User talk:LArron/Archive2

This is an archive page, last updated 6 January 2011. Please do not make edits to this page.

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Omphaloskepsis

my edits

my talk page

This doesn't happen enough

So, thanks for all that you do for this site, what with all of your charts and statistics, they really help to put things in perspective. Aboriginal Noise ^{with 4 M's and a silent Q} 23:24, 20 February 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for your appreciation - flattery is my main driving force, so this is most welcomed :-) larron^{sicut fur in nocte} 10:13, 21 February 2010 (UTC)

Hey! The truth isn't flattery. Your charts & stuff help visualising stuff we know but can't prove. ^yummy &  ^honey_{(or marmalade)} 10:23, 21 February 2010 (UTC)

Lagrange the Insignificant

Remember the archive of old revisions I recently mentioned on the WIGO talk? Wouldnt' it be about time someone did a Gallery of Baleeted Articles? I could do the coding but I can't seem to come up with of a cool name. Mountain Blue 17:03, 13 March 2010 (UTC)

Very interesting idea! And about the name : If you build it, he it will come larron^{sicut fur in nocte} 20:55, 13 March 2010 (UTC)

I'm saving the wiki source text instead of the final HTML for the revisions I'm archiving, for reasons of economy and parseability, so we're going to need a compiler of sorts. Do we attempt to emulate the original look and feel or do we roll our own? Before anybody does any actual work we should probably run this idea by a few people to see if there is any kind of demand for this graveyard. (Graveyard, hm...) Mountain Blue 23:03, 13 March 2010 (UTC)

I don't think that the original look is needed - so, a wiki should be ideal to display the wiki source text - without further need for conversion...

How many articles are we talking about? Could you just show one or two prime examples for starters?

larron^{sicut fur in nocte} 10:15, 14 March 2010 (UTC)

We might want to automagically remove redlinks in the originals that would never be articles here? ħuman 02:39, 15 March 2010 (UTC)

We might. I don't know how many articles we are talking about because I have no idea how many article disappearances are lulzy enough to be worth documenting in this way. This graveyard thing was just a spontaneous idea that Leisure Graph Larry's remark regarding the shitcanning of Mr Lagrange gave me. I'd appreciate suggestions. Mountain Blue 04:32, 15 March 2010 (UTC)

Fine with me to try....

I have Ed's complete proxy on these matters, but rarely exercise it. So I will speak with him about this tomorrow. Shoot me an email, and we can discuss details. I assume you can contact me through this wiki or already have my hotmail address. --TK_/MyTalk^{RW User #45} 07:55, 20 March 2010 (UTC)

Great - but what details are there left to discuss? You can talk with Ed Poor, and he'll say yes or no - or perhaps I want to have a writing plan.

Thanks for your effort

larron^{sicut fur in nocte} 08:32, 20 March 2010 (UTC)

(But out of sheer curiosity, I sent you a mail...) larron^{sicut fur in nocte} 23:23, 20 March 2010 (UTC)

Unless you are "MuchCheaperViagra" I have nothing from you, LArron. Perhaps you have an ersatz email address for me? Try sending through this wiki. --TK_/MyTalk^{RW User #45} 23:48, 20 March 2010 (UTC)

web.de gets often filtered as spam... larron^{sicut fur in nocte} 00:03, 21 March 2010 (UTC)

I got it, but you sent to an address I no longer use much, as I have changed my email here back to my main one. --TK_/MyTalk^{RW User #45} 01:01, 21 March 2010 (UTC)

Have you saved your settings after changing your email in preferences? I just replied to your mail from Mar 19, 2010, as sent via RationalWiki. larron^{sicut fur in nocte} 06:39, 21 March 2010 (UTC)

Nothing yet, but I am receiving the RW notices of changes to my talk page, so something must be working! Ed unblocked your account, and I got a copy of that email letting you know. --TK_/MyTalk^{RW User #45} 06:52, 21 March 2010 (UTC)

OOPS!

What happens at Wikipedia ... Doc Holiday (talk) 10:55, 23 March 2010 (UTC)

‎Game player, feels free to misrepresent himself, and I no longer have confidence he has any integrity.

These block reasons seem to apply better to TK than to me:

• Game player: What games?
• feels free to misrepresent himself: yep, by keeping my identity the same in all wikis and blogs
• I no longer have confidence he has any integrity: because I don't like conversations behind closed doors?

So, future home-schoolers will have to try to find a point with is equidistant on average from other points. Poor pupils... larron^{sicut fur in nocte} 12:51, 23 March 2010 (UTC)

I am not a good writer like you...

