|}) are ignored, so the table never closes. I did the least possible edit, inserting a newline before the table close markup, so the page wouldn't appear at Fostered content lint errors. I'm sorry you threw away your work. —Anomalocaris (talk) 16:55, 12 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
So next time, leave a note on my talk page. And I am now working on another table which right now has no controls. I know that. Surely transient lint errors that refer to sandbox pages don't need a hot fix? 𝕁𝕄𝔽 (talk) 17:05, 12 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
JMF: I try to honor requests from individual editors, so, in the future, if I am drawn to any personal page you've edited within the past couple of hours, I'll leave it alone. That's just me, though. There are a lot of other editors who patrol lint errors, citation errors, and other types of errors, and any of them might fix an error at any time. I have several user preferences set that help in editing, including managing edit conflicts:
Editing tab: [] Warn me when I leave an edit page with unsaved changes
Gadgets tab: [] Add a clock to the personal toolbar that displays the current time in UTC and provides a link to purge the current page
Beta features tab: [] Paragraph-based edit conflict
Beta features tab: [] Improved Syntax Highlighting
The clock is helpful in comparing the present time to times in a page history or in user signature time stamps.
When I click "Publish changes" and I learn that another editor has saved an edit since I started editing, I open a new page history tab and see what's happened. If the other editor did something as trivial as insert a newline character, what I would then do is go back to my editing tab, copy that editor's trivial change into my version, and then save my version. I hope you find this idea helpful. —Anomalocaris (talk) 18:58, 12 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
In live space, there's a "work in progress" tag that I try to remember to use. If your intervention was re a live article and I hadn't set that tag, you would be entirely justified and I'd have no-one else to blame but myself (but the cat had best steer clear for a while). Indeed your intervention would be justified if I had broken a live article. I assumed that I need have no such concerns about my sandbox. Is that not the case? 𝕁𝕄𝔽 (talk) 20:40, 12 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
JMF A number of editors believe that errors should be fixed no matter where they are. I have 9 notices right now from the past month or so, from users thanking me for edits to their user pages and sandboxes. So most people seem to appreciate it. No matter what you do, if a personal page violates a Wikipedia policy such as WP:BLP, it is likely that someone will fix the problem. If you want to protect pages from "help" regarding lint errors, citation errors, and so on, you can put a notice at the top, or near the error, asking people to leave it alone. An comment at the top might not be noticed by someone fixing a lint error, as the lint error pages have links that cause the editor to open right at the error, so if the request is at the top, an editor might not see it. So, if you know something is causing an error and you want it left alone, it's helpful to put the "please don't fix this error" comment close by. After your research is complete, it's best to make the error go away by blanking, or commenting it out with HTML comment markup, or in some other manner. As I said before, "if I am drawn to any personal page you've edited within the past couple of hours, I'll leave it alone." Cheers! —Anomalocaris (talk) 21:11, 12 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Tomorrow I'll probably thank you. Today I'm feeling ratty because I'm working to revise an annoyingly detailed table that I now wish I had never volunteered to do, so losing at least 20 minutes worth of detailed edits guaranteed a tantrum. Maybe by next week I might be ready to apologise for biting your head off. 𝕁𝕄𝔽 (talk) 22:29, 12 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Using { {smalldiv| for the 'The "Yukich" Slate' wikitable in the Homer Glen article...
So, I see that you placed {{smalldiv| around the 'The Yukich" Slate' wikitable, but all that shows up is {.
