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Feel free to leave a note on this page in the usual manner; I'll probably ping you back with a reply. Just to keep things tidy, I generally only keep stuff on this page if it requires further action from me or you haven't read my reply yet, so check the page history for older conversations if you need to refer back.
I created the spelling and grammar checking project at Wikipedia:Typo Team/moss. If you are responding to an edit related to special characters, language tags, or manual of style compliance, HTML cleanup or markup issues, it might have been motivated by some report generated by that project. -- Beland (talk) 03:52, 9 July 2021 (UTC)
Typeface/Font/Computer font
Hi, just wanted to let you know that I have decided not to pursue this merge. I did a lot of work to reduce keyboard layout/keyboard technology/computer keyboard triplication, ending with clearing out the last of these to make it a redirect. It has all been undone and I don't have the inclination to pursue it to the bitter end, I just don't care that much. I can't see why the RTM that we have discussed would have any different result. If you want to go ahead anyway, feel free. --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 10:56, 26 August 2021 (UTC)
Coherent style for formulas
In Nilpotent Lie algebra, you introduced recently the awful formula {{math|''n'' ∈ <math>\mathbb{N}</math>}}. I have changed it into <math>n\in\mathbb{N}</math>. Please, avoid mixing latex and html rendering in the same formula.
Happy new year. D.Lazard (talk) 09:42, 31 December 2021 (UTC)
- @D.Lazard: Yeah, it's definitely more readable when it's all in LaTeX. I've just been going through making articles compliant with MOS:BBB, which only requires changing over the blackboard bold characters. I had been converting relatively simple formulas to LaTeX completely, but it got a bit time consuming, and some longer formulas were quite daunting. MOS:MATH doesn't say anything about not mixing the two, so my thinking was that the mixed style was at least MOS-compliant, and we could go back and convert the rest of the markup later. I was hoping some other editors skilled in LaTeX would be able to help with that. Would you be able to help with some conversions? I see 88 articles with mixed markup (not all of which are from my edits) and several hundred articles with ℝ, ℤ, or ℂ. We could also add a note to MOS:MATH saying not to mix LaTeX and HTML, and resolve to do blackboard-bold-motivated conversions in one step rather than two? -- Beland (talk) 18:59, 31 December 2021 (UTC)
List of possible chemical formulas that don't use subscripts
Hello! I have recently been fixing typos from moss and I see there is a list of possible chemical formulas that don't use subscripts. I was wondering a couple of things:
- what do the numbers on the left of the entries mean? For example
16/5 - H3S10
- are they for reference only, or would it be in any way helpful to investigate and tag them with their common names, if they are indeed chemical formulae?
Thanks and happy typo hunting 😄 rbstrachan (talk) 19:41, 5 August 2022 (UTC)
- Greetings! The first is the number of instances this possible formula was found, and the second is the number of pages. So in this instance, H3S10 was found 16 times across 5 pages. It looks like Graeme Bartlett already determined it is not a chemical formula and made a redirect for H3S10, so I took that off the list. That's a preferred way to fix items that are not chemical formulas if they have articles. The spell checker won't care if you make it a link or not, but it might help readers to do so.
- Yes, the general intention is to investigate each, determine if they are actually a chemical formula, and update the markup accordingly. There's a full list of suggestions of what to do at Wikipedia:Typo Team/moss#Chemical formulas.
- The idea of using the common name to link these to articles is interesting, and something I hadn't really thought about. The spell checker doesn't really care if there's a link or not; it only looks at the display text. So, it will complain about both "H20" and "H2O" ("[[water|H2O]]") because the manual of style says it should be H2O (using {{chem2}}). Turning that into a link would make it H2O, which is a bit ugly but potentially helpful to the reader. Sometimes there's a very technical context, and the problem text shows up in chemical equations or something, where putting words (like "water") wouldn't make sense. In that case, we probably don't need a link anyway, and fixing the typography is all that's needed. Sometimes having the name instead of the formula would make the article easier to read, so switching it out and making it a link would be an improvement; you'd have to use your judgement.
- I suspect most or all of these either aren't chemical formulas or don't have chemical substance articles we can point to, so the suggestion to add links to chemical articles might apply more to Wikipedia:Typo Team/moss#Known chemical formulas that don't use subscripts, where there usually is an article.
- Poking at the "Possible" list just now, I had a bit of trouble figuring out which articles the spell checker was complaining about. I put a note at the top explaining how to use the "insource://" trick, which should be sufficient until I can get those included in the report automatically (or we empty out this list). Thanks for your interesting question and your ongoing cleanup work! -- Beland (talk) 08:09, 8 August 2022 (UTC)
- (talk page stalker) Just out of curiosity, is there a comparable list of chemical formulas that don't contain numbers (like HNO and NaCl), and therefore could be mistaken for words? BD2412 T 22:39, 8 August 2022 (UTC)
- That's an interesting question! While thinking about it, I thought of another, related question.While converting chemical formulae written with HTML
<sub>
tags to use the{{chem2}}
template, should element names such asIn
,Fe
, etc. and chemical formulas that don't contain numbers, such asHNO
andNaCl
as you mentioned, also be converted?On one hand, I'm not sure that it's worth adding the bulk of a template for things that don't technically need them and which don't benefit from a visual improvement to the way they are displayed. On the other hand, it may reduce the number of false positives for projects like WP:TT/M.One of the main reasons that I can see for converting HTML tags to the{{chem2}}
template is to make it possible to search Wikipedia for chemical formulae without having to resort to regex.[1] Having said that, since elements and most basic chemical formulas don't contain numbers, they don't contain<sub>
tags, so making them use the{{chem2}}
template would not do anything to make them more easily searchable.In regards to both of our questions I do vaguely remember reading somewhere that the Moss scripts ignore capitalised words, and as elements and chemical formulas (should) always start with a capital, these may not be issues in the first place. 😅😊 — rbstrachan (talk) 23:34, 8 August 2022 (UTC)- That's right, for spell-checking purposes moss ignores capitalized words made of only letters, on the assumption they are proper nouns. (These problem formulas are actually pulled from a list of ignored but suspicious words.) Even when I stop doing that (because I want to verify the spellings of proper nouns) most of the ones without numbers would have articles or redirects, so they would still be ignored. The only reason they became an issue for moss is that not using subscripts violates Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Chemistry#Symbols and Unicode subscripts violate MOS:SUBSCRIPT.
