User talk:Robin

Tidying This

I'm starting a discussion here because I'm having trouble navigating my way round the site -- which is surely a bad sign, considering how much time I spend here. There are at least 3 different groups of people to bear in mind when modifying this:

1. Casual browsers trying to find information
2. More advanced users who are not editors but who might one day become editors
3. Wikispooks Editors

Before talking about smaller points, perhaps it would be worth discussing, are these three equally important? Personally, I am inclined to make (2) the priority at the moment, intending to attract more editors.

Robin (talk) 15:57, 11 November 2013 (GMT)

Sorry - only just spotted this.

Piwik stats show that the bulk of site visitors get here from a Google search. They are followed by fairly regular links posted on Reddit ('Conspiracy' and 'Endless war' sub-Reddits mainly); then Twitter (I regularly tweet article and document links) then Facebook, then odd mentions on odd sites about specific subjects that sometimes bring a flood of brief visits. A single page accounts for around 15% of total site visits since it was posted 3 years ago - 9/11:Israel did it. It remains the top visited page nearly every day.

I agree it would be nice to have more editors. Site purpose would be more effectively advanced. I'm happy for you to exercise judgements over which group to prioritise on navigational matters. I do think a mandatory form for DocProv would be good when current mountain of work and mods is complete. Also, I have still not thought through the most effective way to employ semantic properties with categories. I'm still also preoccupied with timeline stuff - I am using the Sandbox wiki a lot now too --Peter P (talk) 21:56, 20 November 2013 (GMT)

I'm also mulling over a major main page revamp using SMW to select and present lists rather than the current mish-mash using both the 'News' and 'DynamicPageList' extensions. SMW can do all they currently do without defining any more properties - there are resource implications that I do not fully understand yet though --Peter P (talk) 11:37, 21 November 2013 (GMT)

Bots

Since any user can be made a member of the Bot group, I am unclear what the purpose of the two new users are - beyond their user pages being a logical place for discussing the use of bots anyway. Do you have any existing bot or bot framework in mind? --Peter P (talk) 07:58, 8 December 2013 (GMT)

The other main benefit of a separate user is the ability to keep statistics/edits clear. Today's User:UpgradeBot efforts are by a home baked PHP script adapted from this. Robin (talk) 13:22, 8 December 2013 (GMT)

SMW potential etc

The SMW query additions to William Blum David Guyatt John Pilger Sharmine Narwani and Mark Curtis provide insight into some of the potential for SMW use on Wikispooks. I have not altered any other author person pages yet because this needs a bit more thought. Such queries can themselves be saved and parameterised for use in templates. There are also many other output formats, the appearance of which can usually be tweeked with CSS, so best to settle on a bit of standardisation before taking this further. I also think we should delete all the named person categories in Category:Authors because they duplicate the SMW Property:Is author which is far more useful and are thus redundant - some of them can be converted straight into regular pages because they have page-like content already. There is also scope for dramatically pruning the current category tree and replacing with better considered SMW properties. - Lots of work and I want to be addressing content rather more - Hmmm --Peter P (talk) 09:43, 12 December 2013 (GMT)

I've done a couple of new templates and had a first pass at the above pages now - plus just one subject page Blood diamond. --Peter P (talk) 15:08, 12 December 2013 (GMT)

Greetings, so I added some documents regarding Larry McDonald and KAL-007, these do show up in the KAL article, but do not get linked with Larry McDonald, and I don't get it - there must have been enough time in between now for the server to update if that is needed. Can somebody please help me out here, what am I missing? Thanks! Sunvalley (talk) 22:34, 29 July 2019 (UTC)

I was puzzled, too. It may have been a reflected of the large size of this site resulting in slow updates. Anyway, I just fixed it by making some minor edits to the Larry McDonald page. This apparently spurred the software on to re-render the page. -- Robin (talk) 23:58, 29 July 2019 (UTC)

Ok, so it could be that the software does not touch the page for updates on SMWdocs regularly (or in timely manner), but after edits it does a refresh on that. I had this in the past here and there, so I will test it out in the future. Thanks again. Sunvalley (talk) 01:39, 30 July 2019 (UTC)

A couple of useful tools

1. php cache information
2. The RTRC facility accessible from the sidebar

--Peter P (talk) 10:18, 26 January 2014 (GMT)

Plus: Old server sub expires 10 February. I think I've got everything needed off of it. Is there anything you can think of before it vanishes?