...but do you want me to make a nav box for your Dembski articles? - π 12:15, 1 April 2010 (UTC)

Thanks, that's a very nice thought! larron^{sicut fur in nocte} 12:34, 1 April 2010 (UTC)

I could work on the colours a bit. - π 12:50, 1 April 2010 (UTC)

Great, and I lol-ed when I read the title: but it should be a little be less snarky, as I correspond with some of the authors... larron^{sicut fur in nocte} 12:53, 1 April 2010 (UTC)

pubic hair loss

My robsmith ban was going to be 13.7 billion years, but couldn't seem to do it lol Tweety (talk) 22:21, 3 April 2010 (UTC)

obviously, 6000 years (189 341 712 000 sec) are enough! But he isn't a sysop any longer, so show mercy - or be serious :-) larron^{sicut fur in nocte} 22:25, 3 April 2010 (UTC)

Errata

This should be interesting...assume he doesn't run away. Excellent work. tmtoulouse 08:46, 8 April 2010 (UTC)

Thanks! I'm waiting for my comments at Uncommon Descent to make it through the moderation. larron^{sicut fur in nocte} 09:01, 8 April 2010 (UTC)

17 DiEb 04/08/2010 1:20 am

Your comment is awaiting moderation. Dear Dr. Dembski, it’s Skitt’s law which states something like “any post correcting an error in another post will contain at least one error itself”. So, while I’m confident that my list is correct, there may be an error in it. But perhaps you could correct it, and we’ll converge to an ultimately error-free version of the paper? The format of UncommonDescent doesn’t allow for a display of mathematical expressions, so I put the list here.

19 DiEb 04/08/2010 3:17 am

Your comment is awaiting moderation. Dear Dr. Dembski, essentially, it’s the same list I sent to you (info AT designinference.com) and Robert Marks (Robert_Marks AT baylor.edu) in an (unanswered) email on Oct 17, 2009. How time flies! Or as you put it Your concerns will get addressed in due course.

larron^{sicut fur in nocte} 09:07, 8 April 2010 (UTC)

Help

*Puppy eyes* EddyP (talk) 15:19, 2 May 2010 (UTC)

I hope I found the right ones... larron^{sicut fur in nocte} 17:12, 2 May 2010 (UTC)

Thanks very much! EddyP (talk) 18:08, 2 May 2010 (UTC)

A request

Hi, LArron. A request has been made (by me) for an update of the info and graphs on Conservapedia:This site is growing rapidly! (which is woefully dated) and I was told you were the person to see. I mean, I'd do it myself but this dang fancypants typewriter with that there glowin' screen don't get them numbers all right the way I wants them! Thank you, kindly. DickTurpis (talk)

You are right: It is rather dated... I'll look into it, but it may take a couple of days. larron^{sicut fur in nocte} 06:04, 10 June 2010 (UTC)

To get some better data on en.wikipedia.org, I asked for help. I hope, I'll get an answer soon. larron^{sicut fur in nocte} 12:46, 10 June 2010 (UTC)

GUI

Dear Sir or Madam,

Do you use a GUI for R?

Thank you for your time, 13:28, 29 June 2010 (UTC)

No, generally not: Never found a decent one (but I didn't look that hard). A while ago, I tried the plug-in for eclipse, but I'm faster using just a standard text editor.

OMG

Dear Sir or Madam,

You are awesome.

Thank you for your time, 13:37, 29 June 2010 (UTC)

I want approve on it, I think polite post. 89.132.239.149 (talk) 13:44, 29 June 2010 (UTC)

Collapsible

I'd have done that but I thought it might interfere with pibot archiving. Forgot it was manually archived. 23:09, 30 June 2010 (UTC) ^{— Unsigned, by: SusanG / talk / contribs}

no problem! Frankly, I was surprised how long that wigo got... larron^{sicut fur in nocte} 08:07, 1 July 2010 (UTC)

Pibot & the collapsible thing screwed up the Saloon Bar formatting, so it was wise to be wary.  Lily ^{Inspirate me.} 08:58, 1 July 2010 (UTC)

Article matrix

Hi LArron! I note that you're a fan of generating visualisations of CP's various exploits, so I was wondering if you'd be interested in creating one for the Conservapedia:Article matrix - namely, an animation showing the matrix being populated (and depopulated!) over the time of CPs existence... i think that could be quite fun. Thoughts? :D ^{ONE / TALK} 13:01, 8 July 2010 (UTC)

Thanks!

The Conservapedia:Article matrix has escaped my attention - until now :-) The whole thing looks quite promising, I'll have a closer look at it.

larron^{sicut fur in nocte} 13:38, 8 July 2010 (UTC)

Article network

Is there any easy way to map out an articles "network"? For example, miracle and improbable things happen both link to Littlewood's law. In turn, 30-ish articles link to miracle and 8 articles link to improbable things happen. I made this using "what links here" and freemind, but to map out further would take lots of work. I have no particular reason why Littlewood's law other than I wrote it. Sterile can opener 14:58, 25 July 2010 (UTC)

Conservative words

You need to take a break buddy, it's taking over you! DeltaStar_{Senior Sysop}^{Speciationspeed!} 20:37, 27 July 2010 (UTC)

That was indeed a little bit troublesome: I started to doubt myself... When I applied my little program which generates some statistics on the words, I had problems to get Andy's numbers. Of course, I thought it was me, or the import of the data - in earlier versions I had dropped words which weren't clearly dated. I imported the words in a couple of ways, started recounts (I had a Florida-feeling :-) as I thought that no one would make such a basic mistake (but if one does, you have to make sure that your critique is correct).

