Ohconfucius

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8:14 AM, Sunday December 1, 2024

This user is a native of Hong Kong.

This user is a citizen of the United Kingdom.

This user lives in France.

This user has been on Wikipedia for 18 years, 11 months and 1 day.

Another styletip ...

Pluralizing abbreviations

Acronyms and initialisms, like other nouns, become plurals by adding -s or -es:

they produced three CD-ROMs in the first year; the laptops were produced with three different BIOSes in 2006.

As with other nouns, no apostrophe is used unless the form is a possessive.

Add this to your user page by typing in {{Styletips}}

This user account
mostly performs maintenance and style edits in mainspace. I follow only articles I had a major part in writing (and maybe not them all), but I also perform a small number of edits to a very large number of articles. You are therefore more likely to attract my attention with a message to my talk page or bug report pages.

For my gnoming work,

I am responsible for writing and maintaining the following scripts:
1. User:Ohconfucius/script/MOSNUM dates – aligns dates to a single format throughout the article;
2. User:Ohconfucius/dashes – fixes dashes in accordance with WP:MOSDASH (fork of User:GregU/dashes.js)
3. User:Ohconfucius/script/formatgeneral – fixes some general formatting
4. User:Ohconfucius/script/Common Terms – unlinks common terms that usually don't need linking in the majority of articles
5. User:Ohconfucius/script/Sources – fixes specific formatting of various parameters within <ref></ref> and within {{citation}} templates
6. User:Ohconfucius/EngvarB – aligns spelling in articles of British, British Commonwealth/Irish etc to British English spelling or Canadian English spelling. Please note that {{EngvarB}} is now independent of any British English templating. Its own categorisation also independent of British (or indeed any other) English variant categorisation.
7. User:Ohconfucius/script/flagcruft.js – can be useful to attenuate the overuse of flag icons on some pages.

Most of the work of this account is done by a combination of non-production versions of the above, and the results obtained from the production version may vary. I also frequently make manual tweaks in the course of my script runs.

My philosophy

The various scripts work mainly on applying various provisions of WP:Manual of Style.

Strange though it may seem, I actually quite dislike ENGVAR and other rules that institutionalise or tolerate too many competing styles and formats. Wikipedia ought to determine what's right for it and its readers, and try not to borrow styles from various different sources just because they exist. We need to adopt a single überstyle that embrace greater commonality. I find tolerance of competing styles and language variants is terribly divisive because we dig a metaphorical cultural trench to replace a large geographical feature, creating many "wikighettoes" that may frighten and intimidate editors of another nationality. I would love for styles to be unified, but I just work with what we have.

Although I would prefer British and dmy, and have chosen to first attack dmy articles for reasons of productivity, I would be happy to apply my work to chasing US spelling and mdy dates should WP decide that's the way it has to be.

Aligning dates, even by script, is donkey work. What I find infinitely more enjoyable and rewarding is the writing of the script which I and others can use, but I cannot develop without being the prime user. Therefore, I welcome comments, criticism and bug reports that all contribute to the improvement of the script and therefore the 'pedia as a whole.

Life would be a lot simpler with monoformats because we wouldn't have to do this manually – bots could be let loose to work on the 'pedia.

It's only a digression. I know WP is editor-driven and readers take second place; format unification isn't going to happen any time soon.

Please leave a bug report or suggestion.

Work lists

Scripting resources

CatScan 2.0 – build list, for example, for AWB based on categories
meta:User:Pathoschild/Scripts/TemplateScript (successor of Regex menu framework) created by Pathoschild.
WikEd created by Cacycle
mw:Extension:WikiEditor/Toolbar customization and mw:Extension:WikiEditor/Toolbar customization/Library
User:Cameltrader/Advisor

External resources

http://regular-expressions.info documentation about regular expressions (regexes)
http://www.rubular.com/ Regex tester
http://www.omniglot.com/language/time/months.htm month names in many languages
http://jshint.com a tool to detect errors and potential problems in JavaScript code (used by CodeEditor)
http://doc.jsfiddle.net/
http://jsbeautifier.org/
http://jsperf.com/
http://getfirebug.com/ Firebug (requires Firefox)

Gallery

File:Snoopy mural.jpg

Panorama of Snoopy mural at rue Henri Page, 75013 Paris

Formatting quirks

&lrm;
Lee Yang Xuan markups of chinese pronunciations in two different fonts

AWB tools

Statistics

For reference

Amusing stuff

Fuck You England. YouTube video

Notes to self

Interesting

Seven Taboos