Sam Wilson's Website

January 2023

  1. Lunch.

  2. Itā€™s a day of ā€œother peopleā€™s servers having dramasā€. This morning, matrix.org was down, and now masto.host is being all 403ish.

    At least my server is always intermittent and liable to Guru Meditation, so itā€™s far more reliable. Or consistent. Or something.

  3. According to Wikidata, spiders have two effects: the spider bite, and arachnophobia.

  4. Thereā€™s going to be another Wikispore open hour meeting this evening. Agenda is here: https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/wikispore-open-hour-5

    Last time was interesting, although Iā€™m not sure Iā€™m very good at evening meetings! Hard to think properly when tired.

  6. Uploading scanned letters with Pattypan

    Pattypan is a great tool for uploading lots of files to Commons. Iā€™m using it today for a set of scans of airgraphs. I scanned them all yesterday, and gave them hopefully-useful filenames that contain a prefix, date, and bit of info about each. These documents all look pretty much the same when viewed as thumbnails, so itā€™s important to be able to determine at least something by glancing at the filename. That said, itā€™s never good to ā€˜ā€˜relyā€™ā€™ on metadata being in the filename nor on all files having the same structure to their names.

    Anyway, after creating the spreadsheet for these files, I did some tweaking to the data columns:

    1. Filled the source column based on the name column:
      • Formula: =CONCAT("{{HMW|wiki=",B2,"}}")
      • Result: {{HMW|wiki=Airgraph 1943-12-30 Adele to Murray}}
    2. Extracted the date:
      • Formula: =REGEX(B3,"[0-9]{4}-[0-9]{2}-[0-9]{2}")
      • Result: 1943-12-30
    3. Crucially, any column that uses a formula needs to be copied to a new column with ā€˜ā€˜values onlyā€™ā€™ (i.e. ā€œEdit / Paste special / Values onlyā€). Otherwise Pattypan canā€™t see the formula result.