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What's the minimum size of towns/villages/neighbourhoods that ram-bot goes down to?
I ask as there's been some discussion of whether we should have individual articles on topics that effect only a few people (eg obscure albums, obscure people, etc), and was wondering if we should take a similar approach to obscure villages.

I was also wondering if you'd fixed the St. Albans, Maine -> Saint Albans, Maine bug/feature/issue I mentioned above.
Thanks. Martin 16:48 12 Jun 2003 (UTC)

The minimum size is 0 inhabitants and rightly so. There are plenty of historically significant places where no-one officially lives but many people either work, recreate or visit due to some site of interest in them. Many mining operations, for example, are US Census places but no-one lives there. Obscurity should not really be that important of a criterion for us including things - the only thing that should matter is the confirmability of information presented in the article. That does severely limit the amount of obscure material we have but does allow some obscure stuff that can be confirmed (such as anything the Rambot does). --mav
Seems like they might stand some editing though - the auto-generated demographics section is going to be of limited interest for a place with only one occupant... ;-) Is there anyway I could get a complete list of ram-bot articles with, say, ten or fewer people? I've put the ones I've found on List of places with less than ten people. Martin

I was not aware of the St. Albans problem, however, I do know that I fixed the problem of a redirect (at least I think so!). I'll make sure that I recheck it, but I am sure I don't overwrite it anymore. -- RM

An anonymous person claims that Windsor, Colorado is in Weld County, Colorado, rather than Larimer County, Colorado as the Wikipedia currently has it. I wouldn't have a clue, but I thought I should report it to you, since you're doing these things. Incidentally, while I'm on the subject, I don't suppose that it would be possible to have your bot write things like [[Larimer County, Colorado|Larimer County]], [[Colorado]] instead of [[Larimer County, Colorado]], would it? That way we could go directly from a town page to a state page without having to go via the county page. That is, if you ever set the rambot off again... -- Oliver P. 04:48 13 Jun 2003 (UTC)

The town is actually located in both counties. I cited their own website in the article as a source of this data. The census bureau may just have picked one to use or some other reason that I don't know. This is just one of many special cases that locals who know the area find from time to time. I don't claim that the census bureau is totally accurate or that it does not make certain assumptions that people don't like. Also, the bot has been running lately (check the user contributions for Rambot), but its edits are hidden from view so that it does not clutter up the display of recent changes. It would be very easy to change from the one style to the other. Maybe if you are not the only person who likes the idea we can change it. -- RM

I was wondering if the size information on Carol Stream, Illinois was correct. I live there, and 9 square miles seems a bit too small -- Ilyanep

I don't know about your particular case, but you may be seeing the houses of people who live outside the city limits. Also, the town boundaries may not be a perfect square 3 miles on a side; it might gerrymander around the built-up area of the town. GUllman

While this may be the case, it is surely not the only possibility. There are a plethora of ways to decide where a city begins and ends. This includes but is not limited to the legal chartered boundaries (which interestingly enough are now being debated with the onset of GPS technology), postal service designations, census bureau (sometimes this can be somewhat arbitrary) boundaries, and even voting districts. As this is the case, our data is cited to be the census bureau even though this may not be the legal boundaries. The "fix" is to add the legal boundaries if they are different. This may actually be done in the future by the rambot. -- RM
Great! -- Ilyanep

Oops. message for you at user talk:Rambot. Koyaanis Qatsi 03:58 21 Jun 2003 (UTC)

I looked, and added to it.  :-) Koyaanis Qatsi

Also along the lines of "Spellbot", see the question at the bottom of Wikipedia talk:Boilerplate text. Someone's wondering if we can do something similar to make the capitalization of "External links" consistent. -- John Owens 20:47 23 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Basically there are a number of things that should or could be done automatically. With regards to the geographic articles on cities and counties I would do a widespread replace of certain wordings and capitilizations and so forth to make things consistent. So I was not planning on creating a new "SpellBot" per se, but just extending what I have to do spelling in addition to what it does now. And doing external link capitilization would also be doable I think. -- RM

You have been nominated and approved for Adminship. All we now need is for you to either accept or decline the position. Please indicate your decision on Wikipedia:Requests for adminship. --mav

Congratulations, you have just been made a sysop! Sysops basically can't do anything: They cannot delete pages arbitarily (only obvious junk like "jklasdfl,öasdf JOSH IS GAY"), they cannot protect pages in an edit war they are involved in, they cannot ban signed in users. What they can do is delete junk as it appears, ban anonymous vandals, remove pages that have been listed on Votes for deletion for more than a week, protect pages when asked to by other members, and help keep the few protected pages there are, among them the precious Main Page, up to date.