(talk page stalker) Good catch. That template can't be used to wrap a table. One fix would be to simply remove the small tags. If the table should really be small, a style declaration can be added to the table's opening {| markup. – Jonesey95 (talk) 13:23, 14 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
So, I tried figuring out what style declarations to use, and it seems like none of them gave me the result I was hoping for, so I decided to just go with a normal table. Plus, it's not like the information I was inputting was on the large side anyway, so maybe going with a regular table is the best way after all. ClarkKentWannabe (talk) 21:25, 14 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I seem to have spent a large chunk of the day fixing up one of the worse messes I have seen in many years. Thanks for fixing the font errors in Wikipedia:WikiProject Dentistry/Participants - I was never going to get to all of those. At best I might have fixed just the five that were listed on the lint error page immediately after I had removed 5 stray colons. It was a single entry in the fostered content error list that took me to that page and literally hundreds of problems there that kept me occupied for several hours. -- 92.18.74.149 (talk) 20:00, 15 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Good to hear from another lint fixer. I encourage you to register a username, log in and edit! But, if you have a need to edit as an IP user, your contributions are also valuable. —Anomalocaris (talk) 00:03, 16 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
My user page photo
Thanks for trying to help with my user page photo. I put in frame because it displays the caption. Now it doesn't. Can you help do that without any conflicts? I don't know much about image formatting. Thank you. MisawaSakura (talk) 12:16, 24 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I caught it when there were 32 errors. I refreshed the page and there were still 32 so I incorrectly assumed these were real and current. Minutes later they were gone. So many things to catch the unwary! Last time I saw something like this, errors went from dozens to thousands in an hour. -- 92.23.57.149 (talk) 23:46, 24 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
If there are a bunch of new lint errors through a template, one can always edit any page listed on a lint error page that is reported to have an error through the template, and run lintHint. If lintHint doesn't find any errors, Publish changes without changing anything. This will usually cause the linter to check the page, and within a few seconds it will clear the lint error. If that happens, there's a good chance that the template causing all the lint errors has been fixed. —Anomalocaris (talk) 00:19, 25 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Roxy the dog: I edited Brit Floyd to fix a Bogus file options error, "rigth" instead of "right". As long as I was editing, I fixed several other things, per my summary, "improve <ref>s; <ref name>s quoted; straight quotes and apostrophes; logical quotes; dashes". Then you reverted two edits. Then I saw that Brit Floyd was listed again in Bogus file options lint errors. I went to the Page history and I saw that the IP user had made more than 20 edits, and I assumed incorrectly that you had reverted a lot of them, so I edited the page to redo the fixes I had done less than 10 minutes earlier. My edit summary was "straight quotes and apostrophes; logical quotes; properly close quotes; dashes; magazines in italics; <ref name>s quoted ... it is annoying that another editor reverted just after I made these improvements, so I had to do it a second time." Then I figured out that all you did was remove one paragraph, so it would have been easy to get my version back by editing my version and deleting the paragraph inserted by the IP user. Then I did a comparison between my two versions and saw that I had missed two fixes, so I edited again with summary "more fixes restored from my edit that someone carelessly reverted: {{cite press release}} and dmy dates".
Then you posted your comment here, so I went back to the page history of Brit Floyd to prepare my response. First I realized that even though the IP user made over 20 edits, you actually reverted only of them. It would have been nicer if you had simply removed the paragraph rather than reverting my good work along with paragraph you didn't like. Also, don't blame me for the cruft that you removed, blame the IP user. If I had paid more attention, I would have realized how easy it would have been to restore my changes from my own version. Your reversion of my good work was not that big a deal, but I would encourage you to be more careful in when reverting, and not undo the good along with the bad. I'm sorry my edit summaries expressed annoyance. Cheers! —Anomalocaris (talk) 02:51, 27 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
You'll have to forgive me for my ignorance if it is a MOS thing, but just so I know for the future, what's the deal with changing the 'work' field in cite news to 'publisher', especially in regards to BBC Sport cites? I know its been addressed on your talk page before, but I'm of the opinion that BBC Sport, for example, is the published work that sources the news cite, not the publisher of the cite; that sounds to me like it would refer to the publishing company who owns, say, the the Hull Daily Mail (Reach plc/Trinity Mirror), the Warrington Guardian (Newsquest) or Love Rugby League (Planet Sport Limited). I won't revert it on my drafts, but I just find it a bit odd and would appreciate your line on it. Hullian111 (talk) 09:22, 12 September 2025 (UTC):[reply]
Hullian111: Wikipedia's manual of style does not seem to be clear on this. I make a distinction between media (plural of medium) and organizations. The New York Times is a medium, specifically a newspaper. The New Yorker is a medium, specifically a magazine. Slate is a medium, specifically a website. In contrast to these, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Reuters, NBC News, BBC News, and BBC Sport are organizations. None of these organizations has a magazine, newspaper, television show, or radio show with the same name. For example, the flagship evening program of NBC News is NBC Nightly News. These organizations all have websites, but when they publish something on their websites, I see the publisher, not the website, as the primary notable entity. When an organization like Human Rights Watch issues a report, they publicize, distribute, and broadcast it in a variety of ways, such as emailing copies, posting on social media, and distributing printed copies, in addition to posting it on their websites. Human Rights Watch the organization is primary and its website is secondary. Like NBC News, which produces NBC Nightly News and broadcasts it on its own television network, BBC Sport produces television shows such as Football Focus and Match of the Day, both of which are broadcast on the BBC One network. This is the difference between a medium (such as a newspaper, magazine, or website) and an organization. Some organizations, such as BBC News and BBC Sport, are divisions of a larger organization, BBC, but they are still organizations. Respectfully, Anomalocaris (talk) 19:39, 12 September 2025 (UTC).[reply]
