User Talk: John of Reading

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Belated Birthday Cookies!

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|text = Hungry? Here's a little snack for you on your birthday, from the Wikipedia Birthday Committee ↗! Have a great day, '''John of Reading'''! --<span style="color:Green;">☘︎☘︎☘︎'''ALEX'''Hammeke</span> (talk | guestbook | sandbox) 04:57, 3 May 2026 (UTC)
}} <span style="color:Green;">☘︎☘︎☘︎'''ALEX'''Hammeke</span> (talk | guestbook | sandbox) 04:57, 3 May 2026 (UTC)
:{{Re|AlexHammeke}} Thank you! -- John of Reading (talk) 10:45, 3 May 2026 (UTC)

Curiouser

Have you ever searched in an article page for the word "jump"? No need to do anything about it; I love harmless flaws. Like Word's spellcheck dictionary (they may have fixed it since) contained "noolbenger", a tiny possum only found in one small region of Western Australia, but did not have "emu". Cheers. Doug butler (talk) 13:07, 27 May 2026 (UTC)
:{{Re|Doug butler}} That is weird - the word "Jump" is there in the HTML sent to the browser, but it is normally invisible. Try this: go to a random article, search for the text "Jump to n", click to a different tab, click back to the article tab - and, at least in Firefox, the text "Jump to navigation" is now visible. No idea! -- John of Reading (talk) 13:17, 27 May 2026 (UTC)

Possible punctuation fix

This search ↗ (and similar ones, like <code><nowiki>/''', \([0-9]{4}[^)]/</nowiki></code>) seems to return quite a large proportion of unconventional punctuation (some example fixes ↗). Even where the use of a comma is appropriate, it seems to be misplaced (i.e., set before the parenthesis instead of after). Would you like to have a look? 1234qwer 1234qwer 4 ↗ 02:51, 2 June 2026 (UTC)
:{{Re|1234qwer1234qwer4}} Yes, I've put this on my "to do" list. -- John of Reading (talk) 14:00, 2 June 2026 (UTC)
::Thanks! Special:Search/"an estimated of" ↗ seems like another one you could add to that. 1234qwer 1234qwer 4 ↗ 22:31, 7 June 2026 (UTC)
:::Yes, that looks effective. -- John of Reading (talk) 09:26, 8 June 2026 (UTC)

{{od}}
I've made a start on the comma project, making a first batch of 100 edits. I'm only considering the easiest cases. Over at User:John of Reading/X2 I've posted links to the articles I've ''not'' edited while making that first batch of edits. That's either because it's clear they should not have been in the list, or because the lead sentence is a bit more complicated and I'm not familiar with the MOS. -- John of Reading (talk) 09:26, 8 June 2026 (UTC)

Great, thanks! I still think in cases like Actual Wolf ↗ the comma should go after the parenthetical, though maybe that is what you meant with the MOS part. How many pages did you get for your database search, by the way? 1234qwer 1234qwer 4 ↗ 11:07, 8 June 2026 (UTC)
:2840 in all. -- John of Reading (talk) 11:08, 8 June 2026 (UTC)
::Could you also do a database scan for something like <code>:/\<ref[^>]{1,25}\>\>/</code> when you have time? I've fixed close to 100 of these but CirrusSearch is quickly timing out on this. 1234qwer 1234qwer 4 ↗ 14:33, 13 June 2026 (UTC)
:::In progress... John of Reading (talk) 14:39, 13 June 2026 (UTC)
:::{{Re|1234qwer1234qwer4}} The list is at User:John of Reading/X1. Does that "1,25" mean you've been able to find those with ''no'' additional characters? -- John of Reading (talk) 15:00, 13 June 2026 (UTC)
::::Thanks! Yes, the ones with no characters were easy with CirrusSearch (though there was a new result since I fixed them some time ago). The 25 was just a guess; not sure how long exactly reference names typically get, 1234qwer 1234qwer 4 ↗ 15:15, 13 June 2026 (UTC)
::Thanks for doing this so quickly! In case you are interested, apparently there is also a number of MOS:COMMA ↗ violations in search results for <code><nowiki>/''', also known as [^.,)]+ was /</nowiki></code>, missing a comma before the "was" in most cases. 1234qwer 1234qwer 4 ↗ 00:06, 18 June 2026 (UTC)
:::Sorry if I'm bothering you too much: <code>"also known as" insource:/lso known as, /</code> also has a large proportion of punctuation errors. 1234qwer 1234qwer 4 ↗ 14:53, 1 July 2026 (UTC)
::::{{Re|1234qwer1234qwer4}} I've added these to my "to do" list, though I prefer to tackle spellings and grammar rather than punctuation. -- John of Reading (talk) 16:16, 1 July 2026 (UTC)

Grammer

Wanna attend with u sir can i? ~2026-33778-55 ↗ (talk) 12:54, 7 June 2026 (UTC)
:Probably not. If you'd like to meet other Wikipedia enthusiasts face-to-face, have a look at meta:Meetup ↗. -- John of Reading (talk) 14:30, 7 June 2026 (UTC)

Word duplication

In a similar vein to User talk:John of Reading/Archive 28#FYI, you might want to be looking for "of the of", "the of the", "for the for", "the for the" etc. I just fixed 20 instances of the very first but not sure how much time I could dedicate to looking through all possible variations. 1234qwer 1234qwer 4 ↗ 15:56, 28 June 2026 (UTC)
:{{Re|1234qwer1234qwer4}} I'll search for three or more consecutive instances of "for", "of" and "the" and see what turns up. -- John of Reading (talk) 16:22, 1 July 2026 (UTC)
::Thanks! The problem is certainly not restricted to these prepositions alone, "the in the", "the on the", "the with the" also have dozens of results. 1234qwer 1234qwer 4 ↗ 16:32, 1 July 2026 (UTC)
:::There are also some unusual sequences of consecutive prepositions (as usual, certainly not all incorrect): Special:Search/"by from" insource:/ by from / ↗ (also some with "from by", though most seem to be correct), Special:Search/"per to" insource:/ per to / ↗, maybe other combinations to play with. 1234qwer 1234qwer 4 ↗ 16:16, 8 July 2026 (UTC)