And there IS still a date problem but a function of the latest Release of SMW Forms. If the day is not completed then an error is printed on the page, in red, right after the template info Expression error: Unexpected < operator.. As before, it's OK if just the year is completed or if day month and year are completed. See File:King Family File Transcript.pdf for an example. No sweat to wait for a fix with next release though --Peter P (talk) 15:58, 26 January 2014 (GMT)

Nothing springs to mind, if the scripts etc. are working OK on the new one. Best take a backup copy of everything else, just in case. Robin (talk) 16:13, 26 January 2014 (GMT)

Video display problem

Can you have a look at Template:MainPageVideoArchive and Template:MainPageVideo2 , neither of which display video correctly following your mods to Template:Video. The issue concerns the new subtext field and is apparent on The green fields of France video currently on the Main Page and first on Main Page/Videos. I've spent ages on it and can't figure it out. I need it working properly before changing the forms and doing something similar for the Main Page Images display and archive --Peter P (talk) 07:01, 13 September 2014 (IST)

Email

Just sent a message to your Unwelcome Guests account re system issues.

I also sent an email on 15-9-14. No reply needed to it but not sure if you received it. --Peter P (talk) 19:42, 26 September 2014 (IST)

Potentially useful tools

The Mobo project looks potentially useful for SMW development.

• This is a techie paper about it.
• This is a presentation.

Also, no reply to previous message or last 2 emails. Nothing earth-shattering but I think our comms really ought to be a bit better. --Peter P (talk) 12:01, 7 October 2014 (IST)

Is there still an issue with email?

No response to last 2-3 emails. Sent to robin-upton[at]robinupton.com and encrypted with the UG key --Peter P (talk) 08:12, 19 October 2014 (IST)

Hi Robin, what's the easiest way to message or mail you?

Server re-boot

FI. Just rebooted the server.

@ 16:45 ish RAM started to fill up, then virtual memory memory bound in less than 5 minutes! First time in 3 weeks. Still don't know what's causing it but now suspect the job queue when updating a page that has one of the Lua cite errors on it. --Peter P (talk) 17:01, 23 October 2014 (IST)

Suppressed Lockerbie evidence ignited 9/11 attacks

Robin, in moving the above WS article to User:Patrick Haseldine/Suppressed Lockerbie evidence ignited 9-11 attacks, you omitted the final sentence of the lede (which I've now corrected) and The 9/11 timeline (which I can't correct). Grateful if you could retrieve it and the rest of the Contents for me:

Contents [hide] 1 The 9/11 timeline 1.1 05:00 a.m. 1.2 06:00 a.m. 1.3 07:00 a.m. 1.4 08:00 a.m. 1.5 09:00 a.m. 1.6 10:00 a.m. 1.7 11:00 a.m. 1.8 12:00 p.m. 1.9 13:00 p.m. 1.10 14:00 p.m. 1.11 15:00 p.m. 1.12 16:00 p.m. 1.13 17:00 p.m. 1.14 18:00 p.m. 1.15 19:00 p.m. 1.16 20:00 p.m. 1.17 21:00 p.m. 1.18 22:00 p.m. 1.19 23:00 p.m. 2 References 3 Further reading 4 External links

Also, because 9/11 becomes 9-11 in the new title, it is difficult to navigate from the deleted article. Could you please therefore install a redirect from one to the other. Thank you.--Patrick Haseldine (talk) 15:37, 10 July 2015 (IST)