And I think it is very irritating: there I was, having done all the stats on the words, trying to keep it as simple as possible, and then, the real answer to

Liberals doubt our observed doubling per century for these words, yet every layer reproves the remarkable growth pattern. Still looking for 6 more. Can any liberals disprove the pattern?

is even simpler:

Yes, any liberal who can count up to 160.

larron^{sicut fur in nocte} 20:57, 27 July 2010 (UTC)

Citizendium

Your graphs on CZ are getting lots of pokes around the blogosphere, and Larry Sanger himself is running around to various blogs and websites crying "its all a lie!" Any chance on updating article creation/active users? Thanks for your work! tmtoulouse 17:34, 28 July 2010 (UTC)

LS running around? Links? --ZooGuard (talk) 17:47, 28 July 2010 (UTC)

[1] [2]. tmtoulouse 17:50, 28 July 2010 (UTC)

Is that actually Sanger responding just below David Gerard? Is it just me or is he sounding a little Schlafly-esque? He practically said "this site is growing rapidly, deny this and lose all credibility". ^postate 17:55, 28 July 2010 (UTC)

I am 97 percent certain it is Sanger in both posts. I liked the one at Harvard Law that ended with a rant about child pornography. tmtoulouse 17:57, 28 July 2010 (UTC)

There's something very odd if it is him. He's claiming that WP's "verified article" output is zero; but of course it is, WP doesn't do "verified articles". You may as well criticise my research group for not publishing psychology articles by that logic. ^postate 18:02, 28 July 2010 (UTC)

Well now that you bring it up, I do think you haven't fully appreciated the role of self-actualization of protons in NMR signal processing. Larry is an odd guy, when he first started his campaign to be enshrine himself as co-founder of WP his monologing often impressed me as somewhat childish. tmtoulouse 18:06, 28 July 2010 (UTC)

@trent: CZ has a problem with its database: when doing an api-query which includes a tag with a timestamp, it won't process it. I tried to get them to fix it - and it seemed that they got it working for a while - but now, the old problems are back. I had thought about a round-a-bout, but wanted to realize it only when there was some interest in CZ. As there is now, I'll provide you with new pics - though it may take some time :-) larron^{sicut fur in nocte} 18:08, 28 July 2010 (UTC)

Cheers, I appreciate it. I saw the thread where you were asking for assistance, they were pretty dismissive. But with the site frequently being barely usable I would guess they are strapped for technical assistance. tmtoulouse 18:30, 28 July 2010 (UTC)

Along with the NIH that made them run Postgres just because WMF uses MySQL (and, oh yeah, the MediaWiki software is MASSIVELY TWEAKED FOR MYSQL ALL THROUGH), they hacked up their version of MediaWiki in various odd ways. So it's unsurprising that (a) basic stuff doesn't work properly (b) they have no-one left who could fix it. (Compare CP.) They have recently on the forums spoken of the need to get back to core MW so they can get some useful extensions in place, so there's signs of sanity on the NIH front - David Gerard (talk) 00:20, 29 July 2010 (UTC)

The Harvard Law blog is written by metasj, aka Samuel J. Klein, longtime Wikimedian and now WMF board member. So obviously liberal deceit - David Gerard (talk) 23:51, 28 July 2010 (UTC)

Oh, and CZ has half the editor traffic of RationalWiki. So Trent, if they really can't afford about $3/mo each to fund their hobby, the RWF could offer them somewhere to play.

Or they could go to Wikia.

(*cough*) - David Gerard (talk) 23:52, 28 July 2010 (UTC)

I just looked up the Alexa stats. We're about on par with CZ with reach, slightly lower but we seem to have had a boost since the change from .com to .org. But CZ is far higher on most other stats and is showing an rapid increase over the last few weeks on things like pageviews/user - but a corresponding drop on search%. Most of these are well above the usual noise. Its rank hasn't changed though. Does this point to more frequent visits by its core members rather than an increase in participants? ^postate 02:21, 29 July 2010 (UTC)

They, like we, are so down in the noise that you can't get anything from the numbers Alexa has. So it could be that one of them installed the Alexa toolbar deliberately (I wonder if Ken has done this yet), or it could be they have one reader out there, or it could be sunspots, or it could be friggin' magnets - David Gerard (talk) 07:21, 29 July 2010 (UTC)

Instead of the elegant queries of the <api>, I had to use <html>. There are quite a few disadvantages to it, e.g.,

• bigger overhead, i.e., more traffic, greater files, more time needed to gather data etc.
• cumbersome syntax: more error-prone

But now, it's done and I'll add a list of pics to the talk-page of Citizendium, perhaps they can be integrated somehow in the article. larron^{sicut fur in nocte} 07:18, 29 July 2010 (UTC)

CP user contribs

Hi LArron,

Do you have a tool which extracts a user's contribs and converts the detail into a spreadsheet? I'd love to play around with Ken's contrib stats. Thanks! ^{ONE / TALK} 18:54, 29 July 2010 (UTC)

Hi, I've got a zoo of undocumented perl scripts which I run ~once a month: I generate a list of the users and then look up their contribution using the api CP provides by queries like

http://conservapedia.com/api.php?action=query&list=usercontribs&ucuser=Conservative&uclimit=5

"action" => "query"
"list" => "usercontrib"
"ucuser" =>"Conservative"
"uclimit" => 5 (max. 500)

