My user-name
My user-name for many years was user:John Maynard Friedman, which was my twist on an occasional urban myth about my home city, Milton Keynes. Despite the myth, MK is not named after Milton Friedman and John Maynard Keynes. The name is centuries old and comes from that of an ancient village, now part of the new city. Though it could be that JMK is descended from the de Cahaignes, the Anglo-Norman family who once owned these parts.
Such a long-winded name seemed like a good idea at the time but had become irritating and I had been abbreviating it to 𝕁𝕄𝔽 in my sig for some time. It is now my user name.
The typeface I have used is blackboard bold (which was created for mathematicians, so I am an interloper). For its use as an identifier, I assert prior art over Twitter 2.0.
Talk to me
Leave a message on my talk page ->
GAs and DYKs
Good Articles that I helped reach that status
Did You Know features from these GAs
- On 13 June 2019, Did you know was updated with ... that "one of the biggest concentrations of Bronze Age gold known from Britain" was found in archaeological investigations during the development of Milton Keynes?
- On 25 March 2021, Did you know was updated with ... that until the Calendar (New Style) Act 1750 was passed, the new year began on 25 March in England, Wales, Ireland, and Britain's American colonies?
- On 15 September 2023, Did you know was updated with .. that John Ogilby saved the manuscript of his translation of the complete works of Virgil from destruction in a shipwreck by wrapping it in a waterproof cloth?
- On 27 March 2024, Did you know was updated with ... that in addition to his work as a scientist, Robert Hooke was an architect who designed the Monument to the Great Fire of London so that it could also have a practical value as a scientific instrument?
My useful links
Citations
- Multiple pages in the same sourcebook - WP:IBID and WP:CITEPAGE (help), especially Help:Shortened footnotes (using Harvard citations).
- Template:Google books
- References and footnotes: WP:References, WP:Footnotes (use {{subst:Footnotes|100%}} )
- Template:Refn and #tag:ref
- templates: efn and notelist
- Use Refill to fix bare references see User:Zhaofeng Li/reFill
- Dead links restored using archive.org, archive.is or ghostarchive
- put longwinded cites in References section rather than embedded:
- {{reflist|refs= then
- <ref name=
- Chasing down all instances of an unreliable or WP:LINKVIO source: {{duses}} (e.g., answering-islam.org
)
- Getting a precise page citation from Google Books: see wp:GBOOKS.
- use
|display-authors=etal
in cite books - Inflation: how to specify as of when: Equivalent to about £{{inflation|UK-GDP|0.15|1700|r=0}} million in {{Inflation/year|UK-GDP}}.{{Inflation/fn|UK-GDP}} yields
Equivalent to about £25 million in 2023.[1]
Good practice is to include {{Inflation/fn}} in the note as it explains what index is being used. - link to other language WPs: {{ill}}
- using {{cite book}} in "further reading" can throw up false positives. Add
ref=none
to the string to avoid. - date={{season|summer|1989}}
- template:r is a quick way to shorten named refs and include chapter/section/page numbers.
- Also used to combine a number of named citations. e.g., {{r|Hsu 2023|Paddison 2023|McCarthy 2023|Sethi 2023}}
- When a Wikipedia article makes reference to a work that contains multiple chapters by different authors, bibliographies and reference sections can look rather cluttered: the solution is {{harvc}}
- User:SMcCandlish/How to use the sfnp family of templates
Bare URLs
Footnotes
- Poole, Robert (1995). Calendar Reform in eighteenth-century England. Oxford Academic Past & Present. p. 117, footnote 77.
or
- Poole, Robert (1995). "'Give us back our eleven days!': Calendar Reform in eighteenth-century England". Past & Present. 149 (1): 95–139. doi:10.1093/past/149.1.95. p. 117, footnote 77.
Got title, need ISBN, publisher etc
Following a link from an isbn= took me to worldcat.org and I found that it is far better than Google (or Amazon) when doing the reverse – I have a title but I need its ISBN. It also gives publisher, location, date, translator – just what one needs to complete a template:cite book.