- There may be other reasons to wrap these formulas, though, such as for accessibility. It doesn't look like they are currently adding alt text, but if you use "auto=yes" with {{chem2}}, it does link each element symbol to the article on that element. I'm not sure if that's something we should be doing everywhere or nowhere? It might be worth checking with Graham87 (who uses a screen reader and who helped figure out how to handle fractions) or Wikipedia:WikiProject Accessibility or Wikipedia:WikiProject Chemistry to see if anyone has any particular preferences. -- Beland (talk) 01:36, 9 August 2022 (UTC)
- That's an interesting question! While thinking about it, I thought of another, related question.While converting chemical formulae written with HTML
- (talk page stalker) Just out of curiosity, is there a comparable list of chemical formulas that don't contain numbers (like HNO and NaCl), and therefore could be mistaken for words? BD2412 T 22:39, 8 August 2022 (UTC)
References
- ^ As an example, to find instances of Si8O22F2 written with HTML tags, you have to search for
insource:/Si\<sub\>8\<\/sub\>O\<sub\>22\<\/sub\>F\<sub\>2\<\/sub\>
. When written with the{{chem2}}
template, it can be done with justSi8O22F2
— no regex, or eveninsource:
necessary.
Watch out for Hebrew letters
Hebrew is written right to left, unlike English which is written left to right. So the character following a Hebrew letter like Aleph will appear to its left rather than to its right. This causes a problem when the Hebrew letter is intended to be part of an English text rather than a Hebrew text. You have twice ignored this fact when replacing ℵ0 with א0 at Cardinality of the continuum.
More generally, you should always look at the resulting text as it is displayed to the ordinary user and make sure that it is what you want it to be. JRSpriggs (talk) 14:45, 31 January 2023 (UTC)
- @JRSpriggs: Ah, thanks for the note! I hadn't noticed that I had made the same edit before. That's surprising that the character and the HTML entity have different text direction behavior; I'll be on the lookout for that in the future. -- Beland (talk) 16:35, 31 January 2023 (UTC)
Edits to 744
Hello Beland. Thank you for your help on the page for 744 (number). I don't know that MOS:BBB (1) is needed here, only a couple of "special characters" I am going to keep with {{math}} rather than LaTeX, and while a very select few phones and other displays might have trouble with it, it's really not an issue, I have a burner phone and it reads just fine (on the other hand low quality Android devices will generally not read <math> in a note, and I think it's the same for other phones with similar operating systems, for some reason. Mine does not read it, iPhones do not have an issue with this). My intention is to dichotomize the <math> to main text and {{math}} to the notes, that way there is a breathing space for readers to see another style, and connect it with a note for like-information that helps contextualize the main text. Also, for your most recent edit 2 you accidentally left a "}}" which took out part of the note into main text (around line 166 in 2 to be specific). Those subscripts that you took out that were in {{math}} tags still and blended with LaTeX, you left in when you had originally converted only the special characters, see 1. Thank you again, and happy editing! Radlrb (talk) 17:16, 12 March 2024 (UTC)
- @Radlrb: Ah, thanks for catching that syntax error! This page is a little overwhelmingly long, and I didn't spot it when checking my changes. I'm a bit unclear on what you mean that MOS:BBB isn't "needed"? Do you mean you're planning to convert expressions like <math>\mathbb{Z}</math> to regular bold like Z, or you're planning to use raw Unicode characters like ℤ? The former is fine, but the latter would violate the English Wikipedia Manual of Style. -- Beland (talk) 22:28, 12 March 2024 (UTC)
Heavy use of explanatory footnotes in the 600-cell article
Hi Beland. Thank you for reviewing the 600-cell article, and for your suggestion that the copious footnotes be simplified and improved, and perhaps pulled inline or moved to separate articles. The article does have a great many explanatory footnotes! I have started this topic on my talk page and replied to your critique there. See you there! Dc.samizdat (talk) 10:26, 21 March 2024 (UTC)
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Beland (talk) 01:27, 24 March 2024 (UTC)Four Noble Truths
Rigorous diff, but nice. Joshua Jonathan - Let's talk! 18:52, 24 March 2024 (UTC)
Unicode
This seems like a thing you might know about; if not, apologies, and pointers to a better place are welcome. This edit added some unicode that doesn't display properly on my (modern, up-to-date) browser. It strikes me as unlikely that that's good practice, but not so unlikely that I reverted immediately. Thoughts? --JBL (talk) 18:44, 27 March 2024 (UTC)
- @JayBeeEll: It's displaying OK for me with Firefox on Linux, but I'm not surprised it doesn't for everyone. There's lots of articles where we have characters from lesser-used writing systems that don't show up for some readers, including me. In some cases, we make an effort to put images there so everyone can see what they look like. In many cases, we just put up some version of Template:Contains special characters and encourage readers to install the right fonts and maybe give them a pointer or two toward instructions on how to do that. In this case there's a link to Maya numerals and images there, so I added that template to 0. There's not much room in the infobox to do a lot more, so I think that's probably OK for now. -- Beland (talk) 20:01, 27 March 2024 (UTC)