That gives you

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<api>
  <query>
    <usercontribs>
      <item user="Conservative" pageid="17795" revid="799275" ns="0" title="Debate:Does History Matter?" timestamp="2010-07-30T05:55:00Z" top="" comment="/* Yes it matters - Christianity makes plenty of important historical claims. */" />
      <item user="Conservative" pageid="17795" revid="799274" ns="0" title="Debate:Does History Matter?" timestamp="2010-07-30T05:54:26Z" comment="/* = Yes it matters - Christianity makes plenty of important historical claims. */" />
      <item user="Conservative" pageid="17795" revid="799273" ns="0" title="Debate:Does History Matter?" timestamp="2010-07-30T05:54:10Z" comment="/* The History of a People is a Macrocosm of the History of the Person */" />
      <item user="Conservative" pageid="104536" revid="799272" ns="0" title="Satires of atheism" timestamp="2010-07-30T05:43:12Z" top="" comment="/* Postscript */" />
      <item user="Conservative" pageid="104543" revid="799271" ns="0" title="Essay: Richard Dawkins&#039; lack of appeal to the Asian woman audience" timestamp="2010-07-30T05:42:01Z" top="" comment="" />
    </usercontribs>
  </query>
  <query-continue>
    <usercontribs ucstart="2010-07-30T00:54:04Z" />
  </query-continue>
</api>

and you can iterate over ucstart:

"action" => "query"
"list" => "usercontrib"
"ucuser" =>"Conservative"
"uclimit" => 5 (max. 500)
"ucstart"=> "2010-07-30T00:54:04Z"

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<api>
  <query>
    <usercontribs>
      <item user="Conservative" pageid="104569" revid="799196" ns="2" title="User:Conservative" timestamp="2010-07-30T00:54:04Z" top="" comment="/* Movies and Film clips */" />
      <item user="Conservative" pageid="104569" revid="799195" ns="2" title="User:Conservative" timestamp="2010-07-30T00:52:25Z" minor="" comment="Protected &quot;[[User:Conservative]]&quot; ([edit=sysop] (indefinite) [move=sysop] (indefinite))" />
      <item user="Conservative" pageid="104569" revid="799194" ns="2" title="User:Conservative" timestamp="2010-07-30T00:52:07Z" new="" comment="enemy below added - German dispirited sailors  making noise due to depth charges raining down on them trying to cheer themselves up" />
      <item user="Conservative" pageid="104379" revid="799190" ns="0" title="Essay: The question atheists fear" timestamp="2010-07-30T00:39:12Z" top="" comment="" />
      <item user="Conservative" pageid="104473" revid="799189" ns="0" title="Essay: Does Richard Dawkins have machismo?" timestamp="2010-07-30T00:35:04Z" top="" comment="/* Quick note */" />
    </usercontribs>
  </query>
  <query-continue>
    <usercontribs ucstart="2010-07-30T00:19:15Z" />
  </query-continue>
</api>

So, it's all pretty straightforward... larron^{sicut fur in nocte} 07:03, 30 July 2010 (UTC)

I didn't understand any of that, but it did help me find this. Fucking nuts even rabid squirrels wouldn't touch. ħuman 07:10, 30 July 2010 (UTC)

Oops! I forgot I asked about this. Thanks for the response :) Sadly I'm an absolutely programming newbie - what would I need to do to run one of these scripts? Do I need some sort of perl application to run it in? Do I need to have Conservapedia open in my browser? (I'm sure these questions come across as phenomenally stupid, but that just proves my newbiness) ^{ONE / TALK} 15:37, 5 August 2010 (UTC)

Ignore my shit, I made the idiot mistake of Schlafly-skimming your post :P Thanks for the help! ^{ONE / TALK} 15:39, 5 August 2010 (UTC)

Image request

Could we please have one of your purty pictures of Citizendium's average word count per day? [3] That's broken down by month; with the broken API, I suspect it would be srs pain to extract each day's actual count. Apparently they get their numbers from analysing the database dump - David Gerard (talk) 17:38, 30 July 2010 (UTC)

Wikipedia has a similar system, it's convenient for their great amount of data..

Did you have something like this in mind? It's not much - anyone with access to excel (or a similar program) could/should do it:

Total number of words	Error creating thumbnail: File missing Words per day	Clusters
Monthly increase in clusters	Median length of clusters

Enjoy! larron^{sicut fur in nocte} 21:58, 30 July 2010 (UTC)

Oh, just excel? I could probably turn that up with small effort ;-)

We now have a ton of nice infographics making points nicely. I've done the layout as a gallery floated right, which is not ideal but not horrible. Trouble is how to fit seven (and counting) images.