Note that almost everything you can do can be undone, so don't be too worried about making mistakes. You will find more information at Wikipedia:Administrators, please take a look before experimenting with your new powers. Drop me a message if there are any questions or if you want to stop being a sysop (could it be?). Have fun! --Eloquence 03:01 28 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Woohoo! Lucky Me! -- RM

--- I believe there is a convention to use US, instead of U.S. Certainly I prefer it, the extra . are kinda unnecessary. Pizza Puzzle

Wikipedia has no convention on this. It's a style issue; some writers, editors, and publications prefer to leave the periods in to avoid possible confusion with the word "us"; some prefer to omit them to save space; some have either preference for other reasons.Vicki Rosenzweig

Then there should be a vote, so that there is a convention, so that we don't have to argue about it. Pizza Puzzle

The most proper would be U.S.A., but no one wants that :) Seriously though, U.S. is the proper thing to do gramatically since it is not an acronym and it is an abbreviation. Someone may think I am being picky, but I think that would should strive to make it gramatically proper even though "US" may be popular. That is merely my view though. -- RM
I prefer "US", personally. Mostly we seem to not use fullstops in abbreviations, even on US subjects such as the DMCA (not D.M.C.A.).
Both options are grammatically correct. Martin 00:36 29 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Understood. The DMCA was a coined term that is supposed to be an acronym. The U.S. (or US) is not used exclusively in said manner. Now granted the US is a very popular set of letters but it is possible that it might confuse a person who does not actually live in the U.S. The latter is clearer and much less prone to any sort of confusion. It is stupidly obvious. Like most things though, I don't think it matters too much in the long run. I like B.C. instead of B.C.E., but either one is accurate and either one is equally "religiously biased". Just some thoughts. I'll try to avoid edit wars. I have so far! -- RM

I prefer BC over B.C.. Pizza Puzzle

Funny! -- RM

Look at what I did to Quitman, Missouri. Should I be able to do this? And would it be a good idea if there was a script that did more of exactly this? (I can't do scripts myself. Sorry.)

I am guessing that if you can do scripts, you can input numbers as words.

I'll look into it. -- Ram-Man

Going back to an earlier comment regarding the USA census results, I have in fact added some colour to a few towns. Unfortunately, as a Brit who has spent a total of 10 days in the USA in Florida, I am probably the least qualified person to do this. I haven't seen anyone else adding anything, so it would be reassuring to know if any American contributors were building o the bare statistical facts as well.jimfbleak 12:07 Feb 22, 2003 (UTC)

Sure, see Topeka, Kansas amoung others. Many people do their home towns, and as I get tired of working on the Baha'i subjects, I'm doing eastern Kansas. It will be a while, there are a lot of towns in eastern KS and not a lot of wikipeidans. Did you do YOUR hometown? Not many Brit towns are in the database. Rick Boatright 17:16 Feb 22, 2003 (UTC)~
I've added info to dozens of towns, and I know others have been doing the same. --Infrogmation

Hrmm, I have looked at the FAQ and I don't think this is covered - I see that the bulk, in fact, nearly 100% of Rambot's new pages today have another page of a place with the same name but a different status. ie Geneva (city), New York and Geneva (town), New York - is this correct? It seems odd. I presume there must be some physical relation between these places, since the odds of this happening with every name are very low if it was just a case of 2 separate places with the same name... Evercat 02:08 3 Jul 2003 (UTC)

This has been a long overdue addition to many missing cities. The census bureau lists over a thousand places with two separate sets of data. In New York a "town" is contained within a "city" of the same name. They are two distinct entities with the same name. These are the only articles left to be made by the rambot. -- RM

Hrmm, one feels that the article about the embedded place should link to the article about the surrounding place... Evercat 02:41 3 Jul 2003 (UTC)

It would make sense, however, I do not know enough about these some 1,000 places to pinpoint the exact relationship between them. Some places are designated as a "Census Designated Place (CDP)" and as such *may* just be an arbitrary census bureau designation that has nothing to do with the legal city boundary... or maybe it really is a part-whole relationship. In otherwords, I am not in a position to tell what it is, so it will have to be up to locals to try and figure it out (if possible). Make sense? -- RM