Historic England
- eg: Historic England (4 November 1993). "Bradwell Bury: a moated site and associated manor house remains at Moat House (1011298)". National Heritage List for England. Retrieved 6 April 2020.
VCH
- Philip Riden and Charles Insley, ed. (2002), "Parishes : Furtho", A History of the County of Northampton, vol. 5. The Hundred of Cleley, Victoria History of the Counties of England, pp. 127–142, retrieved 28 June 2020
- Page, William, ed. (1927). "Parishes : Cold Brayfield". A History of the County of Buckingham. Victoria History of the Counties of England. Vol. 4. London: Constable & Co. Ltd. pp. 323–327.
Statutes at large
- Resource: The Acts of Parliament at Alsatia
Geography
- "Key to English place names". Institute for Name-Studies, University of Nottingham. Retrieved 11 April 2022.
Maps and mapping
- NLoS Find maps by place, down to 1:2500.
- template:cite map
- <ref>{{cite map |author = Ordnance Survey | title =OS Six-inch England and Wales, 1842-1952 |map = Buckinghamshire XV (includes: Bletchley; Bow Brickhill; Walton.) | map-url = https://maps.nls.uk/view/102340115 |date = 1885 |scale = 1:10,560 |publisher = Ordnance Survey |via=National Library of Scotland }}</ref>
- Wikipedia talk:WikiProject UK geography/Archive 27#ordnancesurvey references re care to avoid WP:SYNTH
Getting metro area population from NOMIS
- https://www.nomisweb.co.uk/ then section headed Local Area Report
- Name of urban area and then Search ... Example: Bristol
- Select the relevant built up area ... Example: Built-up area (villages, towns or cities), ...Bristol (in South West Region) (caution! not "Built-up area sub divisions (town or city sub divisions)").
- Get the GSS E number from the response ... Example: "This report covers the characteristics of people and households in Bristol Built-up area in South West (GSS code E34004965)".
- Plug into template:NOMIS2011 ... Example {{NOMIS2011|id=E34004965|title=Bristol BUA}} produces UK Census (2011). "Local Area Report – Bristol BUA (E34004965)". Nomis. Office for National Statistics. which reports "There were 617,280 usual residents as at Census day 2011".
- Wrap in ref tags and attach to figure in table.
Book sources
- Wikipedia talk:Book sources
- fix harv errors for unused citations by moving them to a Further Reading and appending
ref=none
to the citation.
Finding CS1/2 errors
- String
CS1 maint:
- String
= ignored
Wlinking to an older instance of a page
- template
- diff
- {{Diff|page|diff|oldid|label}}
- with this diff, xyz
- template
- oldid
"[ ... ] You can also use the {{oldid}}
template: my sandbox or go through a special page my sandbox." Gospel according to Redrose64 🌹
Antivandalism and other warnings
- Wikipedia:WikiProject User warnings
- Category:Standardised user warning templates
- Wikipedia:Requests for page protection
- Wikipedia:Administrator intervention against vandalism to request block
- Redaction: WP:REDACT (aka notcensored, go away); Wikipedia:Revision deletion for libel; WP:Oversight e.g. for outing or doxing (prob via an admin, I assume).
- Wikipedia:Disruptive editing
- WP:Advocacy
- WP:AOBF (Accusing others of bad faith)
- WP:BMB Bans apply to all editing, good or bad
- Request deletion of a page created solely for vandalism (eg talk page): put
{{db-g3}}
at the top of the page. - Wikipedia:Guidance for younger editors
- Earwig's Copyvio Detector (Toolforge)
Editing talk pages
{{od}} restart indent sequence {{Talk quote block}} for quotes in talk pages.
IP editors
- {{Shared IP advice}}
- {{subst:Xsign}} (wrapper for {{Unsigned}} and {{Unsigned IP}}). Takes input copied and pasted directly from the history tab as the first unnamed parameter. Don't incude the talk|contribs bit.
- {{esp}} if responding to requests for changes to semi-protected pages. use subst:
- Why create an account?