The other point: I'm entirely unclear on WTF a "cluster" is as opposed to a "lemma"/stub and how each relates to the "article count" and the number of pages in mainspace. Are we sure we're comparing apples to apples? - David Gerard (talk) 23:54, 30 July 2010 (UTC)

RonLar

I'd be happy to lend you one of my IP addresses if you need one. mb 06:56, 5 August 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for the nice offer - for the moment, RonLar is trying something else. larron^{sicut fur in nocte} 12:16, 5 August 2010 (UTC)

Good luck, as they say, with that. Feel free to msg me if you change your mind ;) mb 15:57, 5 August 2010 (UTC)

No luck at all, I'm afraid (see here) larron^{sicut fur in nocte} 16:02, 5 August 2010 (UTC)

pretty, pretty please

Good sir, please share with us some of the R that makes your wonderful charts tick. I've always been dying to see. Occasionaluse (talk) 00:57, 7 August 2010 (UTC)

how do you suppose andy trues up creation and conservation of mass

If nothing can create or destroy matter, and God created all the matter ever with out violating the laws of physics, then how did he do it? --Opcn (talk) 01:09, 17 August 2010 (UTC)

I've not the slightest idea... larron^{sicut fur in nocte} 05:03, 17 August 2010 (UTC)

wikiFactor: Two comments

(copied from Talk:WikiFactor)

Dear LArron, I should like to make two comments:

1) You say "Obviously, this definition doesn't work...". Could you explain why?

2) You also say "...his eponymous paper"; I would not go as far as to say eponymous, after all, it is not called the McBrideFactor. Actually, at the time I would have liked to have called it the wiki-index, in line with the h-index, but there is a web site known as wikiIndex (where I occasionally lend a hand as an administrator) so I settled for wikiFactor.

All the best, --Carl McBride (talk) 10:48, 17 August 2010 (UTC)

corrected at WikiFactor/Talk:WikiFactor. Thanks for the comments - larron^{sicut fur in nocte} 18:34, 17 August 2010 (UTC)

Request

Hello! Can I be cheeky and ask -if at all possible - if you can please update the "blocking the world" graphs. They're about a year old and it'll be interesting to see just how much TK has left unblocked. Tx! --PsyGremlinPrata! 13:54, 1 September 2010 (UTC)

Also you haven't updated the active users yet. Don't forget to add me and Blue (formally Lyra)! --Sir Onion ^{Kneel before my vegetable might!} 12:19, 5 September 2010 (UTC)

At the moment, I'm enjoying my holidays - so the updates have to wait for a couple of days. larron^{sicut fur in nocte} 21:06, 6 September 2010 (UTC)

I'm back :-)

• I won't update the "blocking the world" graphs, as not much has happened over the year
• I just updated Conservapedia:Active users, and RationalWiki:Active users will follow soon.

larron^{sicut fur in nocte} 09:11, 15 September 2010 (UTC)

Skillful work is never done, my request is an update to Citizendium/Active users now that the charter is passed and they have over a dozen positions of management to fill I am curious how many active users there are relative to elected positions open. tmtoulouse 14:59, 23 September 2010 (UTC)

Done! larron^{sicut fur in nocte} 15:35, 23 September 2010 (UTC)

An ID paper (in a philosophy journal?)

Thought you might take an interest. The author of the paper seems to be a truther too; I can't be sure but his blog strongly suggests it. --Quantheory (talk) 14:04, 17 October 2010 (UTC)

Thank you: From a first glance, it looks like an excellent example of an ID research paper :-) Unfortunately I haven't had any time yet to take a closer look, but I'll do so over the next days.

larron^{sicut fur in nocte} 17:09, 22 October 2010 (UTC)

You mentioned you are banned from reading CP

Ever tried tor + proxy auto-config? No slowdowns for the other sites (and if other sites needs tor like once, there are always the tor button to fall back on) and CP still is readable (well, most of the time, there are some tor relays which are blocked I believe, but get new identity from <whatever the controlling software is called in your OS> should be easy enough I think) [[User:K61824|]][[User_talk:K61824|]] 02:03, 1 November 2010 (UTC)

Nice idea, thanks. At the moment, I'm using tor for my bots, and sites like hidemyass for direct visits.

larron^{sicut fur in nocte} 08:30, 1 November 2010 (UTC)

Question

Do you need any help with all your charts and stuff? Somebody mentioned that you might, and I might need a tutorial. If not, give me a shout if you change your mind. Tyrannis^{An Iron, but caring, fist} 23:00, 1 November 2010 (UTC)

1. Thanks for your kind offer
2. I try to update our stats on RationalWiki:Active users and Conservapedia:Active users during the first days of a months - and generally, I'm successful :-)
3. Sorry, there is no tutorial at hand, just a couple of clumsy perl and R scripts...

larron^{sicut fur in nocte} 07:56, 2 November 2010 (UTC)

Dembski at it again

FYI. Although, you probably already knew that. sterile can opener 01:29, 5 November 2010 (UTC)

Thanks - I've seen it: I visit Uncommon Descent regularly. Though contributing to this blog is quite a pain: I'm under moderation, and my comments are delayed for one or two days. On a lively thread, they are then already buried under tons of material by the regulars... larron^{sicut fur in nocte} 10:45, 5 November 2010 (UTC)

I used to follow it more regularly, but it frustrates me too much. I try to look only once a week at there, Todd Wood's blog, and Evolution News and Views, and a few others. sterile can opener 01:13, 7 November 2010 (UTC)

At UD, I ignore any post by Denise O'Leary - and any comment of Kairosfocus and BornAgain77. That helps. My moniker over there is DiEb - the same which I use at PandasThumb/AntiEvolution. That may be a reason that I have to wait so long to get my comments through (otoh, Dembski et al. just don't like me :-)

I can't stand Evolution News, so I just look at the the sensuous curmudgeon's rehashed versions.

larron^{sicut fur in nocte} 11:33, 7 November 2010 (UTC)

New request

So Citizendium is now saying they need 350-500gb of space for hosting. That is huge. Are their articles really that many more/larger than ours? Is it edit history? Or is something else going on? To begin to figure that out is there a way to get data that shows both the size of the page and the number of edits it has had? Tmtoulouse (talk) 17:08, 13 November 2010 (UTC)

At the moment, I can give you only the data for their namespace main: excluding redirects, but including sub-pages, there are some 75,000 pages in this namespace. These tend to be quite long and I estimate the space the current revisions need to be 65GByte.