Fair enough. Evercat 02:55 3 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I don't know if I've brought this to the right place...for every county/city article made, under demographics, the Asian American group is listed as [[Asia|Asian]], which should be listed instead as [[Asian American]]. Those links will offend someone! There are too many cities for me to edit manually, but if you can, please make this change. --Jiang 09:48 7 Jul 2003 (UTC)

First of all while we don't go out of our way to offend anyone here, I don't suspect that we change things just because someone is offended by them. For instance, many people do not like the usage of "A.D." versus "C.E" because of the former's association with the Christian religion. Nevertheless we use it anyway and I won't get into the politics of why we do it. Totally aside, however, is that when the U.S. Census Bureau uses the term "Asian" (and this is the term they use, I am merely restating it), they are not referring exlusively to "Asian Americans" but to *all* people of an Asian culture. This is an all encompassing category to include those who associate *themselves* with that race. They do not even need to be American citizens to be included, but merely those living at the place in question. Thus, "Asian American" would be factually incorrect, and thus we do not use it. If someone is offended by the facts, well there is nothing I can do about *that*. Remember that those who fill out the census bureau's forms have a choice as to which race they consider themselves. They are not forced to put one over another. Besides, American is a nationality/culture, not a race. -- Ram-Man 21:55 7 Jul 2003 (UTC)
So non-citzen Africans (illegal, international students?) are included in the category "from other races" and not "African American" in those statistics? --Menchi 22:16 7 Jul 2003 (UTC)
I'll check into this issue further, as I could very well be quite wrong in my assessment. I will get back when I learn more.... -- Ram-Man 00:21 8 Jul 2003 (UTC)
The census bureau divides people into six categories: "White", "Black or African American", "American Indian and Alaska Native", "Asian", "Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander", and "Some other race". Those are the breaks and people select whatever fits them best. In addition to this, people who put more than one race get their own category: "Two or more races". I guess that is for people who are mixed or something of that sort. Those are the terms used by the census bureau, so I think I used the same terms in the articles. The census bureau considers those who are citizens AND non-citizens, so yes those who are illegal residents are theoretically required to state that they live in such and such a place and are of such and such race (given the above categories). Oddly enough I chose the politically correct term "African American" and left out the term "Black", which would make the articles more accurate. To be correct I should either change "African American" to "Black" or just make it both. I picked one to save space which might have been a mistake. I hope this helps. -- Ram-Man 00:31 8 Jul 2003 (UTC)
When someone becomes an "American" is up to debate. Legally, it is when one becomes a citizen. But culturally, when? What if a person has resided here for 20 years? Are you to say he is not an American?
To be accurate, you should change it to "[[Asia|Asian]] or [[Asian American]]," and not simply "Asian". Otherwise, you are implying that all Asians in America belong in or come from Asia while other races do not. Otherwise, African American would be linked to Africa. I believe a white immigrant from Europe would likely check the white box. The point is--not all "Asians" are immigrants. The good number are "Asian Americans". But you've left them out! Although the census bureau may use those terms, I'm pretty sure they're not referring to real Asians--people living in Asia. Maybe "Americans" is left out to shorten the title. I hardly believe they equate that term with the continent, as is now linked. But if it is your concern that people who are not really Americans are included in that group, you must not treat the entire group as not being American. Both "Asian" and "Asian American" are needed. --Jiang 03:10 8 Jul 2003 (UTC)
I think it's an accuracy issue first and foremost, and as we know the federal government is hardly a standard on which to judge accuracy (they can't even decide how to spell Department of Veterans' Affairs, for example). Unless I'm completely misinformed, the vast majority of people covered in the census under "Asian" are in fact Asian-American, and those who aren't are at least living in America; to link to Asia from this stat is confusing, in my opinion. - Hephaestos 18:18 19 Jul 2003 (UTC)
So what should it say or link to? -- Ram-Man 22:13 19 Jul 2003 (UTC)
I'm tempted to link it to [[Asian American|Asian]] but I'm not positive about the demographics myself (although I'm almost positive that people on visas aren't counted in the census). Another possibility might be to link it to [[Asian (US Census)|Asian]] and stub out an article there explaining what that means; if it turns out the demographics are virtually the same as I suspect then Asian (US Census) could be made into a redirect to Asian American and we'd be little the worse off. - Hephaestos 23:23 19 Jul 2003 (UTC)
I found a publication at here that has the following definition for an "Asian"
“Asian” refers to those having origins in any of the original peoples of the Far East, Southeast Asia, or the Indian subcontinent including, for example, Cambodia, China, India, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Pakistan, the Philippine Islands, Thailand, and Vietnam.
Now I don't know if this really qualifies as deserving an article. It is merely a definition. Maybe it should be placed on the Geographic references page, although that is not exactly the purpose of the article. There is also a definition of "Pacific Islander". So should it be included in its own article or just a subheading under the census bureau's reference? -- Ram-Man 23:34 19 Jul 2003 (UTC)
I found a better reference which defines everything there is to know about what they call "Race". So I think the more general question is, where do we put census related definitions? -- Ram-Man 23:50 19 Jul 2003 (UTC)
I'm guessing those would go well in United States Census Bureau, but that still wouldn't solve the cities-links problem, unless the articles were gone through to change African American, Hispanic etc. for consistency. - Hephaestos 23:56 19 Jul 2003 (UTC)
What I was originally thinking was to change all of the race links to wherever we decide to place the census bureau's definitions. I have not been keeping up with the discussion, but some things (like the U.S. Constitution) are not meant to be changed. In a similar way these definitions are not going to change (at least not often) and maybe are not appropriately placed in the main article. I don't know that there is a good alternative. Maybe putting them in their own page is best and then we can move them elsewhere as we see fit. Then the race links can all point to that page until we decide whether or not to move it elsewhere. -- Ram-Man 00:01 20 Jul 2003 (UTC)
These aren't Constitution-style set-in-stone things, they change with every census. (I'm pretty sure "Negro" was a checkbox in 1960.) The distinction between "Hispanic" and "Latino" is very recent.
That said, I like the idea of putting them on their own page and moving them as we see fit, due to the fluidity of wiki itself. By definition they can only change once every ten years. - Hephaestos 00:30 20 Jul 2003 (UTC)
That's great. I'll make up the article and eventually run the bot on the article to do the update. I do think that we should keep the wording used by the census bureau at "Asian" since the bureau counts anyone who is Asian, not just those who are American. -- Ram-Man 00:47 20 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I have been participating in the creation of small highlighted maps of U.S. counties (see discussion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject U.S. Counties). Since there are many hundreds of these, we were wondering about ways to upload them. Is there any way rambot can help us with this? As a rough estimate, there will be around 20 to 30MB of images. I'd appreciate your suggestions. Thanks! -- Wapcaplet 17:43 7 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I've never uploaded anything using the rambot, so I don't know what this would entail. Since it requires uploading, it is a different animal from what the rambot has currently done. As such, I don't suspect that I can easily do this without some changes. And I am quite sure no one wants to wait around for that to happen since I don't know when I might have time (and desire) to do it. I have a large list of things to do with the rambot, and they get done periodically when I get the inspiration. That could be days or months. In otherwords, don't count on me, but if no one wants to do it, eventually I could add the feature to it. -- RM
Wapcaplet, can you put your images on the Web somewere? I might be able to do something... -- The Anome 21:59 7 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Hi there,