Obscure but useful links
- Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Character Table 1 Characters to avoid (and what to use instead)
- Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Icons generalised MOS:FLAGS esp wrt infoboxes
- Talk:Muhammad/FAQ images and honorifics
- Use–mention distinction Foundational concept of analytical philosophy, according to which it is necessary to make a distinction between using a word (or phrase) and mentioning it
- {{bots|deny=botname}} to fend off an overactive bot
- Product placement concerns: WP:NOTHATNOTE Trivial does not get hatnote. Obscure probably does is my reading.
- {{GBP}} for simplified {{inflation/UK}}: {{GBP|1000|1900|round=-2|about=yes|long=no}} => £1,000 (equivalent to about £136,700 in 2023) not for CapEx etc.
- Pareidolia – Perception of meaningful patterns or images in random or vague stimuli
- Veblen good – Luxury good for which the demand increases as the price increases
- {{set index}} midway between a bare disambig and a full list article.
- {{for multi}} hatnote template that produces a list of alternative uses for the title of the article
- to flush the cache
- Template:Div col
- User:SD0001/easy-merge for merging articles
- Wikipedia:Teahouse/Questions/Archive 1165#When writing an edit summary, is there a way to stop the enter key generating a "Publish"?
- It works!
- X v X (disambiguation): Judging by WP:DABNAME and WP:INTDABLINK, X(d) should redirect to X if X is also a disambig (no primary topic).
you can search any namespace - enter your search term in the search bar, choose "search for pages containing <search term>", then expand the "Search in" dropdown, where you can remove the article namespace and add the Wikipedia namespace instead.
─ Tollens- WikiNav (where do visitors go next, useful to identify WP:PRIMARYTOPIC).
- Template:Emoji presentation
- {{spaces}} for nbsp, thinspace, etc
- {{wiktionary redirect}} redirect to Wiktionary
- User:Cacycle/wikEd
- {{in title}}, e.g., All pages with titles containing Topic
- Wikipedia:Graphics Lab/Photography workshop for image clean-up, contrast/brightness issues etc.
Screen-reader ready
It just shouldn't rely on color and/or font alone; if it's marked up with
<kbd>...</kbd>
(which indicates keystrokes or other textual input, and is more loosely spec-defined than<code>...</code>
), that's a sufficient HTML/CSS handle for anyone with a screen reader to tell their software to do something specific when encountering that element. But if there's no specific element, just some CSS coloring and/or font-family on a span, all screen readers will ignore it as irrelevant visual fluff. That would mostly be a problem when the content coincides with an English word like a or I, though it would probably also affect punctuation characters (we need them to be interpreted as characters in and of themselves in these cases, not as part of the regular flow of the sentence; I think by default most screen readers would just ignore it as mis-placed punctuation (a typo), though some might even do something more wrong, e.g. misinterpret a single-quote character being presented as a glyph, as instead indicating the beginning of a quotation. While not everyone with a screen reader will do something to distinguish<kbd>
markup, at least they have the option, and it won't be dependent on using a unique-to-WP CSS class, either, so easier to deal with on their end.
Excerpt
Rather than outright copy the lead of another article, use {{excerpt}} to replicate it automagically.
Collapsible list
- Template:Collapsible list aka {{clist}}
Better disambiguation articles and See also lists
- {{anli}}, appends the short description (aka {{annotated link}}
- {{subst:AnnotatedListOfLinks| etc etc}} to convert a long See Also to use ALs.
but... Wikipedia talk:Short description/Archive 9#Length – 40 or 90 characters??
Trouble at t'mill
- Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)
- Wikipedia talk:Short description/Archive 9#Length – 40 or 90 characters??
- Wikipedia:Requests for oversight for enhanced revdels
Things to follow up
- Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2019 June 9#Category:Political correctness
- finish census ref in parishes (E)
- talk:Bracket
- Flesch–Kincaid readability tests
- {{chartab}} at talk:A
Footnotes
References
- ^ United Kingdom Gross Domestic Product deflator figures follow the MeasuringWorth "consistent series" supplied in Thomas, Ryland; Williamson, Samuel H. (2024). "What Was the U.K. GDP Then?". MeasuringWorth. Retrieved July 15, 2024.