(RationalWiki has less than 5000 articles in main - their current revisions adding up to a little bit over 7GByte._{does this sound right?} That's not a good comparison, as our longest pages are not in the main space)

I'll be able to say something about the revisions later on.

I can't say anything about deleted pages: didn't they start as a fork of wikipedia, and then got rid of the legacy? I don't know... But this would occupy a lot of space..

larron^{sicut fur in nocte} 18:06, 13 November 2010 (UTC)

300gb is just sooo big....I don't get it. I am trying to figure out if they switched to mysql and upgraded the software/tables if it would get them a reduction or if they are legitimately just that huge of a database. Tmtoulouse (talk) 18:11, 13 November 2010 (UTC)

I tend to agree... BTW, they want to allow for moderate growth - wasn't there some prediction by Sanger once? larron^{sicut fur in nocte} 18:30, 13 November 2010 (UTC)

Active users

Did I miss something [4]? Tmtoulouse (talk) 21:05, 18 November 2010 (UTC)

active editors at CP

• with the update of the software at RW and CP, a new feature was introduced: you can get a list of cp:Special:ActiveUsers (resp. Special:ActiveUsers)
• at the same time, the text for the definition changed, it reads: (Users who have performed an action in the last 91 days) - again the same for RW and CP.
• however, at RW the period for calculating the number of active users is still 7 days, not 91 days, resulting in some 200 active editors.
• At first CP also sticked to the shorter period - which lead to some confusion.
• now - and you seem to be the first to spot it - CP has changed the definition: it fits the 91 days period, resulting in 246 active editors.

larron^{sicut fur in nocte} 21:23, 18 November 2010 (UTC)

Bah how to change the text...Tmtoulouse (talk) 21:34, 18 November 2010 (UTC)

Take another look, it says we have 200 active users in the past 91 days. We're using the longer period to. --Sir Onion ^{Kneel before my vegetable might!} 21:37, 18 November 2010 (UTC)

Except we are not. Apparently there is a disassociation between the description text and the actual days used. Tmtoulouse (talk) 21:38, 18 November 2010 (UTC)

active editors at RW - 1,7,28 & 90 days

Indeed, otherwise our number would be in the 500s. larron^{sicut fur in nocte} 21:49, 18 November 2010 (UTC)

How do you do that?

Looking at File:Pie-Citizendium-2010.png, I'd be really interested in knowing how to do that? Mind sharing? :) ^EXTERMINATE 17:03, 20 November 2010 (UTC)

No, I absolutely don't mind! Basically, it's done in two steps:

• first, I gather the date (like I described it for Conservapedia)
• then, I use R for some basic descriptive statistics - and to create the pics.

larron^{sicut fur in nocte} 20:20, 20 November 2010 (UTC)

help!

Our "active users" stat doesn't seem to actually be tracking only 7 days, any guess on what it is actually using? Tmtoulouse (talk) 07:06, 29 November 2010 (UTC)

Special:statistics said 7 days because you made it explicitly say 7 days, instead of $1, which would be replaced by the configuration option. The option that controls it right now is mediawikiwiki:Manual:$wgRCMaxAge, which is 91 days, but in 1.17 it will change to mediawikiwiki:Manual:$wgActiveUserDays, which is 30 days by default. -- Nx / talk 07:18, 29 November 2010 (UTC)

Except it is not 91 days either. Tmtoulouse (talk) 13:56, 29 November 2010 (UTC)

Do you mean you actually checked the number of users who have done an edit in the last 91 days and it doesn't match the number shown on Special:statistics? Or what? -- Nx / talk 19:36, 29 November 2010 (UTC)

(EC)

Active Editors

act. ed., 14 days

act. ed., 14 days

This pic suggests that we are looking definitely at more than 7 days, but less than 28 days - or even 30 days!

Judging from Special:ActiveUsers, I'd say we're tracking a fortnight at the moment.

Therefore, I produced two pics for the active editors over 14 days. At the moment, Special:Statistics counts 266 active editors, while the pics include 228 editors for Sat, Nov 27, 2010. The difference could be explained by editors who performed other actions than commenting (especially account creation).

larron^{sicut fur in nocte} 19:44, 29 November 2010 (UTC)

(EC) Hm, maybe it's counting them from the MW upgrade, if so it'll eventually reach 91 days and stop there. I'll take a look at the code to see what's going on. -- Nx / talk 19:47, 29 November 2010 (UTC)

Hmmmm, my current pet theory is that it is tracking 91 days from the time that we installed the software. Tmtoulouse (talk) 19:45, 29 November 2010 (UTC)

And discards previous edits? Could be - I can check this. When did the update happen? larron^{sicut fur in nocte} 19:49, 29 November 2010 (UTC)

I ran a script to recalculate the stats, but it didn't exactly work (active users is -1 now) -- Nx / talk 19:56, 29 November 2010 (UTC)

hypothetical numbers

Just to test Trent's hypothesis: here is the calculation for the active editors (making at least one comment over the last 91 days), if we discard all edits made before Nov 14, 2010.