Apologies about deleting your references from schizophrenia article. I was just concerned that since it is a big article (and was one already) not having numbered references made them as good as useless as there is no indication as to which part of the text they refer. Thanks very much for numbering it though. I realise that it is uncommon for encyclopaedia articles to use numbered references but I think it's important when articles get particularly big or they discuss particularly important or controversial subjects such as medical conditions.

I was hoping that the first bit of the article would act as a summary without references, so the casual reader could get a good understanding whilst the main body of the text would go into more detail. If you don't mind I'll replace the repeated bit of text you removed, but perhaps in summary form ! I realise having text repeated verbatim isn't ideal.

Apologies for deleting the tobacco information, that was unintended and pure carelessness on my part.

At the moment, I'm working down through the article, fact checking, referencing and rewriting where necessary. I'll review the whole thing when it's done (as I'm sure other people will).

And thanks for joining the psychopathology project.

Best wishes, -- Vaughan

On the subject of U.S. Counties: The Anome has come up with an automated upload method (see his talk page for discussion), but we'll still need a way to insert the Wiki-code for each image into the county articles. Can rambot do this? I'm thinking something like:

<div style="float:right; margin: 0 0 1em 1em;">[[Image:Map_of_$STATE_highlighting_$COUNTY_County.png]]</div>

There are a couple states that don't follow this naming convention (Alaska has boroughs and census areas instead of counties, Lousiana has Parishes), but those could pretty easily be done by hand if necessary.