InfoGalactic articles

Pearse Redmond and Tom Secker have asked me to delete their articles I started on InfoGalactic so I am asking the administrators to do what I don't have privileges for. I don't know if I am betraying them, my conscience, or my efforts by telling you this. I'm a mixed up fanboy. You may scrape their InfoGalactic articles before they vanish or delete their Wikispooks articles as well. ~ JasonCarswell (talk) 21:43, 27 June 2017 (IST)

I was an admittedly enthusiastic fanboy of Pearse and Tom. After the admin of InfoGalactic, at my request, kindly deleted the articles I wrote, Pearse called me a troll and told me to fuck off (despite promising me a journal and some bonus shows) and Tom had become such an intolerable curmudgeon that I'd already ceased correspondence with him. I wasn't publishing anything that wasn't in their published work. I don't care about their feelings anymore. They are assholes that happen to do terrific work. ~ JasonCarswell (talk) 03:53, 23 July 2017 (IST)

Updating the Wiki

Hey Robin, are there any plans to update the Wikipedia to the newest version WikiMedia offers, so that it is more comparable in usability to Wikipedia? Things like mobile browser views and updated user interfaces make the site both more appealing to viewers and editors alike. LissanX (talk) 05:51, 24 September 2019 (UTC)

File deletion

Hi Robin, could you delete this file I accidentally uploaded? Unfortunately, I don’t know how to delete it myself or request deletion otherwise. — LissanX (talk) 00:54, 26 September 2019 (UTC)

Question

Robin, When you ask me something in my 'talk' page, are you able to see my answers there easily, or do I instead reply here on your 'talk' page?

Robin, Could you correct a misspelling in the headline for this guy, Cristopher Lincoln-Jones? His first name is Christopher."-- Terje (talk) 22:42, 23 October 2019 (UTC)

I promise I won't nag you too much more in the future, but could you see if you can get the membership metadata to work in the British-American Project?-- Terje (talk)

Integrity Initiative/Leak/4

I was thinking of uploading all the Integrity Initiative documents as text, like I did with this one Social Media as a vector for propaganda. Is the document layout I used OK, or can you show me a template document I can use for the other estimated 200-300 text files? -- Terje (talk)

I think that Document as you used it is correct, although the title must begin "Document:", to notify people that these are 3rd party documents that should not be changed. I would start with one or two small ones first and try to do them faithfully. i.e. Try and fill out as many parameters as possible, e.g. |subjects and perhaps |constitutes. -- Robin (talk) 09:50, 25 October 2019 (UTC)

Thanks for the edit

Hey Robin,

Saw your edit on ziad abdelnour page. Thank you, it looks good :) Need to learn from you, i have also created couple of pages, hope somebody makes it more nicer and crisper.

Thanks for your support.

are you on wikiepdeia as well? will follow you there as well :)

regards Indian Robin

made some new edit

Hey Robin,

made some new edits on ziad abdel khalil nour page, do check if its looking good. One thing i was confused was on the right hand panel which says "Criminal Charge" i did some research online but did not find any information on that. Probably its a violation of SEC act and not a criminal charge. Feel free to suggest any edits.

Also i need help in creating page of one Indian stock exchange violator which i want to publish but little scared of the repercussion. Can you help?

Regards Indian Robin

Integrity Initiative

Robin,

With this document: https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Document:Integrity_2018_Moldova_Cluster_%281%29, could change the name to the clearer: Integrity Initiative Activity Budget April 2018 - March 2019 instead of the misleading name given to it in the Anonymous pdf file? This is a fairly central document in the leaks.

Should I add metadata brackets like [ to names etc in the documents?

If you could help me get the format, etc right, I would really appreciate it. --Terje (talk)

Enthusiasm

I appreciate your enthusiasm to participate on newly edited pages, but I find it very frustrating having to iron out conflicts that halt me in my tracks. Perhaps consider waiting a several hours before diving in. I may be working on an edit for a few hours and that much makes it harder to untangle. This happened when I first joined in 2016, on my own user profile page no less, and totally alienated me then. Whatever the good or bad I may contribute, there's really no need to jump right in.