Do you remember such numbers for the last days? larron^{sicut fur in nocte} 20:00, 29 November 2010 (UTC)

When we upgraded though our active users didn't go down. So my revised hypothesis is that it is actually 7 days prior to when the upgrade occurred. So that it was keeping a "7 days" tally up until the upgrade, and then has merely been adding on to that. Tmtoulouse (talk) 20:01, 29 November 2010 (UTC)

Yes, because the previous setting was 7 days. -- Nx / talk 20:06, 29 November 2010 (UTC)

Ok, I fixed another bug, and ran the script - it now says 268... -- Nx / talk 20:08, 29 November 2010 (UTC)

Interesting. We'll see whether it raises to 500 over the next days: our number of active editors for 91 days... larron^{sicut fur in nocte} 20:17, 29 November 2010 (UTC)

Likely wouldn't hit that till February though. Tmtoulouse (talk) 20:19, 29 November 2010 (UTC)

Actually, no. I looked at the code of Special:ActiveUsers: What it does is basically get all the user names from the recent changes table which goes back 91 days. I think it leaves out users with active blocks. Special:ActiveUsers has a little over 250 (using the pager), so 268 should be correct. -- Nx / talk 20:20, 29 November 2010 (UTC)

Ok, scratch that. A select count(distinct rc_user_text) from rw_recentchanges; returns 528... I'll try to figure out why activeusers is wrong... -- Nx / talk 20:23, 29 November 2010 (UTC)

Ah, of course, it doesn't count IPs, that makes it 321, minus the spambots who are blocked, and that's how you get 268. -- Nx / talk 20:26, 29 November 2010 (UTC)

That is sort of an interesting stat in and of itself, with anonymous users appearing to be a significant source of contributions. Now of course a lot of those are probably users that didn't log in. But still...Tmtoulouse (talk) 20:28, 29 November 2010 (UTC)

Indeed: still.... My numbers include only real editors making comments - no log activity, no IPs. We should have something over 500 for active editors over the last 91 days, ~260 for active editors over the last 28 days, and roughly 180 - 200 for the last week. larron^{sicut fur in nocte} 21:05, 29 November 2010 (UTC)

$wgRCMaxAge changed in MW 1.16 too. I don't know how much it was before, but now it should be 91 days. So our recent changes table is simply not long enough, the oldest timestamp is 20101107130420. -- Nx / talk 21:10, 29 November 2010 (UTC)

Can we change $wgActiveUserDays? Before the update, it was 7, now it is probably 30 (the default setting, we will know more in 16 days :-)...

The way to calculate the active editors seem to have changed: earlier, it would not have been possible to get the list via the table of the recent changes, as this was to short for some settings of $wgActiveUserDays... larron^{sicut fur in nocte} 21:19, 29 November 2010 (UTC)

Word length per article

LArron, is it possible with the data you have to calculate word length per article for citizendium?

With my current data, no. Citizendium has already a rudimentary word count: cz:CZ:Statistics#Word_count - though it lacks some pretty diagrams :-) larron^{sicut fur in nocte} 09:39, 8 December 2010 (UTC)

Yes hmmm only 140 odd words per article. That's roughly a stub with three sentences, and getting smaller. Even though number of articles picked up in the last month, the actual size of all them has continued to decrease. FreeThought (talk) 10:24, 8 December 2010 (UTC)

As promised

First there's a module to return wigo entries with sum and total number of votes:

http://rationalwiki.org/w/api.php?action=query&list=wigo&wigoprefix=wigo&wigolimit=50

The query-continue node tells you that there's more and how to continue, in this case by adding wigostart=109 to the query

http://rationalwiki.org/w/api.php?action=query&list=wigo&wigoprefix=wigo&wigolimit=50&wigostart=109

This module also has a month and year parameter like bestof, but it's best not to use it because it's not exactly what you'd expect it to be: like bestof, it counts only the votes from that month/year, so for example if a wigo has 10 votes in september and another 20 votes in october, with wigomonth=09 it would only return count=10 and the sum of those first ten votes. Instead you can use the wigovote module to get the timestamps of individual votes and work with that. E.g. you can safely assume that the timestamp of the first vote is roughly equal to when the wigo was added. However, some of the timestamps before we upgraded to MW1.14 are incorrect, I think Trent's version of wigo didn't record timestamps, and I gave the votes that didn't have one the same timestamp. You can use the wvid parameter to select votes of a particular wigo entry, e.g.:

http://rationalwiki.org/w/api.php?action=query&list=wigovotes&wvid=wigo3321&wvlimit=50

Or you can use prefix:

http://rationalwiki.org/w/api.php?action=query&list=wigovotes&wvprefix=wigo&wvlimit=50