Apparently there was some discussion about where to place the maps. I think at the top of the article would be fine, but Mav suggests using the empty space adjacent to the list of adjoining counties. Whatever is easiest. All of the images are a consistent 300 pixels wide, but some of them are taller than others. Let me know if you can help with this! Thanks. -- Wapcaplet 13:30 12 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I can probably do it. Won't have time for a few days though. -- RM
No problem. User:The Anomebot is uploading them at the rate of one per four minutes; it will be several days before the rest of the states are even ready to upload. Take your time :) -- Wapcaplet 22:04 12 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Butte, Montana and Silver Bow, Montana are two separate towns in Silver Bow County, Montana. However it appears that the census runs them together in some strange way (maybe even lumping the entire county together!) as Butte-Silver Bow, Montana, Butte-Silver Bow (town), Montana, and Butte-Silver Bow (balance), Montana. The Butte-Silver Bow county website (Butte-Silver Bow Local Government) might help resolve some confusion.

Hope this helps some. -- RTC 01:20 8 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I was already somewhat aware of this problem. It appears as if both towns are physically separate but are joined in terms of government. The census bureau possibly takes the whole thing as under one government and hence one body. But then again I am not sure what articles match up with what physical boundaries. I guess I or someone else will have to figure this out some more. -- RM
I found another detail: "In 1977 Butte consolidated with Silver Bow County as Butte-Silver Bow city, sharing one government headed by an elected chief executive and other officials." on The City Of Butte . Com . -- RTC 01:41 8 Jul 2003 (UTC)
So my guess is since 1977 the entire county government is run by the Butte "city government" as one entity. Thus the strange census data. -- RTC 01:50 8 Jul 2003 (UTC)
A brief analysis of some of the stats seems to indicate that Silver Bow County, Montana and Butte-Silver Bow (town), Montana are identical and Butte-Silver Bow, Montana and Butte-Silver Bow (balance), Montana are identical. I don't understand the delta between the numbers though. The differences look funny to me (way too low for the town separate from the rest of the county) as IIRC Butte is the largest "city" in the county. Maybe one data set is Butte and the other is the rest of the county, but why it would then be repeated in this odd way, confuses me. I'll do some more research on this. -- RTC 02:32 8 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Well, I think I may have it, but I am only about 90% sure as there are things that still don't make sense.

Viewed this way the population data makes sense, with the town of Butte having a population of 33,892 and the combined City/County of Butte-Silver Bow having a population of 34,606. There are apparently very few people living outside of the town of Butte itself. However the area data doesn't make sense any way I look at it, all four articles give areas covering roughly the entire Silver Bow County.

I have checked population data for both the town and the county using Montana NRIS On-Line Interactive Map Builder. This is a very helpful site based on data from the census and other sources. -- RTC 09:13 8 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Yes! I have it now. The area data that didn't make sense before now does. Apparently when the Butte City government merged with the Silver Bow County government to form the single entity of Butte-Silver Bow, it appears that Butte annexed ALL of the unincorporated land remaining in the county. So for all practical purposes (except for a few small towns that were already incorporated) the city of Butte now fills Silver Bow County. Somewhat like San Francisco, California completely fills San Francisco County, California, but without containing other separately incorporated towns in the county.

I would suggest doing the following:

-- RTC 21:38 16 Jul 2003 (UTC)

OK, I finally decided to do it myself as follows:

Please review these changes. OK? -- RTC 22:59 23 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Ok I shall try. I am having some internet connectivity problems, so I have only been even more part time around here until that gets resolved! But I will glance at it when I have the time and internet. -- Ram-Man 11:04 24 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Unfortunately, I kind of did my favorites first. *grin* So they're not in any real order. On the other hand if I keep at it I can probably have them all done manually in a couple of weeks or so. Although I certainly wouldn't turn down help on the project. (I think it's better done manually too, I've found some glitches here and there in the uploads.) - Hephaestos 02:34 26 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I can do a number of automated checks. First of all, if an article already contains a picture I will look at it manually. If it doesn't then I will try to check to make sure that the picture exists with that name and if not do it manually. But we could use your editing skills for other things rather than grunt work. I created 90% or so of the county articles in the first place. I generated the articles using software but I manually cut and pasted the stuff into the some 2000 or so articles. It took me weeks. When I made the bot it added the 30,000 cities in a *very* short time in comparison. Plus doing things manually with a cut and paste action is prone to errors in ways that a bot isn't (interestingly enough). Let's just say that you should save yourself as much work as possible, since I have to do a bot scan over all the articles anyway. -- Ram-Man 02:44 26 Jul 2003 (UTC)
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