That said, I'm copy pasting over the UK related stuff from Infogalactic. After I'm done please feel free to edit it all down as much as you like. I've done the "alleged" and made orange boxes for those, and will do red boxes with "acknowledged". Those are from the 2 chronological lists. I can do the same with the content in the main article - but that's so large it's a whole other day. And I'd add yellow for "related" and green for "whistleblower". These colour codes I intend to apply to those three sources too - so people aren't confused about accusations and rumour or court sentencing and facts.

I hope this is what you were expecting. Don't feel compelled to respond, but if you do, please make sure I find it and respond. I'll keep an eye open here, but you can email or SaidIt chat me. ~ JasonCarswell (talk) 08:11, 7 December 2019 (UTC)

Also, do folks use the discussion pages here on WikiSpooks. It's exceptionally rare on Infogalactic, (especially without a ping ability,) and most don't bother on Wikipedia, but the folks who care use it, though not effectively.

The UK/VIPaedophile content dump thus far is only from the https://infogalactic.com/info/List_of_acknowledged_pedophilia_elites https://infogalactic.com/info/List_of_alleged_pedophilia_elites but not yet from https://infogalactic.com/info/Pedophocracy. I figured we could determine 1) how we want to arrange the content, 2) how we wish to deal with hyperlinks (many remain red on Infogalactic too), and 3) whatever else you wish to do with it.

I follow your lead on this. It's certainly far more fulfilling participating with colleges here than trudging away solo on InfoGalactic. ~ JasonCarswell (talk) 08:27, 7 December 2019 (UTC)

Bilderberg 2007

Robin, Can you have a quick look at Bilderberg/2007 attendee list? I believe the one on Wikispooks is wrong. Compare to https://publicintelligence.net/official-list-of-participants-for-the-2007-bilderberg-meeting/

I know (confirmed in MSM) that Guido Westerwelle participated in the 2007 conference. I can do the work with fixing the list, but should I delete Ed Balls etc. that are not on the Public Intelligence list? "-- Terje (talk) 05:44, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

Well spotted. I would go with the P.I. list, so yes, do start fixing the 2007. If you wish to include people because of Commercially-controlled media references, then do include the references together with mention of them somewhere in the page, so later readers have a clear source. -- Robin (talk) 06:36, 1 February 2020 (UTC)

Integrity Initiative

Dear Robin, Thank you for streamlining my newest page. I've added one section about a prolific confirmed operation her division took. Could you please let me know if this was done correctly and if I should add that section to the SCL/Cambridge A. page as well? Jun. And apart from that. I am not sure that that the G. Van den Berg you found on LinkedIn is the same as the picture in Muscat. There are two different persons with the same name, I believe, the one being married and the other not. The DOB you used therefore appears to be incorrect. Jun

The Companies House references mentions Gaby as director of EMIC, so that matches the II contact. I think she's probably not Gabrielle van den Berg, who seems to be a Dutch resident academic. https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/staffmembers/gabrielle-van-den-berg -- Robin (talk) 12:53, 1 April 2020 (UTC)

P.S. To sign comments, I recommend " -- ~~~~ " (no quotes), which has the above effect.

Appears to be, this statement is correct. It does raise a few other interesting questions. I could probably add a profile picture as well later on. But for now I'll continue with the other members of the cluster. Please support me in streamlining those pages as well. Thanks again, -- Jun (talk) 17:27, 1 April 2020 (UTC)

Hawija

Dear Robin,

I'm trying to write an article about a '15 US-led Dutch bombing of a small Iraqi village where at least 70 civilians died. (The informant for the US says on Dutch TV an additional 100+ refugees were killed, but that investigation is still ongoing.) The cover up comes down to two main points;

1. Denying they were civilian casualties by the Dutch-strike even though the US reported it to the Dutch and went silent for 4 years.