There's an issue with this module, if a wigo entry receives more than limit votes at the exact same second (so that the timestamp is identical), the wvcontine parameter will not work. To show you what I mean:

http://rationalwiki.org/w/api.php?action=query&list=wigovotes&wvid=wigo318&wvlimit=10&wvdir=newer

You can see the timestamps of the first several votes are identical (this is because of the timestamp issue I mentioned above, though it has occurred "naturally" as well). Note that the third vote is a -1 Now if we limit it to two, we get this:

http://rationalwiki.org/w/api.php?action=query&list=wigovotes&wvid=wigo318&wvlimit=2&wvdir=newer

And using the continue value we get this:

http://rationalwiki.org/w/api.php?action=query&list=wigovotes&wvid=wigo318&wvlimit=2&wvdir=newer&wvcontinue=wigo318%7C2008-09-01T00:00:00Z

Which is incorrect, since the third vote was a -1. The problem is that the primary key consists of the poll id and the voter's IP, and I can't use the latter for continue, because that would essentially allow anyone to see who voted for what. But this isn't an issue if you use limit > 100 (This is the largest in the database, and it's unlikely to be surpassed). -- Nx / talk 16:22, 13 December 2010 (UTC)

The wigovotes module also has a wvmin and wvmax parameter to filter which votes are returned, e.g. for wigos you'd want to use -1 and 1. The same database is used for the multipoll, slider and checkbox extensions, but they prefix the poll id with 'multi', 'slider' and 'check' (I think) automatically, and there's probably some leftover junk, and people screwing up the poll id and stuff like that. And of course you'll find the description of all the parameters in api.php -- Nx / talk 16:27, 13 December 2010 (UTC)

Thank you so much! That's very satisfactory - I hope I find some time over the weekend to have a closer look at our wigos...

larron^{sicut fur in nocte} 15:46, 14 December 2010 (UTC)

Active Users

Hey, I love the work you do to keep RW:AU up-to-date, thanks for putting the time in. I was wondering if, from January 2011, the table could posted twice: In its current form, total edit count, and then just mainspace edits? Interested? ^EXTERMINATE 16:28, 2 January 2011 (UTC)

Something like that? Here, only contributions to non-talk namespaces are counted. So, it can be done, but I'm not seeing the point, I'm afraid.

# 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

User Prior Jan 10 Feb 10 Mar 10 Apr 10 May 10 Jun 10 Jul 10 Aug 10 Sep 10 Oct 10 Nov 10 Dec 10 Total Average edits /day Recent edits /day Verdict Blue 413 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 447 440 1642 841 291 4075 4 30.2 Übermensch Human 24876 529 388 877 787 980 624 724 620 721 1054 467 25 32672 24.8 16.8 Hyperactive Armondikov 5429 440 256 324 428 865 481 1209 595 719 697 543 498 12484 12.1 18.9 Hyperactive Tyrannis 11 2 54 261 0 4 98 1 35 30 330 1047 70 1943 5.3 15.7 Hyperactive Psygremlin 796 94 58 83 162 193 28 186 227 306 216 165 125 2639 2.6 5.5 Very active Nx 5319 278 507 333 443 801 123 36 68 150 145 340 154 8697 11.9 6.9 Very active Capturebot2 2440 523 266 236 283 356 370 303 427 276 334 370 259 6443 10.2 10.5 Hyperactive Dalek 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 12 87 515 60 674 6.2 7.2 Very active Onion 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 366 611 558 210 0 1745 14.4 8.3 Very active Weaseloid 4539 201 260 241 69 182 155 187 4 53 226 200 45 6362 7.3 5.1 Very active Total 247285 8746 8453 9243 9757 13985 8374 8958 11858 8652 9631 9691 5805 360509

And here the version for Conservapedia:

# 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

User Prior Jan 10 Feb 10 Mar 10 Apr 10 May 10 Jun 10 Jul 10 Aug 10 Sep 10 Oct 10 Nov 10 Dec 10 Total Average edits /day Recent edits /day Verdict Conservative 16317 87 192 240 362 844 450 752 3274 1214 479 703 1137 26051 18.5 25.2 Hyperactive Aschlafly 28532 384 354 265 484 355 634 509 1294 360 618 698 428 34915 23.3 19 Hyperactive TK 7937 200 307 256 244 386 503 398 860 442 454 580 186 12753 9.3 13.3 Hyperactive Jpatt 6353 205 231 299 199 208 205 240 730 220 346 338 175 9749 7 9.3 Very active Karajou 9853 637 97 99 170 69 289 189 509 57 65 73 676 12783 9.2 8.8 Very active Ed Poor 16224 443 246 149 134 31 44 169 213 185 228 263 121 18450 13.4 6.7 Very active RobSmith 11852 30 346 584 75 417 200 175 112 258 281 168 67 14565 10.5 5.6 Very active JakeRMurrin 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 84 128 361 5 578 6.1 5.4 Very active Joaquín Martínez 4541 566 606 663 143 231 9 16 0 18 64 40 339 7236 10.5 4.8 Very active Chippeterson 3218 295 78 78 44 77 58 29 48 32 26 210 9 4202 3.3 2.7 Active Total 458990 8126 4724 5254 4594 5288 4689 5033 12429 3620 3388 4316 3908 524506

larron^{sicut fur in nocte} 17:52, 2 January 2011 (UTC)