2. Denying they knew (The US DOD informed the Dutch, the Dutch just failed to go public with it for 4 years, if not for a Dutch and US-FOIA request).

I'll put in on the DoD page for now, but the question I have is: I was wondering if you think it could have it own page. -- Jun (talk) 13:40, 2 April 2020 (UTC)

Done with the piece. Please let me know what you think of the.... importance of the need for this article and feel free to do whatever you think the article deserves. I think it can shed light of examples of "policies" in the middle east. -- Jun (talk) 03:18, 3 April 2020 (UTC)

I had never heard of the event, but it sounds nauseatingly familiar :( ... This article is a help to unmemory holeing the event, and so to exposing the hypocrisy of those involved. Wikipedia generally airbrushes such events. I've limited my edits to typos and technical points (for example, no need to add quotes around phrases such as "terrorism"/"counter-terrorism" in |constitutes, the software will automatically add them where needed). Generally, pay extra attention to red links that you expected not to be red (i.e. you thought they would link to an existing page). Making pages for an event's senior participants (i.e. stubs with a short link back to the event, one sentence is enough) is helpful in case the same individuals turn up in other contexts, since it helps one measure their character. Overall, I'm very impressed. WS is relatively weak in content about non-English speaking countries, so there's a wealth of major events which we do not mention here. Keep up the good work, -- Robin (talk) 09:39, 3 April 2020 (UTC)

Thank you for your response and support this week. Been a busy week. I'll add more (e.g about the IfS) when I"ll return. For now I've given the Dutch Air Force their own page, your point about linking and redirecting people on the site gave a bright moment so that I could link three Dutch bilderbergers to another "war-incident"". -- Jun (talk) 19:48, 3 April 2020 (UTC)

Curious

Curious what you think about my response: User_talk:JasonCarswell#Categories Would love to get ping working here.

I was going to add stuff on Tedros Adhanom but first found that there are duplicates of these and I considered consolidating and putting in a #REDIRECT but don't want to ruin anything, not to mention, I don't know which you prefer, the long form or short form:

WHO/Director-General same as World_Health_Organization/Director-General but seems to me one should redirect. Same with WHO and World_Health_Organization.

Yesterday (or maybe the day before) there were 2 people listed in the director general, including him. Did someone erase one?

Thanks for fixing the SaidIt mod permissions. I'll add a new CSS tomorrow. You can let me know what you think about it. I also have some ideas about banners. d3rr is keen to help me too and hopes to be enticed to participate with WS more. I have some ideas for the banner, especially celebrating 10 years of WS. I'll also write up a thing on my/our ideas for WikiSpooks based on our discussions. I'll share it with you in the /s/WikiSpooks/wiki to go over it before I/we post it.

My priorities over the next couple months: keeping up on Covid, writing Bittersweet Seeds, coding CSS themes, WikiSpooks 10th, WikiSpooks newsletter, then other stuff.

That's all for now. ~ JasonCarswell (talk) 02:40, 8 April 2020 (UTC)

"Financed by" metadata

Robin,

When you get time, could you help me creating a "financed by" and a "financing" metadata categories? This is presuming making them doesn't take too long time or is too difficult. I am not very technically able, so I can't do it myself.

They would essentially be the same setup as for "members", which is a metadata category I have discovered is very effective. "Financed by" & "financing" is for NGOs, events, etc (even people?), and presumably would mostly show links to corporations, billionaire sugar daddies and government cut-outs.

I can't promise they will be a success, they might be too cumbersome, but I believe they would be handy.

Terje (talk) 10:02, 20 April 2020 (UTC)---

You're doing well with members. This doesn't sound too tricky and I see the importance. The first point to notice is that only one is needed, i.e. {{t|financed= ...}} could be automatically understood by the target pages and displayed as "Financed by:" in the metadata column. In fact, only one is desirable -- two would be confusing, and effective SMW requires keeping things as simple as possible. Since Template:Event already has {{t|sponsors}}, how about just adding {{t|sponsors}} to template:group and template:person? -- Robin (talk) 12:27, 21 April 2020 (UTC)

It would be great if you can do it. Let me know when you are ready. Does this mean it would work equally well if I add this information to either the giver or the recipient? F.ex. National Endowment for Democracy or some small NGO recipient? Best regards Terje (talk) 12:55, 21 April 2020 (UTC)---

Pharma_lobbyist issue with Big_pharma_lobbyist

Can you please delete the page Big_pharma_lobbyist (a REDIRECT page, no content). I surmise there is a problem with pattern matching in SMW; the pattern constitutes="Pharma_lobbyist" seems to match both Big_pharma_lobbyist and Pharma_lobbyist. -- Urban 27 November 2024

Censorship

Discovering that you've updated some pages of platforms on the topic of censorship, I want to help while my time this early summer is still quite limited with this; https://f-squared.org/whovisual/ Someone showed me this script you can run in chrome or Firefox; apparently with up to 95% precision, it's shows who is writing the articles, editing and repeatedly using specific words (and even restoring them as our subpage on Wikipedia has shown) among other things on Wikipedia. Maybe it helps, you maybe not, but I just wanted to share it, so that we can maybe spot some new patterns on Wikipedia. Jun (talk)

Bug with referrals?

It appears on many pages at the time of writing this that every first referral when holding your mouse over it (the number one ref on each page) you can only read the last part of the site' notice that states Another possibility is home hosting - Use the mailing list if you are interested to help with this."

Think it has something to do with it that line being a referral itself? Maintenance of some sorts? Jun (talk) 16:55, 13 July 2020 (UTC)

Back again as we speak. Jun (talk) 01:28, 15 July 2020 (UTC) It appears to be only visible when being logged in as an user. I don't know if that's intended at this moment. Jun (talk) 01:45, 15 July 2020 (UTC)

Crime

Hi. There is a redirect from Organized crime to Criminal, but then there are also the term Mafia and related ones. All this goes to Crime syndicate. I think this can be merged, or the redirect should be changed. BCCI qualifies as organized crime for me, the rest too. But then, war criminal may be kept separate because this goes into a different line of thought. Not sure how to do this properly, but the "Organized crime" redirect I would switch to -> "Crime syndicate" - is that ok? Sunvalley (talk) 22:25, 8 September 2020 (UTC)

Firstly, a hint (which I should probably put somewhere in the help files) on dealing with non-standard or apparently wrong or contradictory pages or redirects : check the date. That redirect was created on 20 September 2015, when there were way fewer pages. It probably made good sense at the time but no longer fits the pattern -- the group type section is old fashioned and probably should be deprecated. The plan was for each group to have a |type of a few set values. This was ecliped by use of |constitutes, which is simpler and more flexible. A simple idea would be to make it a separate page in itself. Feel free to try that, or anything else that you think would straighten things out a bit. -- Robin (talk) 13:52, 13 September 2020 (UTC)

Now I see that, Organised crime redirected to Crime syndicate already. So I just do this to the other spelling as well. It probably makes sense to keep criminal for war criminals alone (Bush etc). Also there are mass murderers outside politics who are mostly sentenced as if they have acted alone .. also war criminals of lower rank. Wasn't sure about the matter and the logic behind, but for now I would just leave it as is, with links back and forth. -- Sunvalley (talk) 17:54, 18 September 2020 (UTC)

Previously, this site used Wikipedia's page titles. However, two factors mitigate against this:

1. Wikipedia has large gaps covered by redirects

2. Wikipedia doesn't use semantic mediawiki. SMW makes it more important not to confuse, e.g. "Conspiracy theorist" and "Conspiracy theory"

So the summary is that more pages rather than less is probably good, even if the are sparse. -- Robin (talk) 18:16, 18 September 2020 (UTC)

Dear Robin

Dear Robin, I just wanted to say if I am not pulling my weight, or not doing anything to help you and the site. Please let me know. I have been very worried about how I am doing, and if I am nuisance rather than a help.